The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 28, 2008

1 Christmas – B
Isaiah 61:10--62:3
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18

If you were asked to write your own Gospel, how would you do it? What would you say if your were asked to share the meaning of Christ in your own life, and in the life of the world?

St. Peter says that this is exactly what every one of us should be ready to do. “Always be prepared,” he says, “to give a quiet and reverent answer to anyone who wants a reason for the hope that you have within you.” (Phillips)

Peter isn’t suggesting that you and I should be prepared to recite the Creed or Catechism. That would require nothing but a little memorization. Peter is suggesting something much more profound and mysterious than that. He’s asking us if we know the meaning of our own lives in Christ. Does Jesus of Nazareth make any difference in your life? Do you know why you were born? Do you know why the world is? Do you know where you came from, and where you are going? Do you know what the purpose of your life is? And if someone asked you to tell him what it is, what would you tell him?

Maybe Peter asked his friend and fellow apostle John these same questions, because John did answer them. And he wrote his response down, and here is what he said:

“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.

“[And] 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 “logos” – the Greek word we translate as “word” in English – although it is properly translated into “word” in English, meant much more than that to the Greeks.

“Logos” meant something like “the rational principle that underlies all reality.” Logos is that living, creative mind and energy that accounts for why there is something rather than nothing. The “logos” is the One who makes life happen, that living power who turns life’s crank. Logos is that underlying principle of life that makes all life, indeed all existence, possible, that purpose or energy or light which sustains everything, and without which no life is possible. Because the logos is, everything else is.

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 Power which underlies all existence, and that Power was with God, and that Power was God.... And that 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 that brings life into being, and that sustains life and gives life its meaning – God’s Purpose or Reason for everything that exists, without which 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 “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 and primarily through 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 his death on the Cross, he shows us that that Purpose or Reason or Meaning is sacrificial love. And 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 – that is the purpose of life and the meaning of life, the purpose and meaning of life in heaven, the purpose and meaning of life on earth, the purpose and meaning of your life and mine, says John.

And that’s what John means when, later in his Gospel, he says that “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever trusts him and abides in him, shall not perish but have eternal life, because God did not send his Incarnate Meaning and Purpose of Life into the world to condemn the world, but to show the world how to live according to that Purpose and Meaning of life who was with God in the beginning, and who is God, both from the beginning and here and now in time, in Nazareth in Galilee in John’s time, and in our time.

And this is also what John means in his great letter when he says that this Purpose of Life has been there from the beginning, 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 it’s who God is. Creating persons who can love each other is why God created life in the first place, and it’s how and why he continues to sustain life, because God is love, and therefore 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 walking around and still inhaling and exhaling.

Because love comes from God, and because love is that which brings the world into being through the Purpose and Meaning of God, love is God’s purpose and meaning for himself, and also God’s purpose and meaning for us as well.

I know this, John says, “because with my own eyes I have seen God’s Purpose and Meaning live among us, and love among us; and his love for us was so great that he even laid down his own life for us, and no one has love that is greater than one who would lay down his life for his friends.”

And this is why Jesus laid down his life for us – because he is the creative, loving energy of God made flesh and blood in the world. So Jesus laid down his life for us because he loves us so much that he wants us, too, to know that Purpose and Meaning of life who was with God from the beginning, and who is God, and who is the energy of Creation and existence itself. Jesus wants us to know this because God is love, 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 this Love and Meaning is why I was born,” says John. “It’s the meaning of my life. It’s where I came from, and where I’m going.” And John knows this, he says, because he watched it happen in Jesus. And he writes his Gospel so that we might know it as well.

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

“We make a holiday [of this good news] 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 make it 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. That would be a piece of cake for the One who created everything in the first place. 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 mortal flesh – what he brought to birth in the mortal flesh and blood of Jesus in his life and in his death 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.”

How would you say it? How are we to say it at the Chapel of Our Saviour in Colorado Springs? These are the questions of Christmas for us.

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