First Sunday After Christmas Day

On Christmas Eve, we heard Frederick Buechner remind us that Luke's and Matthew's details surrounding Jesus' birth are really not important. Whether there were shepherds there, "abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night," whether there were wise men from the East who presented him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, whether there were two or three angels there, or thousands, or whether there were none at all -- all this, Buechner reminds us, is beside the point. All these details are beside the point, he says, because what Luke and Matthew are really concerned about is the significance of Jesus' birth, what Jesus' birth meant to them. What they are really concerned to share with us is how in the child Jesus, and "in the man he grew up to be, there is the power of God to bring light into our darkness, [the power] to make us whole, [the power] to give a new kind of life to anybody who turns toward him in faith, even to such as you and me."

In St. John's Gospel, as in Mark's, there is no account of Jesus' birth at all. Instead of telling us anything about how Jesus was born, John gets right to the point. From his opening line John explains the meaning of Jesus' birth and life and death for him, and for you and me and the world.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it....

"He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

But John, of course, wrote his explanation in Greek, not in English, so the way he actually said it was this way: "En arche ein ho logos." That's the way John said it in Greek. And that's significant, because the Greek word, logos, which is translated into English as word, meant much more to the Greeks than we mean by the English word, word.

Logos meant something like "the rational principle that underlies all reality." Logos is that living energy that makes life happen. It is the living power that turns life's crank, as they might have said it in the lingo of the street. Logos is that underlying principle of life that makes all existence possible, that Purpose or Energy or Light which creates and sustains all existence, and without which no life is possible.

So when John starts his Gospel with, "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.... And the logos became flesh and dwelt among us," he is saying that "In the beginning was that Principle or Purpose or Power which underlies all existence. And that Principle or Purpose or Power was with God, and that Principle or Purpose or Power was God.... And that Principle or Purpose or Power that underlies all existence, and is the meaning of life, became flesh and dwelt among us."

In other words, the very Purpose or Reason or Energy who brings life into being and who sustains life and gives life its meaning -- God's Energy or Purpose or Reason for everything that exists, and without whom all life would degenerate into death -- became a flesh and blood human being at a particular time, at the time of Herod and Pontius Pilate, in a particular place, in Nazareth, in Galilee, in a particular person, the person of Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth, in other words, is God's scandalous "body language" in the world, says John. Jesus is who God is when God becomes a human being in this world. Jesus tells us, not only through his teaching, but also by the way he lives and the way he dies, what cranked life into being when the world began, and what makes life continue to crank at all times.

In the way he lives and the way he dies in the world, Jesus shows us the very Purpose or Reason or Meaning of God in heaven. In the way he lives and the way he dies, he shows us that that Purpose or Reason or Meaning is sacrificial love. The self-giving love of God that brought us into existence in the beginning, so that God might share himself with us and we might share ourselves with him, is the same self-giving love that keeps us in existence now for the same reason. Sharing the self-giving love of God with God and with each other is the Purpose of life and the Meaning of life. It is the Purpose and Meaning of life in heaven, because it is the Purpose and Principle that has been with God from the beginning. And it is the Purpose and Meaning of all life, including your life and mine, right now, says John, because that's why God's Purpose and Meaning became flesh and dwelt among us.

That's what John means when he says that "God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him, and remains in him, shall not perish but have eternal life, because God did not send his Meaning and Purpose of life to be incarnate in the world in order to condemn the world, but to show the world how to live according to his Purpose and Meaning, who was with God in the beginning, and who is God, both from the beginning, and here and now in time, in Bethlehem and in Nazareth in Galilee, and in our time as well.

And this is what John means in his great letter when he says that God's Purpose of life has been there from the beginning, when we could not see him, but now we have seen him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. We have seen him in Jesus, who has shown us, through the way he lived and the way he died, that "we should love one another," because that's what life is all about. Loving one another is what life is, because love is who God is, and who God has been from the beginning. Creating persons who can love each other is why God created the world in the first place, and it's how and why he continues to sustain the world. Because when we love one another "we pass from death to life," says John; but when we do not love "we remain in death," even if we are still inhaling and exhaling. Because God is love, and because love comes from God, and because love is that which brings the world into being through the Purpose and Meaning of God, his Purpose and Meaning for himself, and his Purpose and Meaning for us.

And we know this, John says, because with our own eyes we have seen his Purpose and Meaning living among us, and loving among us, and even dying among us, because his love for us was so great that he even laid down his own life for us, because no one, not even God, has love that is greater than one who would lay down his life for his friends.

And that's why Jesus laid down his life for us. Because Jesus is the creative, loving Energy of God made flesh and blood in the world. And he laid down his life for us because God loves us so much that he wants us, too, to know his Purpose and Meaning of life who was with God from the beginning, and who is God, and who is the Creative Energy of existence itself, a love so deep and powerful that he creates life even out of death, which is what God has done from the beginning, and what God always does.

And that's the stunning significance of Christmas, according to John. It is news more stunning, actually, than the later news of the Resurrection, this news that God, the very Purpose and Energy and Meaning of the universe and life, has become a flesh and blood human being. This is John's Gospel, his Good News, his news that the Love and Meaning of God is why Jesus was born in Bethlehem, whether there were ten million angels there at the time or only his mother and father. It's the meaning of Jesus' life, and the meaning of his death. It's where Jesus came from, and where he's going. And John knows this, John says, because he watched it happen.

This is the Good News of God, according to John, and according to all the Evangelists. And we make a holiday of this news and call it Christmas.

"We make a holiday [of it] here, in time," says Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century mystic, "because the eternal birth which God the Father bore, and bears unceasingly in eternity, is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But if it happens not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it should happen in me." In this time. Now. Here.

So we come here today, this Christmas morning, to ask God to happen in us. We come to ask God to make us his body language in our day. We come to ask God to make us a people who, like Jesus, bear the creative, self-giving love of God to the world in our lives. We come to ask God to create life out of death in us. We come to ask God to help us, through our risen Lord, become church. Not to "go" to church, but to become church, to be church. To become and be the Body of Christ, the body language of God to the world here, in our time.

So when we offer bread and wine at God's altar this morning, we are not asking God to enter those pieces of bread and that wine and somehow magically turn them into flesh and blood. We are asking for something much more mysterious and important and profound than that. We are asking God to bring to birth in us -- in our living, but mortal, and therefore dying flesh -- what he brought to birth in the living, but mortal, and therefore dying flesh and blood of Jesus in Bethlehem, and on the Cross. We are asking God to resurrect you and me and make us church, the flesh and blood Body of Christ in the world. Now, in our time.

"How can I tell of this great mystery?" asks the officiant at Orthodox Christmas Vespers. And he answers: "He who was without flesh becomes incarnate. The Word puts on a body. The invisible is seen. He whom no hand can touch is handled. And He who has no beginning now begins to be."

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.