Christmas 2

January 5, 2014, Benson Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1:1-18

On December 23, I happened to see a piece by Rachel Maddow about the year 1968.   For those of you not old enough to remember, 1968 was a year of great upheaval and tragedy.  It was the year of the assassinations of both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Senator Robert Kennedy.  It was a year of riots and protests and war and violence, not only in our country, but in many countries around the world.  But, as Maddow pointed out, the year 1968 ended with an amazing experience that the whole world shared.   

On Christmas Eve of 1968, in preparation for an eventual landing on the moon the next year, the Apollo 8 mission circled the moon.  It was the first time that human beings looked back on earth, from the point of view of a different world.   And instead of any other message that the Apollo 8 astronauts could have sent back from their orbit of the moon, looking back on the moon, this is the message they read to the whole of the human race, listening on radio or watching on television.  “We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.'"

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

"'And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.'

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

When the Apollo 8 astronauts returned to earth and their film was developed, all of us on earth, saw the good earth that they saw from lunar orbit.  A particular color photo, called “Earthrise” of this beautiful world, blue and wonderful and fragile, showed all of us for the first time where we really lived.   And the message of the astronauts was clear, in a new way, the message of the first chapter of Genesis was clear, this good earth, this beautiful and fragile and powerful place is the gift of a Good Creator, given into our hands, to cherish or to destroy.

This passage we heard this morning from John’s Gospel, called the prologue by Biblical scholars, goes back, way back beyond Bethlehem, beyond Nazareth to the dawn of creation, to the beginning of all things.

In the beginning, John quotes from Genesis, but then he hits a variation, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  John pulls back the curtain and shows us the whole sweep of salvation’s history from creation to the arrival of Jesus in the world.   John shows us God’s gift of salvation, given as a human being, fragile and powerful and precious.  God’s gift of salvation is given into our hands, to cherish or to destroy.

John’s Gospel is not a chronological life of Jesus.  John’s portrayal of Jesus is rich with symbolism and theological discourse and this passage we heard this morning is a prime example of that.  In this short passage, we see the entirety of John’s story of Jesus.

I think one of the things that many Christians find so frustrating about the stories of Jesus is the dearth of information about his early life.  In our twentieth first century context, we want to know how someone is shaped by their upbringing.  “The child is father to the man,” wrote William Wordsworth.  

Yes we have those very charming and very different stories about his birth from Matthew and Luke.  And there is that one incident from Luke about Jesus when he was twelve and was separated from Mary and Joseph in Jerusalem, but really, we don’t know what kind of little boy he was from the Bible, at least.

There are childhood accounts in the Gospel of Peter, one of the later Gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible and frankly, the little boy in those accounts sounds like someone who needs a time out, if not a swat on the bottom.  You can see why this book never made it into the Bible with this bratty Jesus.

Anne Rice, who is best known for her books about vampires, wrote a very interesting novel about the childhood of Jesus, “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt”.  While Rice approaches this book from ideas about Biblical scholarship that I find faulty and while she includes a lot of Catholic traditional teaching that has no basis in the Bible in her novel, the basic idea of the book is one that I find fascinating.  What did Jesus know and when did he know it?

In Rice’s book, Mary and Joseph know about Jesus special nature and destiny, but they try to raise their son as a normal little boy.  For the most part they succeed, but the child Jesus, like any child, is curious about who he is.  He realizes that Joseph is not his father, but he can’t quite figure out what the big secret is about him.

Finally Rice’s Jesus comes to a stunning realization about himself and the nature of the world.  Everything that is born must die.  He realizes that he was specifically born to die, that his special destiny is to lay down his life.

Looking at Jesus’ early life is not even a question for the author of John’s Gospel.  It was not a part of his big picture.  But, he would have agreed with Anne Rice’s conclusion; that Jesus was born to die.

During the Advent and Christmas seasons many churches hold a Service of Lessons and Carols, which has its origins in Cambridge University in England.  In 1918, a young chaplain at the Kings College, Cambridge, had just received that post after seeing the horrors of the First World War.  He wanted to make worship a more meaningful experience and spent his life updating and enriching the worship of the Church of England.  Lessons and Carols became a tradition in Cambridge and spread widely to other churches throughout the world, especially after the BBC began broadcasting the service in the 1930’s.

That service is broadcast, live from Cambridge on Christmas Eve by the BBC and is usually carried by public radio stations.  One year, I was surprised that one of the carols the choir sang was an anthem that in the country is more associated with Holy week than Christmas, John Stainer’s “God So Loved the World.”  In fact, that anthem is part of a longer work by Stainer, “The Crucifixion.”   It is an anthem that I’ve sung many times.

The text of the anthem is a quotation from John’s Gospel, a few chapters hence from what we read today, perhaps one of the best known quotations from the Bible. “God so loved the world that he gave the only Son, that whosever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I think whoever put the service in Cambridge together that year wanted to emphasize something that we tend to ignore at Christmas:  this child just born, was born to die.  It is something often mentioned in Christmas carols and we think of Christmas as being so joyous, we often ignore this truth.  This child is born to die.

John begins his story of Jesus with this truth: the Word became Flesh.  There is a fancy word for that, incarnation.  You may recognize the Latin word, carne that came into Spanish, carne literally meat.  God became meat, just like you, just like me.  God became one of us.  God in Jesus experienced everything, every emotion, every pain, every joy that ever one of us knows. 

The glory of God can be revealed in the little place and in the everyday event.  Sometimes we look for God in the large places, the loud things, storms, wars, earthquakes, thunderous proclamations from pulpits.    But because of the incarnation, because God became flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, any and every dimension of life becomes an arena of God's extraordinary saving activity.  In the most mundane circumstances, from a space capsule orbiting the moon to you and I gathered here this morning, ordinary people like you and like me become the material for the Kingdom of God, the glory of the saints, the salvation of the world.

Amen.