Christmas 2B
Text: John 1:1-18
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
January 3, 2021
The Last Word Is the First Word
If you follow Faith’s video worship regularly, you know that on Christmas Eve I preached about how small it is that God comes to us in Incarnation. In the gospel of Luke story that we read on Christmas Eve we get God coming to us as a newborn baby, in the stable in Bethlehem.
Ten days later, today, the Second Sunday of the Christmas season, we get the gospel of John, and there’s no stable, no baby, and there’s not a thing about this Incarnation business that is small. I’m reminded of the line from the movie Jaws: “we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” If I’m gonna preach this time about the Christmas event as it is in the gospel of John, I’m gonna need a bigger sermon.
John starts us off at the beginning. Not the beginning of the Bethlehem story, but at the beginning of creation. “In the beginning was the Word,” he writes, and that brings to my mind the line from the poet T. S. Eliot: “In my beginning is my end.” Eliot writes that in a poem in which he explores East Coker, the community in England from which his ancestors immigrated to America. Why is it big, to know where you come from? Why is it big, to remember your very beginning? Because it is in my beginning that is my true end.
In the beginning was the Word, John writes, and this Word that is Christ was God. All things came into being through him; yeah, without him there is not one thing that came into being. What has come into being in him in the Christmas event is life – life itself; is that big enough for you? It is the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.
How big is this thing, this Incarnation of the very God? It’s cosmic. The best guess of the astrophysicist types is that the Big Bang origin of the universe we know was 14 billion years ago, and the Gospel of John makes the audacious claim that the Word, Christ, was there in the beginning. Our sun is one of many billions of such stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and our home galaxy is only one of some 170 billion such galaxies, and the Gospel is that not any of this was created without the Word from God. You can tell I spent a lot of sermon research time on Wikipedia this week, can’t you?!
From the outer reaches of space you can go in the other direction, toward the inner reaches, and go big there, too. In the human mind – your mind – there are some 100 billion neurons and between them some 100 trillion synapses, the switch places where electrical and chemical signals are tripped, one cell to another, and every thought you’ve ever had and every creative impulse has come to you in just that way. What has come into being in him, the Word, is life, and this life, says the Gospel, is the light of all people. Think of that, the next time a light bulb goes off in your brain.
This matter of the Incarnation of God is big, cosmically big, but in our sin we look to make it small. That’s the way the devil works; the devil convinces us that what is small is really very big; the devil works to make us lose the Big Picture. I remember a conversation around this holiday time with a church member – not Faith; before Faith!, so don’t be trying to figure out who this is – and this guy wasn’t sure about heading home for Christmas. Seems he had this old fight with his brother that had resurrected itself, something that seemed big and important until he was telling me about it and in the telling it came across as so petty and so not-worth-it. So it was that in the middle of it he stopped the telling and suddenly blurted out, “I don’t want to be small about this.” And I smiled and nodded and I helpfully suggested: “Well, then, don’t!” Go big or go home, as my sons used to yell to one another when they were lifting weights. In the end my friend did go big, and he went home, for Christmas.
The Incarnation of God is cosmically big, but in our sin we look to make it small, when we see injustice and pain and pandemic in the world and we believe that the things in this world that are not of God, are winning. The devil works to convince us this is just the way things are; you can’t fight City Hall; things are going down the path to perdition and there is nothing you can do to change that. You ever think: this is exactly what happens in the TV news and on Facebook and social media stuff – all the things in this world that are not of God are portrayed as being big, big, big. Don’t be letting them do that to you. As if – what?; as if you are not armed with the very Gospel of God itself? The Gospel is that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Now in the life of faith there is room for engagement and struggle against the things in this world that are not of God, plenty enough room for that, but there is no room for despair. Our God is big enough, says the Gospel, that our God can overcome. Victory is ours; even in the darkest days of pandemic, never forget that.
This year through this holiday season we are all wrestling with loss, in all kinds of ways. The loss is real, and it is big; don’t let anything I say hear today imply anything else. It’s the truth. We have among us people who mourn.
But we also have among us a Word that has been from the beginning bigger than death, and will be bigger forevermore. For to all who have received this Word, he gave power to become nothing less than children of God. We have been born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of any human will – nothing as small as that! – but of God.
For it is because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. And from his grace we have all received, grace upon grace.
T. S. Eliot was right: in my beginning is my end. It is because in the beginning was the Word, that in the end we know our end. Neither discouragement, nor despair, nor death itself – none of these things we know right now has the last word. In my beginning is my end. In the end, the last Word belongs to our God. Because as these majestic opening words of the Gospel of John tell us, God was ever, the first Word.