Christmas Day/Sunday 2005

Christmas Day/Sunday John 1:1-14 12/25/05

“Love Song”

At the office one day last week I got to thinking that it would be fun to sing the Gospel lesson as a carol. After all, we seem to get rather little chance to sing carols and today *is* Christmas. I tried and tried to find a Christmas carol tune that would fit the words of John 1:1-5. I tried the tune to:

“Away In A Manger” -- “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,...

It goes along okay to there, but the next phrase doesn’t work. Then I tried:

“Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” -- well, take it from me, it doesn’t work.

“Joy To The World”, “O Come All Ye Faithful”, “Silent Night”...all the same. These words of John just don’t work as a Christmas carol.

Scholars tell us that these first five verses were a hymn of the early church, but the trouble is that they are not a Christmas carol. They are a love song. They are the first Christians attempt to proclaim the unfathomable love of God for human beings – for you and me.

Just think about it for a moment. Before the world was created, before humans walked in the garden, before sin came into the world, before anything, Jesus Christ (The Word) existed. He was there and involved at creation. He was already loving us and sacrificing for us from the beginning.

The Word is not just some strange translation of Logos. It is not some mystical way to refer to the second Person of the Trinity. The Word is about communication and Christ is God’s communication to the world. The Word is God’s supreme message of love to us.

We believe that God knows everything and knows it from before the beginning. We can assume then, that God knew before He even created humans that they would sin and be in need of saving. We can speculate on why God didn’t just create life in such a way that sin didn’t and couldn’t happen. It would seem impossible though for humans to be unable to sin and still have free will. Free will is important to God because He wants humans who can choose to love Him back. So, God had to take the inevitable risk, even knowing what would happen.

We also believe that God is all powerful. With this in mind, it would seem God could have just pronounced forgiveness. He could have allowed animal sacrifice to suffice. He could have created a means of salvation we can’t begin to imagine. He could have, but He didn’t. He didn’t because He wanted to be a divine love song for us. How better could He demonstrate His love for His people than to come into the world as one of them and then die for them.

Thus, our Savior was there at creation and was being God’s Word of Love in the midst of creating that which was to be loved. We are told, “In him was life...” It was Christ, God’s act of love that gave humans life.

We think of the creation story and God breathing life into Adam. What God breathed was not just oxygen or air. What God breathed was love. It was and is love that makes life for humans. Take love away and a person’s spirit shrivels and dies as surely as the body dies without oxygen. Therefore, Christ, the Word of God’s unsurpassable love, was intimately involved in creation and in giving us life.

This life, given at creation through the Word, would be a light that leads people from the darkness of sin and death to life. Last night in the first lesson we read from Isaiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” We are so used to being saved that we may not have a real appreciation for what this passage says.

Many years ago, I got a bit of experience of what it would be like. I was at a youth camp for a weekend. Sometime during the night I awoke to total darkness. Someone had closed all of the indoor shutters to keep out the chill of an early fall night. The result was that not one speck or glimmer of light came into the cabin. We were in total darkness. I can remember holding my hand up close to my face, trying to see my fingers. I could see nothing. For a moment, I feared I’d suddenly gone blind. It was only when I felt around for my flashlight and turned it on that I knew I was all right.

Without the light of God’s love that sacrificed God’s self from before creation we would be in spiritual darkness as total as the optical darkness I experienced that night. The Word is the light that shines out, telling us we are all right. We are all right, not because we are able to shed light on our sinful lives, but because God shed His light in Christ and this took away the darkness of sin.

That Word that spoke creation into being then became flesh. God became human which made God vulnerable. In John there is no journey to Bethlehem , no nativity scene, no shepherds, no wise men, but that takes nothing away from the central point that God put Himself into human hands, allowed Himself to be at the mercy of His creation. Just as a baby is vulnerable, so also was God when He came to dwell among us. And all of this so that He could sing us the greatest Christmas carol of all, His divine love song.

In just days we will put the Christmas decorations away. We will put the manger scene and baby Jesus back in the closet for another year. Already today radio stations have probably returned to regular programming and the Christmas carols have been stilled. The Christmas carols may be but a memory, but listen and you may hear... God’s love song goes on and on. Amen.