December 29, 2024 - The First Sunday after Christmas
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. And yes, still, Merry Christmas. As I mentioned in this week’s enotes, Christmas Day may have passed, but now we are in the season of Christmas, and today is the fifth day of this twelve-day season. “Five golden rings.” I think today you’re getting fifteen gifts, if your loved ones are doing this correctly: five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and one partridge in a pear tree. I hope you like birds.
Leaving those twelve days of Christmas behind, there’s another traditional song that comes to mind this week, along with all our traditional Christmas hymns, one specifically sung by many on just one day of the year, this coming Tuesday. This Tuesday, of course, is New Year’s Eve, and that song, as you may have guessed, is Auld Lang Syne. Written in Scottish by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to music in 1799 (so 225 years ago), Auld Lang Syne was made famous in the 1920s, so it has been a strong New Year’s tradition for all of our lifetimes. It is a song about reminiscing over old friendships, good times together, and longing for those good times; it is a song that begs us to look back at the goodness in our past and to toast to it. No song is more fitting for the end of the calendar year.
In our home, we have spent the last week navigating new traditions, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. My family loved the Christmas Eve service here this year, especially the candles at the end, and we loved pajamas at church on Christmas morning. We collectively did not love the exhaustion dad felt on the afternoon of Christmas Day. We’ll figure that all out, maybe by assembling and wrapping gifts a little further in advance next year. My brother’s family visited from Chicago on Friday and Saturday, and that too was great; maybe next year we’ll visit them? Some of our people are celebrating their own traditions this morning, out of town for family Christmas, or using this week as their marker for their time to get someplace warm for a few weeks. We even have a dance here on Tuesday night, I’m told, and South Haven drops beach balls on people gathered on Phoenix Street at midnight. We’ll definitely be attending the latter.
But the one tradition our little family has seemed to keep each year on New Year’s Eve is to pause and look back at the previous year, making a list of our favorite moments from each month. Then, Abbey and Lily (and probably this year both Nora and Jane will join in), they sketch those moments. Now this is nothing major or complicated, it’s usually done on one big piece of paper, but we really enjoy living out the message of Auld Lang Syne, looking back on good times, appreciating them from a distance. Often, we cannot find the beauty in something while it’s happening, we need perspective, time, to recognize the depth and importance of what is really going on. And with the coming of a new year, it’s always good to take some time to reflect, to bring old times to mind.
That, friends, is my introduction and my segue into this wild first chapter of the gospel of John this week. On both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we were met with a simple and straightforward narrative of the birth of Christ, with shepherds and angels and manger scenes. Today, on the first Sunday of Christmas, we are met with one of the most beautiful and mystical pieces of poetry in the entire Bible. Several biblical scholars and commentators make it a point in their commentaries that this is a passage to spend plenty of time in meditation over, this is not one to try to explain in a ten-minute sermon, this is not a passage to take lightly, this is not one to ignore. There’s simply too much in these eighteen verses for a preacher to cover in one sermon, let alone a sermon written over a half a week full of family traditions and multiple Christmas services. I could spend the next month diving into it, though, and I’d barely scratch its surface. So, I encourage you to take this passage home this week, to read John 1:1-18 again at least once before next Sunday, to spend some time with it, to let this text speak to you.
For what may be obvious reasons, I’m always drawn to the “man sent from God whose name was John” piece. (Ha.) I’ve referenced this verse in sermons before, but this John referred to here, John the Baptist, not himself being the light but serving as “a witness to testify to the light,” well, that really resonates for me.
During the Christmas season though, nearly all of this has special and significant meaning. The writer of this gospel, St. John, is traditionally believed to be John the Apostle, though recently, scholars have begun to disagree on that. What is almost universally agreed upon (though scholars do disagree about everything) is that this gospel was written last of the four. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels, called such because they are similar in structure, content, and wording. But John is arranged a bit differently, with a different purpose, a bit more theological in its description of Jesus’s life, interpreting events a bit more than the other gospels do. As it says in John chapter 20, “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
John, then, writes last; he writes in retrospection of what has happened in Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, and he writes about it so that you may believe and have life.
This first verse of the gospel passage today clearly mirrors the creation story in the book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” ... now, it’s “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That verse alone has birthed countless sermons and books of biblical commentary. John does not begin with Mary and Joseph and eight-pound, six-ounce baby Jesus, no crying he makes, but with telling his readers that there is now a whole new creation narrative, a new way of understanding the world, and it starts with understanding that the Word was there with God at the beginning, was part of the creation of the world, was the light itself, shining in the darkness, and then that Word became flesh and lived among us. It’s a mind-blowing assertion. It’s a world-changing understanding, one not found in other religions or spiritualities, that the very creator God came to be with us as a man.
The end of this passage contains another dozen sermons, including one message that I particularly like: No one has ever seen God, but we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth, come through Jesus Christ. Moses received the law, yes, but now, now we have received a person. We might not understand everything about God (and if we say we do, we’re wrong), but we have seen Jesus. We do have these accounts about how he lived, about abundant love, about sacrifice, about this upside-down kingdom of God, and these accounts are full of grace and truth. Let’s live like that. Jesus makes God known. Thanks to Christmas, we have God incarnate on earth, unbelievable glory among us.
As I’ve said, there is plenty for me to talk about in these eighteen verses this morning, but I want to instead leave you with the simple opportunity for the text to speak to you. There’s a lot here, and there are countless sermons, articles, and books you could read about it. But this is not a passage to explain away, to dissect, to try to use as a history or science textbook to explain the mysteries of this life, of our God. It is a mystical account, a poem, one worthy of reflection, one written by a follower of the Way who was able to look back on the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and put words to it, words that are still living and powerful for billions of Christians two thousand years later.
Read it. Sit with it. Pray about it. Then read it again.
This week, I hope you will take some time, like many around the world do in their own annual traditions and like our family does around our dinner table, to bring to mind your year in review, your 2024, to toast to the beautiful moments of your life that might not have seemed as significant in their time, to appreciate those big moments that you will remember for years to come. And, I also hope you will take some time to reflect, as John does here, on the life of Christ, to wonder what it means that this Jesus we celebrate at Christmas time was God’s own son, born into this world to be with us. There is great beauty in this season, in this story, in this particular poem that begins John’s gospel; may we all find time to rejoice in the mystical beauty of the Word made flesh. Amen.
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