December 31, 2023, What If God Was One of Us?, John 1:1-18 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ December 31, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is given below:

1. The passage we just read from John’s gospel gave us an account of the coming of Christ – one of the most important events in human history – in 304 words. How does he do that? It is an absolutely astonishing bit of writing. And I think the secret is that John doesn’t write like a journalist or a novel-writer – the kinds of writing most of us are used to reading. John’s writing is much more like poetry. And that means we need to read this differently from the accounts we’ve been reading in Matthew or Luke, who told us the story of Jesus’s birth, and things like the historical details about King Herod and Caesar Augustus and the census.

We know how to read those narratives. But what is it that is so different about reading these first 18 verses of John’s gospel? What is it that makes this poetry? And if it is poetry, how is that different from reading anything else?

The thing about poetry is that so much can be contained in a single word. I remember when I was a little girl, I had a necklace with a tiny cross on it. And in the center of that cross was a little round glass window. And in that little window, if you had a magnifying glass, you could read the whole Lord’s prayer. Poetry is kind of like that cross; one small word can contain a whole world of meaning. John uses common words, “Word,” and “Light,” and “Flesh,” but those little words echo back to the beginning of time and out to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and down into the deepest needs and desires of our hearts.

2. “In the beginning,” John writes, “was the Word.” The Word – John is speaking of Jesus, of the Christ, but what is he saying? The Word brings us back to the very first verses of the book of Genesis, before anything or anybody existed, no one and nothing but God himself. And God said….

God said the word; God spoke, and everything came into being: stars and soil and rocks and trees and grass and elephants and bugs and people. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” The Christ didn’t have his beginning in the stable in Bethlehem, or in the womb of Mary. He was in the beginning with God. He was present at the birth of everything that exists. He was God. He is God. That’s what it means that he is the Word.

But there is even more contained in that little word, “Word.” As human beings, created in the image of God, words are the way we express what is real, what is true. Words are the way we understand what and why and how and when and who. Words have meaning. The Greek word for “Word,” logos, in Greek philosophy, was a kind of reason that existed in the cosmos, in everything, and the logos was what gave it all form and meaning. So, when we look through the window of that little word, “Word,” there is that, too – all reason and order, the wisdom contained in everything God made.

In Proverbs chapter 8 Wisdom speaks:

“Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above…

then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.”

All of that is contained in the one small word, “Word.” And the Christ is that Word.

3. John also uses the word “Light.” “The “Light” shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” John takes us back again to the first pages of Genesis, to the beginning of creation when the man and the woman rebelled against God, and God cursed Satan, and promised to send someone to do battle with him and to conquer him. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Almost from the very beginning, there is this battle between light and darkness, and God promises to win, to conquer darkness. And victory will be won, God says, not in some cosmic battle way off in the heavens, but through the woman’s offspring, through someone born of a human mother. The Christ child, born of Mary, is that Light, come into the world to win the battle and to overcome our darkness.

And there is another image contained in the word “Light” – well, there are so many images, really. One was the day when Jesus took Peter and James and John up onto a mountain, and Jesus was transfigured right there before their eyes. They saw the Christ in his glory, so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light.

And there is the scene in the last book of the Bible, when the victorious Christ is revealed to a man named John, exiled on the island of Patmos, he writes, “I saw one like a son of man. The hairs of his head were white like wool, as white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace…in his right hand he held seven stars, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” Isaiah wrote, “those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” If you look through the little window of that word, “Light,” you see that Christ is that Light, the light who has shined out in our deep darkness, the Light that will be enthroned in glory. And you see that the darkness will never overcome the light.

4. And then John gives us the word “Flesh.” Now, I think this might be the trickiest word of all, because the word flesh can mean different things. In John’s first letter, he writes about “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” speaking of those desires and temptations that draw us away from God. Flesh can mean something to be despised or rejected or avoided, like pornography or gluttony or greed.

But here, John is using the word flesh in a completely different way. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” he writes. The eternal Word, present before the dawn of time, became one of us, frail, common creatures formed of the dust of the earth – John means that the Christ actually became one of us, God weighing in at about 6 pounds, God, a tiny baby in the manger, crying, sleeping, nursing, getting his diapers dirty – the Word, the Light, the infinite, eternal God himself, became plain old Flesh.

And that brings us to the point of the whole Incarnation. Because it was the will of God from the moment of creation that we should be together, he and us, – not God on high in some distant spiritual realm, keeping his creatures at arms length, but one family, together. One of the best Advent hymns is “O Come O Come Emmanuel” God names the Christ Emmanuel because it means “God with us,” God living among his people, and God living as one of us.

There’s a song by Joan Osborne that was popular back in the 90’s (which doesn’t seem so very long ago, depending on how old you are.) It goes,

“What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?”

The song just posed the question, but the truth is that God was one of us. The truth is God is one of us. Paul wrote, “God sent his Son, born of a woman…so that we might receive adoption as children.” And not just the special people or the holy people, but slobs like us, strangers like us, trying to make our way home. And that should change the way we see him, and that should change the way we see ourselves, and that should change the way we see one another. Because if we are his adopted children, we aren’t strangers at all, but brothers and sisters in him.

And that brings us to the end of all things, – or maybe the new beginning of all things – the “happily ever after” of John’s Revelation, where the new heavens and the new earth are established, and the people of God are presented in all their festal glory, like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband, and we read this, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore…” If we look through the little window of the word “Flesh,” we see a God whose heart’s desire is to be with us.

He is the Word. He is the Light. He is real human Flesh. “No one has ever seen God,” John writes.. “But God the only Son, the Christ, who is close to the Father’s heart, he has made the Father known to us.”