John 1:1-14
December 26, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
On this day after Christmas, I am delighted to see you here. The choir is here because they sang. I’m here because I am preaching. You might be here to round out your holiday weekend in the Bay Area. But I would like to believe that perhaps the reason why you are here is because you are still seeking to hear more about Christmas. You haven’t had enough singing of Christmas carols. You want to hear the miracle of God born as a baby and lived among us.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What does this mean?
When I was growing up and quite small in stature, I was often taunted and ridiculed. In the play yard, I would yell back at the bullies, “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words never do!” These hurtful words are supposed to roll off our backs like water off a duck at the Boston Commons.
But in our Scripture lesson for today, the prologue of the Gospel of John, we hear about the Word. This Word is not to be discounted as unimportant that we should just let it roll off our backs. As we often say before reading the lesson, “The Word of God for the people of God,” means that what we are about to hear is from God.
John’s Gospel
Christmas is the beginning of the story of Jesus. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the story first begins with ordinary people—Mary and Joseph, a peasant couple is chosen to bear the Christ into the world.
In John’s Gospel, the story begins with John the Baptist, a “voice” crying in the wilderness. When asked, “Who are you?” John replies that he is a “voice.” In John’s Gospel, he has no body, no substance or enduring significance other than the sound of a voice, a voice crying in the wilderness “that all might believe” (1:7).
John is only interesting as a voice, a witness, someone who points toward the coming Christ. He is transparent like a pane of glass that you can see through witnessing to the One who comes after him, who is greater than he. As a witness, John is simply to testify to what he has seen and heard, no more. He must decrease as the One toward whom he points increases. His significance is not in himself but rather in the truth that he tells to those in the wilderness.
In John’s Gospel, we are told little about this man whose name was John—nothing of his parentage or his hometown—only that he was “sent from God.” In a way, that man is a parable for any of us who are attempting to be Christ’s disciples. We are here because we have been summoned and called by God. Every one of us has no credentials, no certification other than that we are all “sent from God.”
The Word
John’s Gospel says that Jesus is the Word who came down from heaven and dwelt among us. As the Word, the Christ is God’s self-communication, the major means of God establishing a communication connection between the divine and the human. God didn’t just say to the world, “I love you.” God’s great message of love became a human being who speaks.
The Eternal Word came to “tent” among us (that’s what the verb “dwelt” literally means in the Greek, “pitch his tent among us”), and his primary way of dwelling among us is as the Word (1:14). This is why we joyously sing praises to God this day—the first Sunday after Christmas!
Jesus is more than words can say, but never less than words. In Jesus, the words about God became God-in-the-flesh and dwelt among us as the Word.
Jesus is God’s Word to the world, God’s sermon to us, God’s Word to which all our words in all our sermons point. The Apostle Paul said, “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor. 4:5).
When we read John 1 today, did you hear an echo of the creation story in Genesis 1? God begins Creation with a word, “Let there be light.” As John’s Gospel said, “people love darkness rather than light,” God will overcome our love for darkness with the Word.
When Jesus comes into the world, John 1 says that it’s almost like Genesis 1 all over again. Creation continues. God will get what God wants and that is—God loves us so much that God is coming as a Savior to save us. The light shines in the darkness and nothing that we have ever done, even the worst of it, has been able to overcome the light. To those who receive the Word has been given the gift to “become children of God” (1:12).
The Incarnation, the Word made flesh is the true meaning of Christmas. It’s not the holiday shopping, the holiday parties and eating, not even the enjoyable and meaningful times we gather as family and friends over the holidays.
The Incarnation, the Word made flesh, is the supreme example of God’s determination, from the beginning of the world, to be with us, no matter what it takes. Jesus the Christ is fully human and fully divine, without any subordination or mixing of either the human or the divine. Jesus was not just “the greatest person who ever lived,” not just “a great moral example,” not just a wonderfully insightful wisdom teacher. He was more. He was God in the flesh.
Jesus is God’s supreme act of self-communication. God didn’t just say, “I love you.” God became flesh and moved in with us as Jesus. God came over to your house and my house and into all the homes in the world to have a sleepover and he never left. The Word in Jesus Christ is God talking to us.
Or as it is said in Hebrews, “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in the last days has spoken to us by the Son (Heb. 1:1-2).
Preaching the Word
One of the privileges of being an ordained minister is to preach the Word of God. Behind all the pulpits in the world stand men and women who believe that they have been sent from God with only one function: to “witness.”
A witness is someone who testifies, who simply tells what he or she has seen and heard. The witness is not to embellish or exaggerate. The witness has little significance in and of himself. His significance is in what the witness has to say about what the witness has seen or heard. The witness shares an honest account of what the witness knows to be true.
Two weeks ago, 6 people were witnesses who told what they saw and heard about how Jesus Christ is making a difference in their lives. And they stood behind this pulpit to do so.
Whenever I have the privilege to read the “Word of God for the people of God” or to give witness to the Word by delivering a sermon, I am, on behalf of God, proclaiming the Word and Christ himself is walking among us in this congregation as the word.
Preaching is God’s speech. Preaching is God’s chosen means of self-revelation. If a sermon works, it does so as a gracious gift of God, a miracle no less than those performed by Jesus himself. Some of you here have experienced that miracle in worship. I know I have when I get to witness God’s revelation among us.
John the Baptist’s pulpit wasn’t anything like this one up here. John the Baptist’s pulpit was in the wilderness where there were wild things, no straight or clear highways, away from the comfortable and dry sanctuary of worship and establishment.
John’s pulpit in the wilderness reminds us that there are some words that are too good to be false, too lively to be fully contained in a church sanctuary. To be sure, the Word of God is to be heard at these confined, established, sacred sites. But the Word, the living Incarnate Word, cannot be contained. It reaches out, pushes out, even into the wilderness. The Word is greater than the beautiful religious platforms and pulpits that are built to present it.
The Word goes out to those who need it most, out to the wilderness.
In a local church, the long Advent wait for Jesus was finally over. They gathered in the church on Christmas Eve to joyously welcome Jesus. A great crowd gathered, far more people than they normally have.
But they waited and waited and no Jesus showed up.
On Monday, at the church’s soup kitchen, all of the homeless people were chatting excitedly. Everybody was talking about the same thing.
“What did you think of him?” one of them asked another.
“He wasn’t as tall as I thought he might be,” said another. “And he had a great sense of humor. I hadn’t expected that in him.”
On and on they talked, sharing impressions, discussing what they had heard from him.
“Who are you talking about?” the pastor asked. “Who was it who visited with you out under the underpass yesterday?”
“Why, Jesus,” they all responded with one voice. “If you hadn’t been at church, you would have seen him there with us. He’s got this thing for the maimed, the blind, the lame, and the homeless.”
On this first day after Christmas, we are sent from God to go into the wildernesses of our times to proclaim the Word! When we bear witness to the Incarnation, God himself becomes human and dwelt among us, we proclaim the Word who is the heart of the Christian experience.
So here I stand on this Sunday of Sundays to announce to you good news: God is with us, God speaks to us, not as words, but as the Word. And the word this day is good.
Merry Christmas. The light shines in the darkness. The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us. Listen to the Word because God himself is talking with you. Hallelujah!
Let us pray.
Dear Lord Jesus Christ, in your Incarnation you united all things, things in heaven and things on earth, things above and things below. In your person, God in the flesh and work in the world, you united God and humanity.
Help us to receive you as the Word when you come to us. Help us to welcome your embrace, to awaken to your intrusion into our lives, and then to courageously follow you throughout our lives, not only on Christmas but every day, now and forever. Amen.