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SERMONS

The First Sunday of Christmas
December 31, 2006

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

On Christmas Eve I told the children a story about when I was a boy. I grew up in a house surrounded by tall pine trees, and when the wind blew hard I could hear them swaying and creaking outside; watch their shadows move across my wall. One night when the moon was bright, and the wind was blowing, I got out of bed and looked out my window; I am not really sure what I was looking for. It was cold outside; I could feel the cold air through the glass, and I may have shivered a bit standing at the window.

And as I looked out, the trees moving in the wind, the moonlight dropping into the yard, I felt as sure as I am standing here and visiting with you today that something, someone, was looking back at me. Something was happening in that darkness, in that room, in that late night; something was flowing between me, and whatever it is that is “out there.” Some sense of presence. Some sense of the “numinous” as the scholars call it; “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” The great awe, the fear, that quality of being awake, the nearness of God.

And there was not a word uttered.

Before I had the words to describe that moment, God was sharing his words with me. You might think of it as the beginning of what has become a long conversation, that I did not understand, much less know how to begin.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This “word” that John is telling us about is known in the Greek as the Logos. It does not mean that in the beginning was the verb, the adjective, and the noun. John is also not implying that in the beginning was the human voice, or even human thought. Rather, John is pointing back much farther, to the beginning that exists before our notion of time existed; to a landscape that we do not even know, of which we do not have a complete picture.

Our understanding of this Word, this Logos, is something like the light of the sun that you see in a photograph. On paper, in a picture, the light is frozen and caught, and if we did not know better, we might derive some notions about light in general if that were all that we had in hand. Like trying to understand a cow by holding a hamburger in your hands.

The photograph does not represent the fact that light moves, that it travels, that it is ultimately produced in a great stream of energy from something we call the sun. That its particles have made a journey, and have an eight minute history by the time we see them. None of this can be derived from simply holding a photograph in your hand and studying it. The first principle of light might be lost to us if photographs were all that we had; like looking through a telescope at the wrong end.

The first principle of God might be lost to us if we lacked the living and breathing, flesh and blood, incarnation of Christ that we have been given. We would be the proud owners of a picture, without Christ, something perhaps very much like God, but not the same as the actual reality. Knowing God with Jesus, knowing God through Jesus’s life, looking through the telescope at the right end, is something like standing in the presence of the sun when all you have had are photographs.

John is helping us to draw the correct circle in our understanding of God; in fact, it is a circle whose ultimate circumference is beyond us, whose full compass will not be drawn with our hands, but rather the hand of the One in whom all things are made, “without whom not one thing came into being.”

I have a friend who is a particle physicist. We were at the University of Vermont together, where I was slogging through hoping to find the meaning of life, and he was finding that meaning in the smallest pieces of matter in the known universe. One night as we were discussing how he goes about his work, he was talking about filling one of his labs with smoke, so that he might actually see the pure beams of light shot by his lasers. The smoke offered some contrast against which the pure light might be seen.

It struck me that this was an appropriate image of the religious life, and theological reflection in general. It is also an appropriate of a Creator God who seeks to be known through the most complete means by his creatures; coming among us as another human being, what better form might the light take, than to be human among human beings. To give something that is pure and eternal a form, a shape, a voice that can be understood. What better form for the Word to be known, than to speak our own words.

With the coming of The Word, the Logos, in the baby and the man Jesus, we see that one of the first principles of God is that God wants to be known by us on our own terms, in the midst of the surroundings that are familiar to us. Not simply to be known as a fact among facts, not simply known the way we might know the speed of light; but known the way we know our own best friend, the way we know those whom we love, as by others who love us.

But this has always been the deep desire from the heart of God, the whisper that follows us through our days, “I have made myself known to you, so that you might come to know me.”

The Incarnation means that even before there was an event in the human mind that might conceive of God, God was in our midst as some one that we would come to know.

I have always been looking at you through the window, so that you might come and look with me. I even came to stand with you so that you might see me.

And he will be there looking through that window for all time, even after each of us has gone to be with him. The meaning of the Incarnation is that in fact, we will go and look through that window with him. So that in our endings we will find a view that we have known from the beginning.