PRAYER
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in our hearts, and our reflecting;
God be in our lives, and in our doing.
Through Jesus, our light and our hope. Amen.

Christmas ended suddenly this year.

No sooner had we paused from singing about shepherds and angels and a Child laid in a manger, than the news began to filter in of disaster in southeast Asia.

As if to emphasize the point, our lectionary for that day, Sunday, December 26, offered us Matthew’s chilling story of the rage of Herod, that strange sequel to the news of Jesus’ birth in which the ruler of Judea gets word of a child born to be king and orders the deaths of all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two, just in case. Another tale of human disaster— this one originating in the human heart instead of the ocean floor.

A silent tectonic shift. A baby born in a stable. And then terror and destruction: families torn asunder, joy giving way to bitter mourning. We might be excused for wondering whether the good news of Christmas can really stand up to the agonizing realities of life on earth.

And in the face of all this, what does our lectionary offer us this morning? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Excuse me, but—who cares? The world is hurting, here. We don’t need a theological treatise. We need God to come down here right now and deal with this mess. Wars around the globe, disease, economic uncertainty—catastrophe in the Indian ocean unfolding faster than relief efforts can keep up. Against such a backdrop, the words of John can seem discouragingly remote and disconnected, the reflections of a theologian locked in his study, blinds drawn.

But don’t be too sure.

To begin with, the prologue of the gospel of John is not a theological treatise, but a hymn—a very early hymn, probably as ancient as any Christian record preserved. John chose it to begin his gospel because it was close to the hearts of the people he served—and because it summed up, in poetic and devotional form, the story he was about to tell: the story of how God crossed every barrier and came to dwell with people; how, as Jesus, God went unrecognized, yet gave himself in steadfast love even to those who rejected him. The story of a love that existed long before creation, which death itself could not extinguish, and which nothing will ever take away.

All of this could be summed up in one little word of this beautiful old hymn: the word WITH.

“And the Word was with God.”

Who the Word is, the hymn doesn’t say. Which is striking, because you know, the 42 books of the Bible that precede the gospel of John don’t seem to have gotten the memo about the Word’s existence. Or if they did, they forgot to mention it.

The hymn doesn’t attempt to explain who or what the Word is, or how it came to be. Like God, the Word simply IS. But it IS in a way that quietly and completely transforms the Bible’s understanding of who God is. “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.” From the existence of the Word to the Word’s existence alongside God, to the Word’s relationship with God: a relationship so close, our hymn tells us, that the Word was itself God in some intimate sense beyond our comprehension.

Distinct, yet intimately one. That is the beginning of John’s story, the good news of salvation. What is that word WITH saying? It’s saying that WITH is fundamentally who God is, in God’s own nature, “from the beginning.” Even before the Word brought creation into being, Existence itself was a relationship of communion, God with God.

Add the Holy Spirit, and presto: You’ve got the Trinity. God with God with God, one God from the beginning, world without end. All love, all the time.

I’m half tempted to sit down right now and just leave it at that. But this unsettling insight is only the beginning of the hymn, and of the story that will follow. This is a gospel we’re dealing with, after all, not a systematic theology textbook. John and his community are in the business of proclaiming good news, and if their way of going about that is a little harder to stage in the form of a Christmas pageant than the stuff about angels bringing tidings of great joy, well, it’s their turn to tell the story, and they can tell it the way they want to.

And so from communion between God and the Word, somewhere “out there” in some indeterminate divine sphere, our hymn moves directly to communion between the Word and creation. It tells us that all things, indeed life itself, came into being in and through the Word. Remember how, in the story of creation in Genesis, God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence? Light, sun, and stars; earth, water, plants, creatures… All came into being, our hymn declares, in the lifegiving Word. That life in the Word is light and hope for all people, for whatever else might happen, the light is for us, and it can never be destroyed. It shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Or as the Greek literally says, “pitched his tent” in our midst.

It’s said so quietly and matter-of-factly. And it’s so utterly revolutionary.

The Word, the creator of all things, becomes a human creature himself, heart and mind, body and soul. So close to God that John calls him God the only Son, the Word—the source of light and life—enters his own creation as a part of creation. It’s against all the rules. It crosses all the boundaries. It defies all definitions. But according to this early Christian hymn, it’s what happened.

With God becomes with us. As in Matthew’s gospel, where Christ is called Emmanuel: God with us. Transcendent light joins with mortal flesh.

This impossible and, to many, outrageous paradox is the scandal at the heart of Christianity. Isn’t the whole point of God, after all, that God is transcendent? Immortal, invisible, incorruptible, utterly “other”? Otherness, in traditional terms, is the very definition of God. Gazing down on us from infinite heights, observing our deeds and even our thoughts with compassion or disappointment, occasionally intervening—this is God the way God has generally been understood, and there’s good Biblical warrant for seeing God that way. The claim that God had come as a human being was, for many of John’s contemporaries, a ludicrous notion at best; at worst, utter blasphemy.

