2nd Sunday of Christmas, 1st Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY

The Greatness of God’s Love
By Rev Steven R Mitchell
Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1: 1-18
First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY 1/3/10


Today is the second Sunday of Christmas (please note I say “of” and not “after”), as those who are more in tune with the Christian Calendar understand that we celebrate 12 days of Christmas. Next week we start the season of Epiphany and by the second week in February we begin the season of Lent with the observance of Ash Wednesday. For those who like to follow any of the afternoon Soap Operas, I should think that this time of the year can be quit confusing and possibly frustrating. For in the Soaps, you could miss watching for 5 months and when you tune back in, the plot has only unfolded a mere hour. Since I was last with you, on Christmas Eve, celebrating the birth of Jesus, in a matter of 3 days, Jesus went from being an infant to a preconscious pre-teen of twelve, and next Sunday as we celebrate the first Sunday of Epiphany, we once again go back to the infancy of Jesus with the visit of the three wise men.
Yet isn’t that really a reflection on life itself? Many times whatever we are doing today in way of tasks, we must take time out to revisit and address something that has happened previously; say last week or a month ago, or even a year ago or even further back in time. It is a simple fact that what we are doing today has its presence because of what we did yesterday or the day before, or the week before that and even on decisions and actions that we took decades ago.
When you look at the placement of the stories and books within what we call the Bible, their placements are reflective of the understanding that something has happened before the current story. The name of the first book in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis depicts “the beginning” or “the start of”; even the first story tells of the beginning of life on this planet. The Christian Bible starts off with 4 books (called the Gospels) speaking about the person that we look to as the founder of our faith and then is followed by the Epistles which speaks to the spreading of the Christian faith and the teachings by which the early church started to incorporate as standards in which to live by.
Two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke start their stories off with the birth of Jesus. For Matthew, the beginning comes with the explanation of Jesus’ human lineage, tracing it back to Ruth and Boaz. For Luke, we start with the lives of Mary and Joseph. In the Gospel of Mark, the author begins with Jesus’ ministry and ends with his crucifixion (somewhere down the road, someone added the story of the resurrection.) With the Gospel of John, which is where a portion of today’s readings come from, the writer speaks to the beginning of Jesus not through family lineage but rather beyond time itself, the beginning being with God and of God and in God. Hear these words once again:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”
As we read this first segment of scripture, our understand of what it is saying will be influenced by what we have been taught from the pulpit in the past as well as what we may have learned in other settings within the church system such as: Sunday school, youth groups and bible studies, or through teachers found on the religious radio and television stations. Our understanding of the meaning of this text will also be influenced by what we have experienced outside of the church’s teachings, such as social structures, ones level of educational background, the economic level of one’s back ground (meaning growing up poor, lower-middle class, middle-middle class, upper-middle class, or just plain rich), the ethnic and cultural background (meaning African-American, Northern European, Irish, Middle-eastern, Native American and Asian to mention just a few) as well as geographical background (the deep south, New England states, Mid-west, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Northern Plaines states or the Rocky Mountain region); all of this plays into our understanding, our interpretation of not just this scripture but all scripture.
I hope that for everyone here this morning, you have had the marvelous experience of realizing that each time you read scripture it is saying something new to you. The reason for this is because of what has happened within your life between the last time you read that passage to the present reading of that passage. From time to time I like to go back to some of my old sermons and see what I found of interest in that reading as compared to what I am focusing in on currently. It is the stillspeaking God when we find something new in scripture!
Since I was on Holiday this past week and feeling a time crunch to make sure I had a sermon for today, I looked at the sermon that corresponds to today’s lectionary reading. It was on Jan 5, 1986, fresh out of Seminary that I first struggled with today’s lectionary texts. I discovered that I worked on the Ephesians text and not on John’s. Today, however, I found John as the text that most interested me. More specifically about the meaning of the use “word” and “light”. Are these two words meaning the same thing or are there just the obvious differences?
As I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the 4 Gospels had their way of explaining and justifying to their original audience that Jesus was the Messiah that they were waiting for. With John, he was explaining Jesus’ authority as not being based on an earthly kingdom but rather of a Heavenly Kingdom as he uses the imagery of Jesus being with God as well as apart of God. John definitely refers to Jesus as being the “Word” and that the “word” is what gave life. We have to recall the original creation stories as it was God, who with a “word” created all life as we understand as well as what we have yet to understand. It was God, breathing “life” into creation that gave it activity. So from Johns argument, Jesus’ authority comes not from his lineage, but rather because he was with God and of God before earth came into existence. It is from this reality that Jesus is able to provide life for all of creation through his death, because Jesus was a part of creation to begin with.
