from this past Christmas season...
In the beginning…begins
Genesis.
“In the beginning
when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless voice and
darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the
face of the waters. Then God said…let there be light.”
In the beginning darkness
and shapelessness was all there was. If you have tried to navigate your steps
on our icy village before or after the sun is here to guide you, you have known
darkness and shapelessness. Expanses of
ice taunt our attempts to remain upright and proper individuals, we find
ourselves at the mercy of sanded paths that bring a slight shape to our
movements and the only hope we have of arriving without bruised bodies or egos.
And with the rise of the morning sun we exhale, knowing, because we can see it,
that God has once again said “Let there be light”.
From my beginning I have
been afraid of the dark. I knew this
shapelessness when I was a young mother; awake all night with a hungry or
crying infant. I sat in our little house in a run-down neighborhood in Tacoma
certain that all bad things would happen at night…except I never saw sight or
heard sound of another human during those hours. I was also certain I was the
only person in the world awake in those moments; feeling left behind or
profoundly separated from others. I would sit, in the darkness, more sure of my
solitude and darkness than anything I had previously known. It was a path toward despairing, except that
every morning, without fail the sun would rise and within that majestic moment
I was no longer in the dark…but so much more assuring, I was rejoining the rest
of my world in the proper awake hours of daylight. I was not alone in the dark anymore.
In the beginning…begins
John
“In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…What has come
into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
The unseeable Word was
there at the beginning. God created all
things from nothing. And there, in the
created dirt of the earth, in creation coming into being with a Word is our
connection to our Creator, the Divine Word that is life and light and for all
people.
Both Genesis and the
gospel of John are in poetic agreement of the Divine Word present in creation,
in the beginning. But it takes the
Christmas story and John’s telling of it to move the Divine Word from creation
to creature of creation. The Word was
with and was God…yes, and now this Christmas as has been since the first
Christmas two thousand and some odd years ago The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.
The gospel writer is
writing to a people who, actually, have not seen. His gospel account is thought to be the
latest of the four canonized gospel books, not much later than Matthew and
Luke, but late enough that most of the first disciples have died and much
controversy about the identity of Jesus has been stirred and wreaking havoc on
the Jewish and Roman communities. They had not seen the flesh with their own
eyes, faith was a new idea and possibility and too scary to be taken up with
ease.
The same is true for us,
of course. We have not seen. We were not
there at the creation, we were not in the stable or following the star and we
have not seen. We have not personally
witnessed this Word becoming flesh or living, or giving signs of his Divinity,
or dying and resurrecting…we have not seen.
Doubt and faith, belief and unbelief have always been a part of the
Christmas story of faith.
I have a hunch the gospel
writer knew this, that most people who would be hearing his story would not
have had an eye-witness experience.
John’s gospel is grand and poetic, which can also mean vague and
difficult to understand – yet, it is equal parts earth-bound and tied to the
Divine embodiment of Jesus. With the mystery and opposition of light and
darkness we also have the flesh of God living in our midst…and the gospel
writer gives us John the Baptist who, we are told, is testifying to the
light. A human, bound by mortality and
brokenness, skin and frailty is the one pointing to, teaching about, and
experiencing the light of Christ.
John the Baptist cannot
eradicate the doubt and the unseeing, but in hearing another person testifying,
witnessing to or simply standing in the light – suddenly the light comes
closer.
As all Lutheran seminary
students, I did a unit of chaplaincy, which I have shared a few stories with
this community before. During my time of
visiting patients and sitting with families, primarily in the NeoNatal
Intensive Unit or high-risk pregnancy patients I struggled, mightily, with
never having the right words. Should I
be advocating, or listening, do I report what I’ve heard or bury it pastoral
confidentiality? And really, all these
questions were based on the real basic question of who the hell do I think I am
to offer an sort of comfort based on a faith I feel shaky at best about? My
scars were too bright, I was not good-enough or faithful-enough to be the light
they needed in the hospital.
My mentor, an older man
who had served the NICU unit for over twenty years told me that I was assigned
to his unit because of who I was. I was
the only member of my chaplaincy group who was a parent and I was a young woman
which balanced his older, male presence on the unit. I did not have to walk around as the
supremely wise mother of all…but my being a mother and my being broken and
fragile was enough. I began to lean into
his counsel…I would find a commonality and say things like “my baby had a full
head of hair just like yours” or “oh, I felt shaky after an all-night when my
girl was an infant too”. And these
simply phrases would bring us together, not that I knew all they were
experiencing, I did not. But I had been
in the neighborhood of this darkness and I could testify to the light. The greatest awakening I had during these six
months was visiting with a young women on the psychiatric ward. She was trying to escape her abusive
boyfriend through a bottle of pills and I sat and listened and listened and listened…she
was skeptical that this new stranger in her room had any clue of the things she
shared – sitting in arraignments, fearing in the night, trying to leave and
feeling bound to the one who hurts with some sort of invisible tie. I whispered that I knew all those things; I
am on the other side of where you are.
In my scarred flesh and my deep darkness I could testify to the light. It was the first time I saw my flesh-bound
experiences as one that God was all over, using, transforming, dwelling in and
bringing light.
The Word of God became
flesh, our same flesh and has known us and all we’ve been through and the great
gift of this flesh with flesh is grace upon grace.
"If the Word of God became flesh and dwelt
among us, that is, if the Word of God came out of the birth canal of a woman's
body, grew, ate, went to the bathroom, sometimes bathed, struggled against
demons, sweated, wept, exulted, transfigured, was physically violated and
rotted away in a tomb just before being gloriously resurrected, then the Bible
must have flesh on it. If a valley of dry bones can live again, then bones and
blood and bread and flesh and bodies should never be left behind when we are
trying to understand the grime and glory of Scripture. Any interpretation that
denounces the material, created order, including our own bodies, should be
suspect. From birth to death our bodies swell and shrink, are wet with milk,
and sweat, and urine and vomit and sex, and blood, and water and wounds that
fester and stink and are healed and saved and redeemed and die and are
resurrected. If you can't glory in or at least talk about these basic realities
in church while reading Scripture, then how can Scripture truly intersect with
or impact life? We might as well just go read a Jane Austen novel; though I
doubt we'll ever be transformed or made whole or saved by it."1
The gospel writer said
that “we have seen his glory” and it
is full of grace and truth. We do not
see as those first witnesses saw, but because they shared their stories and
shared the light and that light has continued to shine on and on and on through
people as scarred and broken as you and me…now we testify to the light.
I do not see the flesh of
the child born in the manger. But I see
your flesh, your earth-bound and broken life and I see the light of God shining
all over. When we whisper our stories, share our brokenness and confess the
darkness…God is there, bringing the light and we suddenly are transformed to
one who shares the light, too.
Not freed from our flesh,
but joined together with the one who took on flesh and lived and dwelled and a
spread a tent to stay awhile on this very earth…the shapeless earth of Genesis,
the shape of the Christ child, the Word made flesh among us now.
Thanks be to God for all
who testify to the light of life and to Jesus, the Word among us tonight. Amen.
1 Jaime
Clark-Soles, Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian
Believer (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
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