Christmas 1
John 1:1-18

Preached on December 31, 2017 at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, NJ.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Christmas is one of the primary feasts in our church life, and it lasts twelve whole days.  I love that beautiful Christmas story we hear: It’s the story of, as we hear in John’s gospel today, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. Mary and Joseph journeyed all the way to Bethlehem to welcome the Christ Child in a barn, because that’s all our God needed, even with the same frail human flesh we have.  This is Jesus Christ: the Light of the World, who doesn’t need anything more than a humble space in our hearts to outshine the darkness of our world, even on these cold, winter nights.

Growing up, every few years my parents and I would go to visit my dad’s family in Mississippi for Christmas. I would always stay with my aunt, uncle, and cousins. When I was a teenager, they got a cat: Duke. Duke was a strawberry blonde tabby cat who liked to sneak out of the house and get in fights with other cats. He was, as many cats are, adorable, but he was also cool and aloof and neurotic…. And very proud. He did NOT like to be held. However, late at night, when we were all asleep, Duke would sneak up to someone for a visit. I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night from deep sleep to someone tapping me on the should. I’d been lying on my side and as soon as I rolled onto my back to see what was happening, the culprit, Duke, would hope onto my chest to demand attention. I’d pet him and he’d purr, only content to be so affectionate in the middle of the night, when he thought I might not be able to see or remember. For all of his tomcat pride and prowess, Duke needed to feel a loving hand on his back sometimes, just as much as each of us does.

As Christians and people of community, we already know that none of us exist in a vacuum…although all of us came from one.

Today’s gospel passage from the first chapter of John begins “In the beginning was the Word;” John speaks of Christ much as the Book of Genesis speaks of Creation. In the beginning, the earth was a formless void, and the first thing God created was light, separating light from darkness. As we’re reminded in the poetry of today’s gospel from John, God created light to shine in the darkness. God called that light – and everything else that God lovingly made (and sometimes perfected through evolution) – GOOD. What God creates is Good. What God creates is never lacking.  What God creates is always enough. Any voice that says otherwise is not God’s voice

What God creates always enough to outshine the darkness. And God created this whole beautiful world, and then decided that this world needed each and every one of us. Because the Word was God; these four words from John’s gospel today remind us that God is part of all things God calls into being. God is part of all of us, just as we are reminded in our baptism that there is a piece of Christ in every human soul. The Word in every human heart. God’s love in every human skin.

The poetry of today’s gospel passage is beautiful, and at times confusing, but some things are made quite clear; “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That is what happened on Christmas. Love came down, and Christ was born of a woman. God came and was born as a baby. The infant Jesus needed to be held and fed and cleaned by human hands just as we did at our birth. Because part of humanity is that we need the love and care of others in order to grow and then, accordingly, we are called to sow this love into the world, too. Sometimes, just like Duke the cat, we all need a loving hand on our back to make it through the long cold night. Through the Light of the World, love shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

The Christmas moment where God took on frail human flesh is the incarnation – it’s central to our faith. Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension – aka the Easter promise that ensures forgiveness of all our sins – first required our fully divine God to also be fully human: frail, beautiful, and lovingly-made, just like each and every one of us.

In my daily journeys throughout this world we live in, I am on the receiving a lot of messages about human bodies and a few more specific ones about my own. As a society, we’re quick to label certain people’s bodies as perfect (cough only God is perfect cough), even though images these same bodies are then airbrushed before they can be published. Even our standards of beauty don’t make sense. We’ve definitely got some work to do, and we are starting to do it. On a very large scale, we’re finally starting to have some much overdue conversations about appropriate ways to talk about and engage with each other about our human bodies: their shapes, sizes, genders, colors, ages. As a society, we’re taking steps, but it’s going to take some time.  And all the messages we get about our bodies not being “good enough” go directly against what we read in Genesis; where God called humanity into being and called us “good.” Both John’s Gospel and Genesis teach us the even in this darkness, the light shines. The light shines and the darkness does not overcome it.

In our baptism and confirmation, we all promise to seek and serve Christ in all people. All people includes humans who do things like cut us off in traffic or give us the stink eye or who offer unwanted commentary on our bodies. All people includes those who incite feelings of shame in us, and therefore, all people can include ourselves. Sometimes we forget what we’ve learned from God and what we’ve read in Genesis and John. Sometimes we’re tempted to look at our imperfect human hearts and imperfect human bodies and think one or the other is not “good enough”. But seeking and serving the Christ in all people includes the Christ in ourselves, in our unique and imperfect human hearts and bodies, all shaped by God in Creation. All called “good” by God; any voice that says otherwise comes from somewhere else – somewhere dark. Lucky for us, John reminds us today that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

And the light we’re talking about – that’s the light of Christmas – That’s Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ: The Light of World, whose love will shine into every dark, sad, shame-filled corner of our hearts, if we’re open to letting Him in. Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human, took on frail human flesh to help us love better. God believed a human body could help us learn to love each other better, and nowhere in our gospels is there a single reference to any sort of divine height, weight, or six pack. The Christmas Story is about love, a God who loved the world so much that God took on flesh and dwelt among us in a human body just like ours. Following Christ means embodying the light of this love every day. It means loving our neighbors and ourselves just as God does: one character flaw, one laugh line, and one lovingly-crafted human heart at a time.