Christmas Day Year A December 25, 2016
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
Isaiah 52: 7-10 + Hebrews 1: 1-4 + John 1: 1-14
Grace and peace to you, on this day, as we gather together to celebrate the birth of the Christ child. Amen.
When my children were young they got to open a shared gift every Christmas Eve. It was always a Christmas book, and after they opened it we would snuggle in together and read that year’s book. As the collection grew, those books were read throughout the season of Advent, each one spinning out the story of Jesus coming into the world in many and varied ways.
It is in a similar fashion that God comes to dwell with us. The writer of Hebrews observes that up until this point, up until this day of Christ’s coming, God has chosen to speak to the people through prophetic voices. Voices charged with carrying the stories of God and God’s people into the world. Each prophet had their own unique story to tell…their own understanding of God….their own vision or version of what God is up to in the world.
But when God took on flesh….when God was born of Mary and walked and talked and taught and worshiped and loved right here on earth….that was the ultimate plot twist in the greatest story ever told.
Any author will tell you that the key to a compelling story is to have forces that work against one another. These opposites….these binaries put into place by tellers of tales keep us riveted….they keep us turning the page long after we’d intended to put the book down. And of course, the most common story line is of good versus evil. The “good guys” against the “bad guys.”
In movies you can tell who’s who by the change in the music and lighting when people come onto the scene. The so called good characters are washed in golden light and glow a little bit and the music with them is light as well. But shadows and darkness surround the evil and the strains of the music are foreboding.
In westerns you can tell the difference between the good and the bad folks by the color of their cowboy hats….the good guys always wear the light color and the bad guys always wear the dark colors.
If only real life came with movie cues.
But it doesn’t and so we are left on our own to figure things out. And perhaps you’ve noticed as I have that we do not always agree these days on what is good and what is evil or on who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
Of course, this is actually nothing new. Not at all. Writings of both fiction and non fiction from antiquity until now are filled with pointing fingers at the bad guys….at painting them as filled with evil intent and a threat to our very way of life. They must be eliminated! We must keep them out! And the plan for doing so ranges from building walls to asking God to kill them….which was exactly what the Psalmist does over and over again.
The story of good versus evil is an old old story. But it is not the old old story.
The story of Jesus and his love, born into the world on this day, begins, not just with any words, but with the WORD. The Divine Word. Word with flesh and bones and sinews and breath moving through it. Word walking around on beaches and Word weeping in gardens. The story of God is literally fleshed out in Jesus.
And in this story, especially in this passage from John’s Gospel, it is tempting to find yet another binary: this time of light and darkness. Because we are people who yearn for light. But if we aren’t careful, we might miss the truth, hidden subtly within this chapter of the story. God is not absent in the darkness. Before the light of Christ came into the world, God was still at work in the darkness. God is in the darkness of the night sky. God is in the darkness when an angel comes to Joseph to tell him of the child to be born. God is in the darkness of Mary’s womb. The angels come and sing their refrains in the darkness of the night sky.
Martin Luther said that the world is full of God and God fills all. There is no place where God is not. And because God is love, that is good news indeed.
Beloved of God, we are both/and people living in an either/or world. The world would have us believe that it’s all about us against them for any multitude of reasons. Wars large and small have been fought for this very cause. But what if, what if, the coming of Christ means that night and day are both alike? That darkness and light are both full of God who has come among us and who has not and who will not every forsake us?
That is a story worth sharing and that is a story worth celebrating.
Thanks be to God…and let the church say…Amen.
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