Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from December 25, 2005

“And the Word Became Flesh”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Isaiah 52:7-10

John 1:1-14

When it’s John’s turn to tell the story of Jesus’ coming into the world, you have to listen carefully.  There are no angels, there’s no child leaping in the womb of Elizabeth announcing that Mary’s baby is the one to watch.  There’s no long and laboring trek to Bethlehem.  There are no wise men bringing odd symbolic gifts.  There’s no star.  The manger remains filled with hay to nourish hungry animals and the shepherds remain in their field tending their timid flocks under a starlit sky.

There’s no connection to a specific moment, no geography to locate the event.  It could have been Judah or Jordan or Jewett City.  We’re not told where it all happened.  But what the story lacks in detail, it makes up for in poetry.  For the writer of John’s gospel, connecting the historical dots of first century political and religious life in Palestine was not the most important part of the story of Jesus.  John, in fact, takes a longer view, a much longer view because his book starts with the words “in the beginning”.  The only other book of Scripture that begins that way is Genesis.  In the beginning.  It’s not a coincidence.

One of the things that John wants to do is remind us that from the very beginning, from the time that the foundations of the world were laid, there has always been a way for us wayward human beings to get back to God.  From the moment the world came into being, even before there were human beings, Messiah was there with God to assure that there would always be a way home.

So before His name was Jesus, His name was The Word.  He was with God from the very beginning.  There with God bringing things into being, making things happen, shining light into the darkness, He was God’s own self, the breath of all living things, the fire inside the sun, the space between the stars, the axis on which the galaxy spun.  There, from the very beginning, eternal and beyond time as we usually think about time. 

John’s gospel stands in stark contrast to Matthew and Luke’s careful attention to detail that places Jesus in the time of Quinerius and Herod and all of the first century purveyors of misery and mayhem.  John, instead, starts in a place beyond time.  As weird or as mysterious as it may sound, it is something that we know.  But we don’t know it in our heads most of the time.  We know it in our bones.  It is time beyond time—time that can’t be measured by a clock or by a calendar.  It’s time that we mark not by its duration but by its content.

Buechner says, “It is the passage of time known in the unrepeatable event, a birth, a death, a marriage, a baptism; some event of unusual beauty or pain or joy through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about; maybe, even what life itself is all about.  This glimpse involves not just the present but the past and the future, as well.  It’s clock time punctuated by the stuff of life in simple and, yet, deeply profound ways.  In John’s long view, it was the eternal punctuated by a moment that makes all other moments different. 

Maybe the easiest way to understand this great mystery that we know as incarnation is that it’s time that gets punctuated by God, where the eternal becomes particular in a moment.  There came a moment when the eternal is named Jesus.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us—the gospel in nine short words.  What it means is that from that place beyond time where God’s desire has always been that God’s desire for God’s people—us, those who’ve come before us, those who will come after us—to find a way home will be tried just one more time.

Now, Jesus wasn’t the first time God tried.  Buechner said that God was searching for the right word for quite a while.  God tries Noah but Noah was a drinking man.  God tries Abraham but he was a little too Mesopotamian with all those wives and whiskers.  He tries Moses but Moses himself was trying too hard.  David—well, he was just too handsome for his own good.  God tries John the Baptist with his locusts and honey.  It might almost have worked except for something small but crucial like a sense of the ridiculous or a balanced diet.  Word after word, God tried.

Finally, He tries one more time to say it in a way that we might get, to get into one final word just what it’s all about.  God’s self human being is the beauty of love that makes everything new, the peace of God that burns like a fire in our gut.  So God makes The Word flesh in the hope that we might get it.  The Eternal Word in a specific moment.  Nothing has been the same since.

In Jesus, The Word is no longer a unit of speech but becomes a way of life.  Suddenly, talk is no longer cheap because it is the very voice of God that speaks in this Word made flesh.  But it’s not just all out there somewhere in lovely poetry.  There’s a place where we get to be part of a story.  To all who believe, He gave power to become the children of God.  That’s where we get to enter the story.  From His fullness, we have received grace upon grace.

It’s difficult to describe, not so easy to explain, but when we’re paying attention, I think it’s a grace that we learn to name.  There are those moments that we can point to when we know for sure that the Incarnation is not just a thing of the past but happening in our time, as well.  They are those moments that become more than just the sum of their parts, moments when the face of God is revealed in our midst, moments when we speak a truth that points beyond our words and, somehow, manage to bear witness to something of who God is and what we, in this life, are all about.  They are incarnational moments and the human is infused with the holy, and the timeless is known in a moment that becomes more than what we can measure with our clock or our watch.

Each year for me, there is a moment that kind of stands out as the Christmas moment, a time that breaks through all the nonsense and, somehow, manages to get my attention.  I am not sure what it will be this year because the Christmas season begins today and it hasn’t happened yet.  But I remember a few years back when my Christmas moment came in the mailbox.  If you’ve already heard this story, I ask your forgiveness but it’s one that continues to shine in my heart.

Nestled amongst all the cards and all the other junk that come in the daily mail, there was this little envelope.  It had beautiful, even, compact handwriting and a deep, beautiful shade of red ink.  It was addressed to “The Reverend Patricia L. Liberty” with “Reverend” spelled out.  It caught my attention even though I didn’t really recognize the return address.  Inside, there was a simple card and the cover had this creche scene with the words “Joy to the World!  The Lord has come.”  It was unremarkable in design.  The inside verse read, “Thinking of you and wishing you the joys of the season.”  It was signed by a woman whose husband had been one of my hospice patients.

During our visits, she had told me of their life together, shared stories in time that defined her life, her husband’s life, and their life together.  It had only been a few months, and she sends me a card that says, “Joy to the World”.  In that moment, much of the sentimental rubbish that passes for Christmas yielded to this gift in time that reminded me that the Incarnation comes not when we are posing for the lives we’d like to lead but while we are living out the days that are ours, and sometimes we sing “Joy to the World” with a broken heart.

The Incarnation, The Word made flesh, is the eternal hymn sung in the voice of the moment.  It punctuates sorrow with joy, judgment with mercy, and death with life.  The truth of John’s blend of eternal and time-bound poetry is that God comes into our lives as they are so that we might become what God intends us to be.  The song of the Incarnation is always sung in the voice of the moment.  The Eternal One comes.  The Word is made flesh.  It lives in you and me.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.