December 17, 2023
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, 1 Thess. 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28
Rev. Chip Roland
There’s a certain type of forgetting that comes with familiarity. Water, for example. We might intellectually understand the preciousness and importance of water. But, with it surrounding us at all times and readily available, do we really remember this in the depth of our hearts? Now be a boy scout and forget to bring a canteen on a five-mile hike at Starved Rock in the height of summer. Suddenly you remember what water is to the depths of your soul. Speaking from experience.
This applies to things we hear too. It’s possible to forget the importance of things because we hear them too much and they become rote. There’s a wisdom and insight to hearing things for the first time when it’s new, fresh, breaking into our reality at that moment. “I love you” might be one. Perhaps even “God loves you”. When declaration becomes doctrine something is lost. I think Christmas is like that. Centuries of telling a story over and over again until its wheels make deep enough grooves in our neural pathways that we forget it is absolutely bananas! Spiritual dynamite! theological jet fuel! John’s gospel opens by asserting that the Logos was in the beginning, that it was with God and was God. Everything came into being through it, life that was light blossomed through it and it shone in the primordial darkness of the new universe. That is the light that John the Baptist came to testify to.
The Priests and the Levites struggled in their questioning of John because what John was testifying to didn’t quite fit their preexisting models. John is not a prophet though he uses the words of Isaiah 40 to share what he is. Even the politically loaded word “Messiah” likely means something very different to John’s questioners than what Jesus is.
In this scene, somewhere in plain sight is Jesus the Christ. They do not know him. Notwithstanding his foretelling or his existence past the beginning, what is happening within and through him is new.
The Logos, the Word became flesh. Let’s dwell on that for a minute. The Word became flesh. Christ didn’t merely take on the appearance of flesh. It wasn’t a collective hallucination of flesh. God took on the totality of the human condition in all its particularities and vulnerabilities. God wasn’t born in the halls of power, the palaces of the mighty, but cold in a manger because the inn had no room. In solidarity with all who do not know certainty, security, warmth.
Isaiah uses the language of the jubilee year when debt is forgiven and property is returned to proclaim a return to Judah for those in exile. Jesus the Christ, the light of the universe, the Word who is God uses parts of this passage of Isaiah with others to characterize what is coming into the world in and through him. His focus in breaking into human history is on us in our most poor, oppressed, and vulnerable. God came to be with you in your broken heart, your grief. In a world that too often expects the powerful to ignore the needs of the powerless, the most conceivably High dwells with us in our wounds. A God who bears His scars. A God who understands.
Paul calls the Thessalonian church to rejoice always. We light the candle of Joy this week. Joy is more than happiness or satisfaction. It’s perhaps less of a feeling and more of a state of being. Being anchored in a truth that sustains us, nourishes us, and compels us in its power to spread it to the whole world, in the way we move through the world. What should our joy be in? This Christmas, try hearing the story as though it were the first time. Before decorations and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, legions of claymation snowmen and elves. Allow yourselves to be surprised, shocked, maybe even scandalized by the Word that became flesh for you.
© Rev. Chip Roland, 2023, All Rights Reserved
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“Why am I a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church? Two words keep floating up in a rather persistent way – “home” and “family” – and I realized that it is an inescapable fact that is what this church means to me. During my 40 years here, so many life events have happened and Westminster has been there for me through all those times – good and bad. It has been my home and family. They say “home is where the heart is” and I’ve found the heart of Westminster to be as open and warm as a family’s!”