God is Someone
A Sermon for Christmas
John 1.1-14
“What has come into being in him was life…”
All life is the result of God’s Word spoken.
The Word of God is life-creating.
Life-sustaining.
Life-redeeming.
Life-giving.
God’s Word speaks being into existence.
It is God’s life creating, life sustaining Word by which everything that is is.
As God tells Israel through Moses, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Deut. 8.3)
Or as the apostle Paul might say, as he said to the Athenians, the Word is that “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17.28)
But this is the headline of John’s Gospel: that Word became flesh.
A human being.
Born of Mary.
Adopted by Joseph.
The One through whom the world came into being, came into the world, and lived among us,
full of grace and truth.
And the Good News that follows that headline, according to John the Evangelist is this:
Those who receive the Word made flesh, and keep company with him, come to understand the most profound truth about themselves – that they are not merely persons born of human striving – “of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man” – but as, first and foremost, born of God.
Or, we could say, “Spoken by God.”
For John the Evangelist, knowing ourselves as born of God – children of God’s own making, of God’s own creative delight – we are empowered to live without fear as children of God: created and creative, loved and loving, forgiven and forgiving, redeemed and redeeming.
Living and dying by God’s Word, the Word of Life
rather than living and dying by some other ‘word’.
The rest of John’s Gospel is an invitation into fellowship with Jesus, the Living Word through whom we see, and hear, and know God as God knows us.
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For me, the joy of Christmas is the joy of knowing God in personal terms.
As highfalutin as John the Evangelist might sound to our ear, he cannot speak about the Word that was with God and that is God without using a personal pronoun. Because John isn’t writing from a pre-Jesus perspective on the history of God’s self-disclosure to humankind. He is writing as someone who knows he knows God because he knows Jesus.
The arrival of Jesus in John’s life was a light shining into his darkness,
an experience of the fullness of God’s grace
and the fullness of God’s truth.
The arrival of Jesus in John’s life was the experience of being found by God
and invited into close living quarters with him.
It’s no mistake that after summarizing the whole gospel in this famous opening prologue that the very first words John sets to Jesus’ lips to in his telling are these:
First: “What are you looking for?”
And second, whatever our answer might be to that question, John has Jesus follow up with these words: “Come, and see…”
The Good News according to John is God’s personal invitation, addressed to each and every one of us through Jesus, an invitation to be God’s friend.
Living with Jesus delivered John from fear
and set him free to love
as God loves.
The joy of Christmas is God with us.
And of us getting to know God, at the pace of human life.
Not as an abstract concept bearing down on us
but as someone who is with us and for us.
God is not something. God is Someone.
God is Jesus, the Christ, inviting you and me to live by the Word of God that created us, delights in us, and longs to be with us.
God is someone who fellowships with you and me by sharing in the depth of our humanity
so that you and I can come to share in the depth of his divinity.
And God is someone who chooses to become “God with us” in order to show us how God is for us – dying to show us his patience and forgiveness, and rising to show us his power to redeem us.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with men to dwell
Jesus our Emmanuel*
Colin+
*from Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!