The Word Made Flesh

The Word Made Flesh

John 1:1-14

So, imagine that you have a truth to tell, something to reveal to anyone who is willing to listen.  This truth is deep and challenging.  It’s going to require people to rethink what they are sure that they already know.  It’s going to challenge people to be willing to  change, not only in what they think but in what they choose to do.  Your goal is to make this truth as compelling as you possibly can.  How do you tell the truth that you are dying to tell in a way that really brings that truth to life?

Here’s how Matthew and Luke tried.  They went back to the very first days…

It happened!  On a dark starlit night in a barn behind an inn, a young woman named Mary became a mother and a young man named Joseph became a dad.  The only place to lay the child was in a feed trough, used not long before by the animals in the barn, the same animals that now surrounded this family and comforted them with an occasional snort or a bleat or a moo.  Not long after that, shepherds appeared, moving their flocks to the songs of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth, peace among those whom he favors.”  It’s hard to say what twinkled the most that night:  the gleam in Joseph’s eye looking at Mary: the love in Mary’s loving gaze at her baby; or the star as it hovered and shined over head, beckoning the Magi forward on their journey.

This is a vision that can make our hearts skip a beat, that can capture our imagination, that can lead us to get back in touch with our childhood selves, the self who imagined this vision for the first time.  It is the antidote to the world’s cynicism because it is so simple and pure.  It is the opportunity to take the most spiritual thing imaginable and make it so concrete.  What could be more concrete and real and miraculous at the same time than the birth of a child?  Everyone who has ever witnessed the miracle of birth or who has held the bundle of a miracle that is a newborn baby can connect to this story.  You saw that birth and you held that child and love rumbled somewhere deep inside of you.  You knew that you had just seen and held a gift from God.  

If Matthew and Luke want to crack our hearts open and watch us begin to be made knew, they find the perfect way to start by handing us this narrative—by handing us this child.  We meet Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds and wise men and stars.  We take all this in and mash it together and come up with the narrative for our pageants, with the story that warms our hearts and leads us back into hope with the promise that faith can be born anew.  We immerse ourselves in the detailed vision of a particular moment in particular lives a long time ago and to our amazement, we realize that we are looking at something unimaginably powerful.  Then, it dawns on us that this deep power has, against all the odds, come to life inside of us.  

Really, the power of narrative is not confined to Scripture.  Shakespeare had a lot of great truths to tell, truths which are so much more alive as stories than statements.  Someone can tell you that love can break your heart or you can read, “Romeo and Juliet.”  Someone can tell you that envy is a problem or you can watch King Lear come unglued in the play.  Or, forget Shakespeare…someone can tell you, “Ya…Michael Jordan could play,” or they can tell you about the night he played with the flu and a fever and scored point after point after point, until he almost passed out in the end.  

There is a reason why painters paint with passion and writers write their hearts out:  they don’t just want to tell you the truth; they want to bring the truth to life.  Wherever the story, itself, falls on the spectrum between “this really happened” and “I made this up,” the truth of the story is real:  you cry for Romeo; you feel Lear’s remorse; you—just for a moment—believe that like M. J. you might just be able to fly (at least your spirit soars, even if your feet remain just inches off the ground.)  A great storyteller brings the truth to life.  A great storyteller makes the word flesh.

Here’s the crazy thing.  There is more than one way to tell the story.  If you detail out Luke and Matthew’s versions and untangle the parts that we’ve blended over the years, they are not offering the same details.  Still, though, they seem to lead us in the end to the same truth:  that love became incarnate, that God became one of us. All of which makes John’s account that we read this morning so fascinating.  If Matthew and Luke can agree on at least a few things (who Jesus’ parents were, that the circumstances of his birth were very humble, that surprisingly powerful things happened at the time of his birth) John just blows the whole thing up by telling the story in an entirely different way.  

John doesn’t begin in Nazareth or in Bethlehem or in a stable.  John doesn’t begin with Joseph and Mary or Zechariah and Elizabeth.  Johns begins with…the beginning.  “In the beginning…” These are the words that open the book of Genesis, the story of the beginning of all things.  In a story that had been shared for centuries among our ancestors in faith, the truth is brought to life that from the very beginning of creation, God brings order out of chaos.  Everything was formless and void—a big mess—until God speaks.  God speaks and light and darkness are separated from one another, the sea and dry land are formed, the fish of the sea and the animals of the land are shaped and in the end, human beings are brought to life.  From the beginning, God calls all of creation to life.  God does this by simply saying the words, “Let there be…” and calling each thing into being.  And after each new act of creation, God speaks another word:  “Good!”

