A Sermon preached on Christmas Day December 25, 2020 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews
1:1-4, John 1:1-14
Robert Vukovic preached at our Christmas Eve services yesterday and he was determined to get the traditional Christmas story readings from Luke, so I ended up with the other option, John 1, for today’s service. Robert preached an excellent sermon about the shepherds …. and there are no shepherds in John 1. In fact, there is no stable, there are no kings, there is no star, and no heavenly chorus either. It is a much more abstract reading, and not suited at all to pageants or creche scenes. But it might actually be a more appropriate Christmas Gospel for this year, for this “COVID-Christmas!” After all, we would not all be allowed into the stable because of the 5-person limit, the shepherds would have been at home due the curfew, and the kings or wise men wouldn’t have been able to travel due to COVID restrictions.
But that is not quite what I was thinking of. John does not recount the story of the birth of Jesus, instead he draws our attention to who Jesus is and what he came to do. And that is perhaps even more important at this time, even more reassuring, even more hopeful than how Jesus came into the world. Who is Jesus according to John? Jesus is God’s creative word. Jesus is the true light. Jesus is the incarnate Word.
The first thing we learn is that Jesus is God’s creative word and was with God before Creation. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) Through the Word all things were created and without his activity, not a thing can exist. This takes us back to the first creation story in Genesis, “God said” and with that divine word everything came into being: light, the earth, plants and animals, finally human beings. In a time when part of nature seems to be working against us with this virus, this is a vital reminder that God is behind all of creation, however broken it may seem – and however broken we make it. Creation is full of things that can and do harm us – not by intention but as part of their own cycle of growth and survival and as a result of change and mutation, often as reaction to other changes. Creation, as God set it in motion, is not static, not unchanging. It is as free to develop as we are free to develop and choose. But if God is behind creation, we can still be sure that love is its ultimate purpose just as love was the motivation and in the Word, the Son, in Jesus, love the very means by which we were made.
John the Baptist, sent from God, to testify to the light is like a first ray of light shining in the darkness. But John “was not the light … [because] the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” (John 1:8) Who or what is the true light? Well, according to theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the “Son radiates and reflects the unimaginable beauty and light of the source from which he comes.” The Son brings God’s light into the world. There’s a lovely line about this light in the carol ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’: “Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
We sure do need light; we need this Christmas to be a celebration of light. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere it is the darkest time of the year. For the whole world right now what it is dark like the “the midnights of our souls, our lives, our loves, our griefs and our fears,”[1] as we face an invisible enemy and for many a lonely or lonelier Christmas celebration than before. John 1 reminds us that at this time God sent and sends us the light of hope, the light shining in the darkness of the world, It is a light to whom we can bring our fears, and in faith and light our fears will be turned into hopes.[2]
For us as Christians, word and light are not abstract principles, they are a person: the incarnate word or as I always say in the prayer I use before I begin my sermon, the living word. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
God became human, became one of God’s creatures us in Jesus of Nazareth. God lived among us - literally made his dwelling or set up his tent among us – to share and change our lives so that we might fulfil the promise given at creation – that we were made in God’s image. Look, John says, if you want to know what that means and who God is, just look here, look at Jesus. The author of Hebrews calls him “the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being” (Hebrews 1:3)
Here is God’s grace in a person – God’s gift to us who goes on to give himself for us. Here is God’s truth in a person – “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.” (1 John 4:9) Here is God’s glory in a person – importance, greatness, honour, splendour, and power are lived out and demonstrated in poverty, sacrifice, and service, and not by a life of material wealth or worldly power and privilege.
The great promise of the prologue to John’s Gospel is that the event we celebrate at Christmas, Jesus’ birth, was not just some singular event in history, not just something that happened just over 2,000 years ago. The Gospel tells us that as the creative word, Jesus was at the creation of the universe, it tells us that Jesus came into the world to bring light and life 2,000 years ago, and it tells us that Jesus is here with us today. Through the Incarnation God said, “I am with you always.” Or in the rather more poetic language that the Apostle Paul uses in his Letter to the Romans: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39) That is the hope and reassurance of Christmas – in all its versions.
Amen.
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