Advent/Christmas
Yes, it’s only mid-November, and yes, I’m not one who tolerates well a Christmas focus before Advent and Thanksgiving. Consider this article like the choir that needs to start on its Christmas music preparation several weeks in advance. We wanted to get this to you by mid-November in case some of you might want to include it in your December church newsletters. I also wanted to comment on both Luke’s and John’s Christmas narratives since many of our preachers will use Luke on Christmas Eve, only to have to turn right back around and reflect on John a few hours later for Christmas Day Sunday worship.
Almost every congregation reads the familiar Christmas story from Luke’s gospel on Christmas Eve. I can’t ever hear that without remembering as a child watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Linus, blanket and all, cuts through everyone’s commercial preparations with his moving recitation of the Lukan Christmas narrative, ending with, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” Well, yes and no. That’s Luke’s version. John approaches it in an altogether different way.
“In the beginning was the Word.” (Greek: Logos = logic, idea, concept) John, a generation later than Luke, makes less of a historical and more of a theological claim. Preexistent to the creation itself is this Logos, this power through which God “spoke” the world into being in Genesis. The Word. In verse 14, John makes an astounding claim. This Logos, this Word that called into being out of nothingness all that is, became a person, took on flesh, literally “pitched his tent among us.” That is to say, he wasn’t just visiting. He came to stay. This Word-become-flesh was, and is, of course, Jesus.
This is messy business, scandalous business. To take on flesh and to be born into our world is to take on our joys, fears, and sorrows, our life and our death, our hurt and our hope, our limitations of time and space. Why would the great God and creator of the cosmos do such a thing? You can’t read John’s Gospel piecemeal. It all goes together. It’s all about “abiding” (dwelt) and love. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son so that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” God self-limits, becomes incarnate, risks it all, for the sake of love. For you, the beloved.
As you come forward to receive the blessed sacrament this Christmas season, ponder not just the oft- sentimentalized Lukan baby but John’s cosmic incarnation. The Word became, becomes, enfleshed. Body. Blood. Given for you. Shed for you. Is it mere coincidence that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Hebrew Beth Lechem, “House of Bread”? Ponder that what we are claiming is that the entire power and vehicle which creates the universe—the presence of the Christ—becomes flesh for us regularly, is placed in our hands or on our tongue, digested in our inner parts, courses through our bloodstream. In Christ, the creative Logos made flesh, we are, like Mary in bearing the Christ, being re-created from the inside out. Like Mary, ponder…ponder. The world and we are continually and forever changed.
A most blessed Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas to you and yours!
