On
this, the 10th day of Christmas and the second Sunday of Christmas
—As the secular world has already
moved passed Christmas and moved on to New Years and Bowl Games,
I would like to hold us in the proper
season, at least for two more days.
I’d like to tell you again the
Christmas story.
Not the Shepherds and Angels of Luke,
or the Holy Family meeting the Magi as in Matthew
—but instead, I’d like to tell you a
story that will get to the center of the Christmas Story in the Gospel of John
—that will help us reflect on the
Gospel, the Good News, according John, which is this, “No one has ever seen
God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made
him known.”
So
today I would like to tell you the story of another man named John, in order to
illuminate the Gospel Writer’s Christmas story…. I would like to tell you about
John’s Christmas Story.
Prayer
John
had lived his life simple enough, worked hard, went to Church, loved his wife,
raised his kids right—in many ways he was like a lot of you.
Then,
during the Christmas Season, tragedy struck, his youngest daughter died.
A
parent should never have to bury a child.
Yet
that’s what John had to do. Life no longer seemed so simple, especially his
faith life.
He
wanted to know where God was—he demanded it of God. He needed to call God to
account for his child’s death, …but also just needed to know God was there. For the sake of his sanity he needed the
invisible God to be visible.
He
started off by going to Church—after all it’s the body of Christ, right? God
should be there.
And
people were kind to John and his family there, they were very sorry for his
loss
… but after a month or so they kinda
stopped being there for him.
For
that matter, some people even said unintentionally dumb things about his
deceased daughter.
He
realized he was as likely to find Judas
in the Church as find God
—and this should NOT have surprised
him, after all one of the signs of the True Church is that the False Church is
found within it—that it’s filled with sinners (Augustine).
Being
a Good Lutheran, John remembered his Pastor going on one Sunday about Sola Scriptura, Word Alone, so he rushed
to his Bible to find the Invisible God there
—of course he’d read it some, and
listened to sermons for years—but when he dove deeply into it…. That was
another story… wow.
He’d
once heard from an Evangelical friend that Bible stood for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,”
so he thought maybe the rules in it would give him answers, point him to God
—but they were so strange, menstrual
cycles and mold,
head coverings and instructions about
things he’d never encountered.
For
that matter, the more he read the more he
found a very troubling world—brother killing brother, rape, incest, politics,
war, deeds of sale, and nation building, … a world no more holy than the one
John himself inhabited.
So
that’s where he looked next—in the natural world—he often heard people say they
found God in nature.
So he had his friend Tom drop him off
in the Pine Barrens for a week.
It all went to hell pretty quick, he
didn’t bring enough water, he got ticks, a Black Bear drug off some of his
food—he ended up hungrily coveting a Cougar’s catch when it killed and ate a
Raccoon in front of him.
By the time Tom picked him back up,
John had realized he wasn’t going to find God in Nature as it actually is
(not some Disney movie, trail, or wildlife exhibit)—red tooth and claw,
scarcity and cold—it was clear Creation and Creator were two different things.
So,
in desperation he sought a direct experience of God—he did so with Prayer,
Fasting, and Extended Silence, and eventually he took that age-old short cut to
the mystical, psychotropic substance abuse
—and by the end of that Spiritual Binge he found that Luther
was right:
there was a reason Moses wore the
veil,
a reason Jacob limped,
and a reason for Ezekiel’s mad
visions
—the most you can directly experience
of God is God’s backside, and that’s
only if you get lucky.
And
with that he limped back to the Bible, just to look for God one more time. Just
to see if there was some shred of good news
—and he fell upon the Gospel According to John.
He
fell upon that cosmic poem that
begins the Good News in that gospel
—he was struck by the peculiar particularity proclaimed there.
This Child of God Jesus, clinging to
the Father’s bosom—as close to God as a heartbeat or a thought,
this one who is God’s Word of
Creation and God’s plan for Creation,
This one who is light in the
darkness, this one who is truth and grace, this one who is life itself.
This
one who is the invisible God made visible, took
flesh and lived among us
—lived for John, for John’s daughter,
for each and every one of us.
Jesus
the Christ came among us—God made known to us, God’s intimacy with us
—the fact that we are adopted
Children of God, is known to us in his only Son Jesus!
In that particular reality shared
with us and told to us by John.
That’s John’s Gospel,
that’s John’s Christmas Story.
All of a sudden the Church, that poor
vessel unable to hold John’s sorrow, is made whole with the particular words of
God spoken by Jesus to the Church in John’s Gospel—“that you may be born from
above” “that all may be one”—“that you love one another as I love you.”
All of a sudden the Word of God found
in scripture, becomes a witness to the Word of God who is Jesus Christ—no
longer is it Rules, or a record of troubled times,
but instead a love letter by a God
who is in the muck,
in the trenches,
at the bedside,
in the flesh, with us.
All of a sudden nature hears the
calling of Christ—the storm is stilled and Jesus walks upon it’s back as if on
dry land, creation’s endemic scarcity—entropy—is sated by Christ’s feeding of
the five thousand there on that green grass.
All of a sudden the direct experience
of God—the Invisible made Visible—was right there—in Cana Wedding Joy,
in Christ’s weeping for dear Lazarus,
in his washing of his disciple’s
feet…
at that Last Supper in fact, Jesus
sits intimately with the beloved
disciple—“close to his heart” just as the Father is to the Son
—so to are we, through Jesus Christ
our Lord, to God.
We are close to his heart, because
the Invisible God is made Visible to us through Jesus Christ.
“No
one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known.”