That paradox, that blasphemy, if you will, is what our hymn was composed to celebrate—wonderingly, joyfully, triumphantly. “And the Word was made flesh and lived among us.” Long before theologians began trying to sort out what was meant by this strange statement, worshiping Christians were daring to sing out loud of an embrace wider than any division, a healing deeper than any hurt, a reconciling love greater than our worst conflict. Together they proclaimed a God who will not be confined by human categories: a God who is free to love, and to love extravagantly. If God is unlike us, the hymn suggests, that unlikeness consists not so much in God’s remove from human affairs as in the depth of God’s welcome: a welcome that delights in difference, that goes out to welcome the stranger, that reaches across barriers and divisions to create community not in spite of diversity but precisely through and in the midst of diversity.

To do this, our hymn declares boldly, God was willing to surrender all the comforts of home, all the attributes of divinity, and come as close to us as it was possible to come. When the Word came and pitched his tent among us, it was not as one of the great ones of this world but as a carpenter’s son, without wealth or family connections or power or anything to insulate him from the realities of human life. With nothing to offer, indeed, but the gift of his own self, overflowing with the love he had shared with God from the beginning. This is what he came to give, and to receive back from us. This is what he came to give us, so that we might share it with one another.

The rest of the story you know.

Our hymn states it compactly: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

To put it mildly.

And yet, our hymn reminds us, some did accept him. Some did get a glimmer of the light he had come to share. The light we are here to celebrate this morning. That light which shines in the darkness, which the darkness has not overcome.

We are here to try to learn what it means to live in that light and that welcome of God’s love. Because let’s not have any illusions: The way of welcome is far from our hearts.

I’m not talking about the friendly, “Hi, how are you, what do you do for a living” kind of welcome. If Jesus had come looking for that kind of reception, I doubt anyone would have gone to the trouble of nailing him to a cross.

But Jesus was asking for more from us. He was asking for open hearts and open minds. For a willingness to listen deeply and engage the questions he was raising. He came with prophetic challenge and the offer of a new and demanding way of love based not on family ties, social custom, or self-interest but on humility, compassion, and gratitude to God. His very presence was a threat to the established order, and to every heart that had attached itself to that order. THAT is why they killed him.

UCC churches have been thinking a lot about welcome these days. We’ve been asking ourselves if it is true, as our ad campaign claims, that we welcome “all.” What difference does it make, we’ve wondered, if we let someone in our doors, but don’t stop to listen deeply to their story, or invite them into our circle of friends, or encourage their full participation in the life and mission of the church? How deep does welcome go, if it cannot take the risk of inviting in new ideas and new ways of imagining our common life? We may not post bouncers at the doors of our church, but the bouncers at the doors of our hearts—that may be another matter.

The question is about more than church survival. It’s about welcoming Christ into our lives, and allowing him to transform us, from the inside out. It’s about becoming children of God: people of flesh and light, people who are not afraid to cross barriers, embrace strangers, seek healing for the world’s hurts, forgive and ask forgiveness, practice reconciliation, welcome diversity, and so far as in us lies, to live the love Christ brought us from the very heart of God, regardless of the cost.

Christian love is not just about giving. It is also about receiving. Receiving the imprint of the other on our hearts.

Maybe you have been haunted, as I have this long week past, by the pictures of devastation half a world away. Smashed palm trees, debris-strewn beaches, an endless succession of distraught faces, anguish caught on camera to help strangers like me in our struggle to comprehend the human scale of what has taken place. Maybe you have written a check or donated online to help people you have never met in lands you may never set foot in—hoping and praying that the distance between this world and that can somehow be bridged, that love can cross the gap, wounds can be healed, and communities of concern created that pay no heed to the boundaries of nation, ethnicity, or culture.

Maybe you have been angered, as I have, by a press that is more interested in the fate of European and North American tourists than that of southeast Asians. Or by the halting response of our own government, which so far has promised to send aid to the tune of $350,000,000—which sounds extraordinarily generous, until you consider that $350,000,000 is what our nation is currently spending every two days on the war in Iraq.

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

And still the light shines in the darkness, and in every corner of our world.

Still the darkness has not overcome it. God is with us.

Friends, we are here to welcome God into our world, to embrace the light with all that we are—creatures of frail and fearful flesh, beloved of God with a depth and steadfastness we can only wonder at. Let us open our hearts to receive that light and that love, understanding full well that open hearts are vulnerable hearts. Who knows what gifts and challenges may come through those open doors, once we ask those bouncers to “step aside, please”? “For from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”

This is the good news of Jesus Christ.

Prayer
Holy and eternal Word,
God with God, and God with us,
teach us what it means to welcome you,
heart and mind, soul and strength.
Make us boundary crossers, risk takers,
ministers of reconciliation,
so that the light of love
which you brought into the world
may shine ever more brightly.
Open the doors of our hearts
and the doors of our church,
that the stranger may enter and find a home.
In your name we pray. Amen.