Second Sunday of Christmas

John 1:1-18

We don’t often hear this part of John’s gospel in our worship. The Revised Common Lectionary assigns the text to Christmas Day and to the Second Sunday of Christmas but, often by the second Sunday after Christmas, we have already entered Epiphany and moved on from the Christmas story.

This year the calendar fell differently and while at home, the Christmas lights and ornaments may be packed away, the presents opened and the feasts eaten, it is still Christmas in the Church. Tomorrow we will move on to the Feast of the Epiphany, but today, the Evangelist who wrote the fourth gospel has given us another Christmas story, one that comes without angels or shepherds, innkeepers or mangers. Instead, John tells us the story of how the Son of God came into the world this way:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. [i]

Written some sixty or more years after Jesus’ ministry, John’s gospel begins with “In the beginning” and everyone who is listening hears the first words of Genesis echoing through time:

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…”[ii]

Hearing the same words that we hear in the first book of the Torah and our Old Testament, we know that the Evangelist is not writing about something new, but about something very, very old.

In his Sermons on the Gospel of St. John (1537-40), Martin Luther wrote that this Word dwells in God’s divine heart from eternity and it was through Him that God resolved to create heaven and earth.[iii]

The wonder of the Word made flesh and the mystery of the incarnation is the foundation of our very creation: there is no life outside God.

As we begin this new year, can we resolve to live out this basic truth, and see where God indeed is with us?

Here in the Church we especially remember Christ is present with us in the sacraments. In these places the promise and command found in the Word are joined with an earthly element and we encounter Christ anew.

At the Font, we are given new life in Christ in the waters of baptism and receive the promises we are given, that we are made new and all the old has passed away. And Jesus tells us in Matthew 28, “… remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”[iv]

At the Table, Christ is present with us in bread and wine as he gives his body and blood for us, taking on all our sin and giving us all that is his, an inheritance that gives us the power to become children of God. St. Paul reminds us “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”[v]

This same Word enfleshed in Christ is with us in prayer, not only here in the sanctuary but also in our homes and workplaces, when we say, “Lord, teach us to pray.”[vi]

We say our prayers, trusting that God wipes away our tears when we cry out under the weight of sorrows and burdens that we carry,
rejoices with us when we praise God for the joys we have witnessed,
and accompanies us into the unknown when we name the mysteries that escape our understanding.

In First Peter, we hear, “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies…”[vii] The Word appears in our lives when we meet Jesus in the people around us: in those who teach and share their own experiences of God’s love with us; in those who pick up the phone, write a card or send a text to tell us we are remembered; in those who share a meal and fellowship with us.

And finally the Word is present to us in the stranger. Jesus tells his disciples, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[viii] We are called to love. The outcast, in the prisoner, in the refugee. The person who doesn’t look like us, speak our language or share our political bent. And even our enemy.

And as we begin this new year, “the Word with us” is very good news. The headlines are full of bad news: wildfires and evacuations in Australia, new deployments of soldiers to the Middle East, and attacks on both Christian and Jewish communities here in the U.S., but even, and maybe especially, against the shadows that those stories cast the Word comes to us assuring us that:

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

There is no place and no one outside of God’s reach, beyond God’s love.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.

[i] John 1:1-3
[ii] Genesis 1:1
[iii] Sermons on the Gospel of St. John (1537-40), LW 22, 7-9.
[iv] Matthew 28:20
[v] 1 Corinthians 10:17
[vi] Luke 11:1
[vii] 1 Peter 4:10-11
[viii] Matthew 22:37-39