I Believe in Light: Illuminating Peace
Isaiah 9:2-7, John 1:1-18
December 6, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/ftpzWKQ3LXM
Australia was hit hard by the coronavirus, but they employed very strict lockdown measures. In October, one of my friends there, told me that they were not allowed to travel more than 3 miles from home. The state borders were closed and all kinds of things were cancelled. But, now they have flattened the curve and shops are open and people are allowed to gather in limited numbers. It is also the beginning of their summer. One of their department stores has launched an ad campaign that seems to sum up what so many people are feeling this year. Their slogan is “Bigger than Christmas” The commercial is just a bit over the top.
Christmas is already a bg thing – but if more is better, then why not bring on something Bigger than Christmas.
I was in a mall last week, for the first time in months. Yes, I wore my mask, kept my distance from other shoppers and didn’t stay long. But I noticed a sign in a store window. It said “We need Christmas so hard this year.” I tend to agree. 2020 has been grueling and we need everything Christmas could possibly offer.
The intent of the sign at the mall and the Australian ad campaign is undoubtedly to suggest that we need the merchandise they’re selling, as if that is Christmas, as if having the right gift under the tree on Christmas morning will make up for the very real losses and death and grief and hardship of this year. I agree that we do need Christmas so hard this year. We need Christmas so hard every year, although we might not recognize it as readily in other years.
But Christmas is already Bigger than Christmas. Christmas is already so much more.
John understands that. The gospel writer includes John the Baptist in his story of Jesus, but he doesn’t really begin there and he doesn’t begin with Bethlehem. He begins, at the beginning, at the beginning of creation, at the beginning of time on earth. So, yeah, the story John is telling is bigger than Christmas as we know it.
John says: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
Genesis reads: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The author of John’s gospel wants us to hear the connection. The story of Jesus is not an isolated event. It is connected to the beginning of everything. God has held the world from the beginning and has not let go. Divine love was and is and shall be.
John uses symbol very compellingly. His writing influenced the first Christian theologians. One of the early heresies, in the fourth century, was the idea that Jesus was not equal with God. In a little while we will sing “O Come All Ye Faithful”. Notice verse 2 when we get there. “True God from True God, light from light eternal” -- that is the orthodox position, as summed up in the Nicene Creed, based on the opening to John’s gospel. His writing and the theology that evolved from it continues to shape our thinking even now. And so, it is important to note that we do not have to embrace the dualism that might be found here.
“The light shines in the darkness” is so very familiar. We might easily absorb from it a sense that light is always good and dark is always bad. In the racist culture in which we live, darkness is associated with black and light is associated with white. It is not a far stretch from that to the same association being imposed on people, so that black people are imagined as evil and white people are imagined as good. It pervades our language and metaphors -- pure as the snow, black as sin. I am not suggesting that we should quit reading John’s gospel. I am suggesting that we should read it critically, as the first theologians did, and be careful with the language that we derive from it.
So, on one level John is describing something very abstract, the Word of God which was God, the creative power, the organizing wisdom of creation. It is a big, lofty idea.
But then, John declares, the Word became flesh. This is another dualism. In John’s day, many would have said that flesh was bad and spirit was good. But John says the Word became flesh, God became human and lived among us. That’s when the lofty idea gets close and personal.
Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us. . . . However differently you and I may conceive the world, God, or one another, physical reality is something we can usually agree on. When the temperature drops below 32 degrees, I am as cold as whoever happens to be standing next to me. When I see someone run into a piece of furniture, catching the corner of a table right in the thigh, my own thigh hurts in that same exact place. . . .When I watch a perfect stranger open her mouth for a bite of Key lime pie at my favorite Mexican restaurant, my mouth starts watering without my permission. Wearing skin brings us into communion with all these other embodied souls.”[1]
God came into the world with skin on to be with us, to know firsthand our joy and suffering, to love, to grieve and even to die. The incarnation, God becoming flesh, has shown us a different way of seeing life and living in the world--that the creation is good, that the world we live in is good, that our bodies are good, This is the Christmas we need so hard.
But it is even bigger than that. John also says “to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God”. Jesus became what we are, so that we might be what he is – born of God. This is bigger than Christmas, even Christmas in Australia.
The letter of I John says “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
The children of God are the peacemakers, the ones who let their lights shine for justice, the ones who embody love with skin on, so that we behold the glory of God. The glory of God is not an impossibly bright light. It is loving your neighbor. It is praying for your enemy. It is offering mercy, waging peace.
In April, Luciana Lira got a call from her student’s mother. Ms. Lira teaches second grade and English as a new language in Connecticut. Zully was the mother of one of her students. Zully and her husband Marvin are asylum-seekers from Guatemala.
Zully called from the emergency room. She was sick with Covid. She was also 8 months pregnant and she was so sick that the baby was going to be delivered early by C-section. Zully asked Ms. Lira to contact her husband and explain the situation to him in his own language, which she did.
The baby was born five weeks early and healthy. He went into the NICU as his mother went onto a ventilator, and fought for her life for the next several weeks.
Marvin listed Ms. Lira as the family’s emergency contact. When the baby was ready to be released, they asked Ms. Lira if she would take him, because by that time, the father and older brother had both tested positive for the coronavirus.
And she did. She was working from home, teaching her students remotely, but she and her husband and her own son embraced this baby, meeting all the needs of a newborn for the first six weeks of his life. She kept in touch with the family, including the grandmother in Guatemala. Someone asked if she was a relative. She had only known the family since the beginning of the school year. She said, “I am just a teacher.”[2] Others might say she was love with skin on.
This is the Christmas we need so hard this year, and every year.
Years before his anti-Nazi activities led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to imprisonment and death, he said this “Jesus Christ, God himself speaks to us from every human being; the other person, this enigmatic, impenetrable You, is God’s claim on us; indeed it is the holy God in the person we encounter. . . . ‘Christ walks the earth as long as there are people, as your neighbor, as the person through whom Christ summons you, addresses you, makes claims on you. ... Christ is at the door; he lives in the form of those around us. Will you close the door or open it for him?’[3]
It's bigger than Christmas.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God, peacemakers. And we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. Thanks be to God.
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) pp. 35–37, 42.
[2] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/ct-teacher-cares-for-students-newborn-brother-as-family-recovers-from-covid-19/2404318/
[3]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Isabel Best, ed, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), p. 11.