John moves from establishing Jesus as the life giver to also defending the idea that Jesus was not overcome by evil, but rather that Jesus gave up his life willingly in the phrase, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” The idea here of course is that God cannot be overcome by evil. This is where the inner play of the words “light” and “darkness” start to come into play. The idea of darkness is the opposite of the idea of light. Darkness is used to describe evil and light is used to describe good. Remember that in the creation stories, God pronounced all that was created as “good”. The concept of darkness didn’t occur until Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden tends to convey the idea of living in harmony with God and that by not living in the garden is living life away from God or living life in darkness.
As John develops his understanding of Jesus, he uses this phrase, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” So the “word” which was Jesus, became life, from life came “the light” for all people; hence my fascination with the word “light”. What does “light” ultimately mean? If we were in seminary and I was your professor, I could spend over a month, chewing on this word and its meaning. However, I am going to give you a conclusion without the pain of arriving there yourselves. The word “light”, to my current understanding comes to mean, “Truth”. The life that Jesus has brought to us is “Truth” toward understanding God. If we understand God, we then will have the desire to act in the manor that God acts, or at least that is the underlying hope we have as Christians.
John finishes this section of his treaty with this statement: The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John is letting us know that by way of Jesus, humanity no longer has to experience God through the law, but rather we know God because of grace and truth. As we go through out the rest of the church year we will be learning the concepts of “grace and truth.” Through Jesus’ life we are also able to see that the church is not stagnate, but evolving and growing. Once we were under the law, something that was condemning, but through Christ, we live under grace, the active process of redemption of forgiving and of growth; an ever speaking God, not one who has nothing more to reveal.
This redemption is best expressed in Ephesians, where Paul writes: In Jesus you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in Jesus, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people…” There is a process, a flow to what is being said here: first we hear, and then we believe what we have heard and through that believe we receive the fruit of what we believe.
This week while on Holiday, along with the opportunity to visit with many of my friends in Seattle, I took time to read and start preparing myself for upcoming conversations that I will be participating in with the Union Church in Green River as they begin to start learning about the topic of Homosexuality. The book that I was reading was recommended to me by their pastor, Curtis Tutterrow as one of the books that is a springboard for their discussions. I also had the opportunity to watch one of the Box Office hit movies, Avatar, which deals with the theme of one group of people feeling empowerment over creatures that they deemed less valuable, thereby able to justify their destructive behavior toward these lesser creatures.
These may sound like two unrelated subjects but actually they are very much related. What struck me from the book that I just finished titled, Crisis, 40 stories revealing the personal, social and religious pain and trauma of growing up gay in America edited by Mitchell Gold and the movie Avatar, which brought back to memory a film released back in 1985, titled, The Mission, which depicted the decimation of a complete culture in South America as the price to keep peace between Spain and Portugal by the Roman Catholic Church as these two countries were vying for ownership of land in South America, is just how powerful the church has been in our culture and continues to be. We are the voice the “light” that John writes about. We are the voice that is charged to bring “truth” to the larger community. Yet, so many times the church has acted in “darkness” and not as “the light” of the world as it used Gods word to promote slavery, laws against inter-racial marriage, hatred toward the Jews (especially in Nazi Germany), the dehumanization of America’s Native Indians and continues the hatred toward non-heterosexuals. I don’t think it is generally done out of malicious acts but rather more times than not, it has come out of ignorance and a non-willingness to look at truth, when it challenges our own person biases.
As we come to the Christ table today and take part in communion I pray that each of us remember that Christ came to us to bring us truth and in accepting the wine and the bread, we take the challenge to continue to learn about “truth” and to turn that truth into action. The church has more power in our world than what we may think! Let us be working at using this power for the true meaning of what God intends for all of life. Instead of us praying with the mindset of “God be on our side”, let us pray with the mind set, “God let us be on your side”, for it is only with that attitude that we can accept the “light” that came to us in the body of Jesus, the Christ and to share the greatness of God’s love. Amen