John takes this core story of our ancestors in faith and essentially says, “I want to tell you a story but let’s start this way.  Do you remember when there was nothing and God spoke the word?  Well, the story that I’m going to tell you is about how that word, God’s word, the Word became flesh.  In the beginning, God said the word and things came into being.  Then, centuries later, just when it seemed that everything had become chaotic and formless and void again, God did what God always does, God chose to bring order to life.  However, this time, God did this by making the word flesh and becoming one of us.  In the words of our translation, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

This may sound really abstract but what I want to suggest to you is that it is the most primordial appeal to our experience.  John draws on the first day of that creation story, when darkness was separated from light.  In every creature that God created, there is a light that shines—what our translation calls the “Life-light.” There is a part of us when we are awake and aware that can look into any creature’s eyes and see the light of life that shines there.  This is the faithful part of us that knows that, though the darkness is real, it does not win.  It does not extinguish the light.  Even the tiniest light is unconquerable.

How do we know this?  We have seen just how dim a nightlight appears in the day only to feel like it is blazing in the hallway at night.  We have seen the light of life turn back on in our friend’s eyes when they’ve moved toward healing rather than addiction.  We’ve seen the love that is reflected back to us from a loved one, even when it seems like everything around us is sinking into chaos.   The light shines.  The darkness doesn’t win.  And, however we come to see the light, when we see it, we are drawn to it.  

I can only imagine that this would have been even more powerful in John’s day when there was no electricity, when the darkness always seemed to be a moment away.  If I can’t flip a switch then I have to find oil and a lamp and light it or I have to make candles and light them or I have to trust that not too long from now, the sun will rise again and the light of a new day will prevail.  Light was precious and cherished.

This is how John explains John the Baptist.  John the Baptist  comes to point out that we’ve lost our sense of the true light.  John is sent by God to show us the way to that light.  He came to show us the way to look and to be ready to follow that light when we saw it.  Then, one day, the light came.  The light was real but people didn’t see it.  Almost no one wanted to follow the light.  The thing was, though, that those who did follow the light, who believed what he said and did what he said to do, those people became their true selves, what, in our translation is called, “Their child-of-God selves.” If you follow the light in faith what you get to become is the self whom God has always intended for you to be, the self whom God created you to be in the first place.

How can you connect to this?  Try this…ask yourself, “Have I ever been lost in the dark?”  Of course you have.  It happens when you are in the basement with all the lights out.  You put a hand out in front of you and feel your way forward.  It happens to you when you’ve lost your way in life, when you’ve made too many bad choices in a row or allowed someone else to make your choices for you.  It happens when you feel like hope might just be on its last legs and the darkness is falling.  Somehow, some way we end up in a position where we don’t know what to do next.  What we wouldn’t give for a little light that might show us just the next step and then maybe linger long enough to show us the step after that.

Consider the power of the Christmas lights as you drive around town.  Think of the evening walk that you took and the glow that came from inside the homes you walked past.  Remember Christmas Eve in a normal year and the candle light filling the sanctuary as we sing, “Silent Night.”  How much of a difference in a day does it make to wake to sunshine instead of more clouds?  How much of a difference does it make half way through that sunny day when the clouds roll in?

“The Word was made flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”  We might know that word in different ways in different moments in our lives.  Here is “Peace,” the peace that passes all understanding.  Here is “Wonder” the kind of wonder that brings real reverence back to life.  Here is “Love,” love incarnate, self-sacrificing, humble, unconditional love.  What does the Word made flesh look like?  It looks like the joy that shines in the face of a former leper.  It looks like the satisfaction that crosses the face of a formerly hungry person who has been fed.  It looks like the peace that shines in the face of someone who used to be possessed—by their possessions or by their unforgiven grudges or by their unwillingness to seek forgiveness for their own wrongs.  That’s all gone, though, now.  The Word made flesh is what’s happening any time something old and tired and worn and discarded is made precious and new and loved.

And having made the Word flesh, God calls us to make a few words flesh through our choices.  Follow the light of life.  Live this way.  Feed the hungry.  Clothe the naked.  Comfort those who grieve.  Give more than you take.  Serve rather than looking to be served.  Love…then love some more.  This is the pathway we discover through the darkness when we follow Christ’s light.