"The Word That Saves (Second Sunday after Christmas)"
Pastor Roger Gustafson
Sunday, January 02, 2011
John 1:1-18
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus, whose birth we continue to celebrate this day. Amen.
Years ago, on the first day of school in Greenville, South Carolina, the sixth-grade class of Miss Shelton sat in wide-eyed wonder as they watched their teacher write words on the blackboard. These were words like they’d never seen before, big words, long words. As Miss Shelton continued to write, the whispering started among the students, all African Americans. “She must be in the wrong room,” they whispered. Finally a young lady spoke up: “Miss Shelton, ma’am, you must be in the wrong classroom. Those are all eighth-grade words, and we’re only in the six grade.”
Miss Shelton turned to face the class, and smiled. “I know what grade this is. I work here. And you’re going to learn all of these words, and many more must like them. Because I refuse to teach down to you. And one of these days one of you little rascals just might run for president of the United States, and it’s my job to see that you’ll be ready.” With that, she turned and continued to write on the blackboard.
It sounded crazy at the time, talking like that in a town like Greenville, a place that didn’t have a single African American on the board of education, in the police department or in the fire department. But Miss Shelton’s comments planted a seed in one of those students that day, the seed of a vision. That seed would take root and sprout and grow, and indeed Jesse Jackson would grow up and run for president of the United States, and to this day remains an influential force in American politics.
Words are powerful! They can plant a seed, cast a vision. Chosen carefully and spoken with affection, words can do a world of good. Spoken in haste and anger, they can do a world of harm. Some of you were blessed this past week by words that made your heart sing with happiness and possibility. Some of you were wounded by words that hit and penetrated like a steel-tipped arrow. Some of you heard the words, “I believe in you,” and it was like your world burst into song. Some of you heard the words, “Not good enough,” and it was like no matter what you did, you would never be good enough..
Words are powerful indeed. Originally, words were meant to be creative and creating. That’s what we see in the beginning of the first book in the Bible, in Genesis. This is how the writer of that book put it: “… the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” The world was created through the Word of God. The writer of Psalm 33 put it a little differently. He wrote: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. … For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” The Word of God, the first word ever spoken, had creative and creating power.
But we notice in that reading from Genesis that when God spoke and light was created, darkness was not eliminated; it continued to be part of our life. In fact, the world rotates between light and dark, back and forth, again and again, routinely. And so do we in our own lives. We acknowledged as much in the way we started our worship this morning, with the Order for Confession and Forgiveness. I didn’t notice many of us falling silent when we got to that part where we said, “In spite of our best intentions, we have committed sinful acts and have failed to live in ways that honor God.” Sometimes the bondage toward which we gravitate is a darkness of our own making, and of our own desire.
That’s why this Gospel of John is a portrait of a God who from the very beginning of creation was deeply in love with you, personally. There are four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Two of those Gospels, Matthew and Luke, contain stories about the birth of the baby Jesus. They include the classic characters – Mary and Joseph, shepherd and angels, and of course the infant, baby Jesus. Those are the stories that we read here in church and, I hope, you read to each other in your families at Christmastime.
The Gospel of John also contains a birth story, however, and this is it. It is a unique story about a unique birth, because this is the story about the birth of a Word, the creative and creating Word of a God who couldn’t stand to see his children live in darkness. What would be needed in this story is the birth of a Word that was just as powerful as the word God first spoke back at the beginning of creation, but it would need to be more, too. This Word would also have to have the power to save, to redeem. This would have to be more than just a spoken word.
We’ve all heard enough words that turned out to be just words. I spoke yesterday with a young woman who said, “For over a year now we’ve been telling each other how much we love each other. We were making plans for our future, and it all seemed so wonderful. And now he says that he doesn’t know, that he’s just not sure … .” We’ve all heard words like that. “I will love you forever.” “Stay with this company and you’ll retire as a millionaire.” “You can always count on me.”
Words that are just words, promises without substance, leave us feeling betrayed, disillusioned. God knew that we would need more than just a spoken word; we would need a word that actually accomplished what it said, a performative word, a word that not only made promises but also kept them at the same time.
So God spoke the Living Word that is Jesus Christ. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in his paraphrase of the New Testament. He phrased part of our Gospel lesson this way: “And the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” Some of the neighbors would reject this Word, of course, because it didn’t fit the profile, didn’t match their expectations. Jesus is still rejected today. But human rejection has never diminished the effectiveness of this Living Word. When Jesus said, “I love you,” “you are beautiful,” “you are forgiven,” he created the very realities that he pronounced. He created love, he created beauty, he created forgiveness. And he still does today.
This Living Word also does more. To all who welcome him into the neighborhood, who receive him, he gives power to become the children, the sons and daughters, of God, now born of God. That means that we’re no longer on our own to contend with illnesses that suck the life out of us, with jobs that flatten our spirits, with disappointments that shrivel our optimism. It means that the world is no longer on its own in its struggle against violence and racism and despair.
God has spoken his Living Word into our lives. In fact, that Living Word has taken our sinfulness upon himself and destroyed its power over us, and in its place has left within us a spark of divine glory. That means that we are changed, we are different.
In India they tell a folktale about a young tiger cub that became separated from its mother. The tiger cub was found and adopted by a herd of goats. In time, as the months wore on, the tiger cub learned the ways of goats, learned how to bleat and how to eat grass. It wasn’t long before the tiger cub began to think he was a goat. One day a king tiger appeared, and all of the goats scattered into the jungle in fear. Everyone except the tiger cub, who didn’t know what to do. Should he run this way, or that way, or stay put, or what? He paced back and forth and began to bleat, as goats will do.
The king tiger watched for a while, then finally said, “What are you doing, acting like a goat?”
“But I am a goat,” the tiger cub said.
The king tiger took the young cub over to a pool of water whose surface was absolutely still, like a mirror. The tiger cub looked into their reflections; first he looked at the king tiger, then at himself, then at the king tiger again, then back at himself. And the recognition began to come. He tail flashed through the air, his claws dug into the soft clay, he raised his head, and the entire jungle shook with the force of his roar.
The celebration of Christmas is a reminder to us that we were never created to be goats. The Word of God became flesh and lived among us, and within us, so that we might recover the image of God and raise our heads high.
When God took flesh in Christ and lived among his people, he didn’t miss a thing. Nothing that happened escaped his notice, not the blind man by the side of the road, not the woman who timidly reached her hand through the crowd in order to try to touch his cloak, not the solitary sparrow that fell from the sky.
He still doesn’t miss a thing. Nothing in your life has escaped his notice. The dreams of the future that never quite worked out, the failures, the hopes that were dashed, the hurts, the yearning for more – he knows them all. If fact, he knows you and me better than we know ourselves, and he comes to us this morning in the bread and wine of Communion, which is the real presence of Christ here this morning, to reassure us of who we really are – sons and daughters of God.
Yes, our lives continue on as before. There are still bills to pay and schoolwork to do and babies to change and laundry to fold and people to care for. But now we do those things specifically as children of God whose task is to reveal God to each other and to the world in the midst of our everyday, ordinary lives.
My prayer for each of us at this dawn of a new year is that we will become ever-more faithful speakers of that Living Word who came to live among and within us, that Living Word that is Jesus Christ. Amen.