Homily - 1st Sunday after Xmas Day 2014

Tommy Thompson
John 1:1-18
First Sunday after Christmas Day
28 December 2014

Merry Christmas!  I hope the joy of this festive season is radiating from your lives and into God’s world.  Like we teach our children in Young Disciples, Christmas is such a special time of rejoicing that we just cannot do it in only one day, so we need twelve.  I appreciate the 12 days.  They give us the opportunity to let the good news set in…and now we can do that with little distraction.  The Christmas presents have been wrapped, torn open, and appreciated.  The Christmas ham, the Lamb, the Beef tenderloin, or whatever was the main dish for that scrumptious Christmas dinner has been enjoyed and the last of those leftovers are the star ingredient in the best left-over sandwich ever!   All of the busyness of the feast is over…now it’s time to let the good news sink in. As our Eastern brothers and sisters exclaim throughout these 12 days: Christ is born – glorify him!

Glorify him…because what God has done through him is the greatest affirmation of creation and humanity that God could have ever offered to us.  For in Jesus Christ our Lord, God has clothed himself in the stuff of our life…not just flesh, muscles, nerves, veins, and bones…but life itself – joys, frustrations, heart aches – the wildest roller coaster of all – human life. 

And God did this because God knows us and because God loves us. 

Stevie Wonder wrote a song that was made popular by B.B. King titled “To Know You Is to Love you.”  The first lines of the song go like this:  “To know you is to love you, but to know me is not that way, you see.”   While I love this song and realize that it is about two people’s love relationship, I cannot help but to hear this verse as the truth concerning most of our perception of God.  God is loveable.  The more you know of God, the more there is to love…God is perfect…But, not so with me.  The more you know about me, the less there is to love. Too often, this is the way we view ourselves…if people knew the real me (and not the one I try and project onto the world’s screen), then they wouldn’t love me…If God knew the real me…then God wouldn’t love me…but I guess if God is all-knowing, God does know the real me…and that means God must stay distant and I must stay away from the places where God is the closest…because I’m too sinful…I’m too broken.  “To Know You is to love you…but to know me is not that way, you see…”

Enter the good news of Christmas, which is the good news of the incarnation. 

At the outset of John’s Gospel, we get one of the church’s most ancient hymns that sums up the Gospel as clearly as any other piece of Scripture.  The hymn celebrates Jesus as the creative word that shares in the being of the Father, who was with the Father in the beginning, when the creation began.  The Son of God is the Word that went forth from the Father in the very beginning of time creating all that is, seen and unseen.  As a matter of fact nothing that is came into being without God’s creative word – God the Son.  The radiance we experience in God’s world – the radiance of life, the energy of life – that is the Son’s radiance without which everything would be lifeless! 

That light that shined in the darkness and overcame the darkness of the chaos of the primordial creation – yes, that was God the Son.   This light was and is in the world, yet the world did not know the very radiance and energy that enlivens it…the world was lost…groping about in darkness…broken, sinful and unaware of it’s Creator.  As a response to the world’s “lostness,” this radiance of the divine, this creative word through and in which all things are created, this light which was in the world, yet ignored by all, took upon Himself human flesh and dwelled, literally ‘pitched tent’ among us in order to reveal the source and radiance of our life so that we might know life and life abundantly. 

If I had to pick one word that really spells out what this feast is all about from John 1, it is σκηνόω (skénoó) – to pitch tent with, dwell with, live life with…

Sisters and brothers, we cannot help but to hold high festival during these 12 days because God the Son, the energy and radiance of all life, has been sent by the Father to "pitch tent/dwell in and among" those who do not know God for the purpose that by experiencing the divine Word in the flesh, we might know life and life abundantly. In my mind, any warm and fuzzy theology of Christmas that neglects the fleshiness and messiness of God’s stooping down in humility to dwell with us in the midst of our pain and suffering in order to lift us to the bosom of our Creator for the sake of our healing and wholeness has totally missed the point.

The point of our ongoing Christmas celebration is that in the Christ-child, God has arrived in the flesh.  There’s a lot that we will never know about God…but everything God the Son reveals concerning God, and most especially, concerning our salvation, is all we will ever need to know.  As John says, “From his totality – his perfect fullness, we have all received the greatest gift ever given – the benefit of favor upon favor in the eyes of God. 

The good news is: God knows you, and news flash!  --  God completely and utterly loves you and favors you!  You are his daughter…you are his son.  Nothing can separate you from His love, not even your sin and brokenness.  He came down and become one with us because he knew you were broken, proving that very point.

We should not live as if God is aloof concerning us…yet so many of us do…we shouldn’t live our lives as if God is in some distant place, removed from us, keeping a log of all our sins like some rigid judge, waiting for the opportunity to use our penalties against us and condemn us.    No, the perfect revelation of God in Jesus Christ reveals something totally different...

God is more like a mother who can tell her child is getting sick before the child gets sick or knows he is getting sick and does everything she can to journey with her child toward healing.   God knows our condition and sought to bring healing and relief even while we were unaware of the fullness of our plight. 

God is more like a physician who knows not only the patient’s symptoms, but can get at the root of the problem.  We’ve all experienced something like this before…we end up with a symptom or series of symptoms that cause us irritation, anxiety, or suffering…but we don’t know the cause.  We want to know the cause so that we can then learn how to overcome the problem and find relief from the symptoms.  What a relief it is when we visit the physician who knows our problem better than ourselves who then proceeds to give the diagnosis as well as the proper prognosis toward healing and wholeness.

This is what God has done in the incarnation. 

God knows our plight! God is not out there somewhere far removed from us judging as if God didn’t know our condition.  No – God knows full well that we are sinful and broken, and is therefore not surprised by our sins and mistakes – the symptoms of our disease.  God is like that loving mother who knows before we do and seeks to nurture us back to health and wholeness despite our stiff-necked-ness and impatience.  God is like that physician who knows our problem better than we do and has not only the proper diagnosis but also the cure for our sickness. 

We do not have to hide our real selves from God…as if that were even possible anyway.  God knows us and loves us.  Through the incarnation, God has pitched tent with us and chosen to be with us.  He will walk with us through the joys and the pains and disappointments of life, representing us all to His Father and our Father.  He will show us what God is really like and he will also reveal to us what true humanity looks like as he lives a life of total, self-giving, other-receiving love which will culminate on the Golgotha’s cross this Good Friday, when evil and darkness try it’s best to extinguish the light that gives life to the world.  And we’ll continue rejoicing on that night of nights when our Lord Jesus Christ passes over from death to life, rising victorious from the dead, opening the gate of everlasting life and new creation to the entire cosmos…

For these 12 days, celebrate the good news.  God is with us…God is for us…God knows us and yet…God loves us. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.