Christmas Day 2022
Christmas Day
12/25/22 St. John’s
John 1:1-14
How do you like to celebrate Christmas? With one side of the family on Christmas Eve the other on Christmas Day? When do you open presents – both days? When I was a young child, we opened presents on Christmas morning always. That was very important to me. I had heard that some people did it on Christmas eve; that seemed very sophisticated to me until, all of a sudden, at some point when I was 10 or 11, we changed to Christmas eve, I don’t know how that happened. What do you like to eat for Christmas Dinner. Some people have turkey in a big family gathering, some have ham with just their significant other, some have whatever is being served at the soup kitchen.
How we celebrate in church could also be a tradition – Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. I got the newsletter from my home congregation in NY and they are having 3 different Christmas Eve services – children, families, adults. This year we have some other choices – Christmas Day is here on Sunday, most of us celebrate the Nativity on Christmas eve – some of us hard core Christmas people have come to both.
Last night, we did Christmas we did Christmas here at St. John’s with Luke the Evangelist, who is just so into the Nativity, as is Matthew, although in slightly different ways. Both have the stories about pregnancy not just one but two – Elizabeth and Mary; Zechariah losing his voice, Joseph going along with it; the Gabriel’s visit to Mary, Mary visits Elizabeth – it’s all so human.
The Gospel of Mark doesn’t do Christmas at all. Jesus just shows up as an adult and gets to work. We’re left to fill in the blanks about his life.
And today, we get to do Christmas with John, which is not that common an event on Christmas Day. And John is kind of above all that earthly stuff. John has no interest in babies or shepherds, stables. Too messy and, well, physical. For John, Christmas is mysterious and mystical. He wants to take us back not just a couple thousand years, but 13 billion – to the beginning: “In the beginning was the Word”… reminiscent of the very first words of scripture in Genesis –
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth by how? By speaking creation into being with a word. And John he wants us to think about at Christmas is that “this Word spoken by God” became flesh and lived among us.” This is a far cry from swaddling clothes mangers.
You see the Gospel writer John is a Greek thinker more than a Jewish one – and he’s up in his head more. He’s the philosophical typewriter and he expresses the coming of the Son of God with the idea of that spoken word of God – the Logos in Greek thought, is alive among us and in us. The Word – the Logos that existed before the beginning of everything, and is the source of all light, all life, the truth. The infinite vibration of the universe and all that’s in it. The Word: that was as close as the Greeks got to talking about God as a Creator, and Redeemer and Sanctifier, much less those earthy expressions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So, what we rejoice in at Christmas, John says, is that the Word, this light that shines in the darkness, this force for all that is good, became a person, became flesh. He doesn’t care to explain how, only that the eternal Word lived as a human being named Jesus and lived among us. The old-fashioned word in the KJV was “dwelt” among us but the in Greek John actually uses a word that means “pitched tent” work really means – among us. For Jewish readers whose ancestors wandered the desert as a nomadic people, they might think of God wandering with them, God shivering in the cold and sweating in the heat and getting soaked in rain with them. John’s news is that God is with, and it has to be through a human being or beings, the people who are suffering from this terrible cold snap. For soldiers who live in tents, like the soldiers in the war against Ukraine, it’s God struggling with them amid chaos and death. For the homeless who may not even have a tent to pitch, it means God living under bridges with them or on the street.
In the Enfleshment of the Word of God, Incarnation in Jesus, and in us, the Risen body of Christ in the world, God has pitched a tent among us. Is us in and among us. That’s what Christmas means in John’s Gospel and what good news that is for us on this Christmas day: that God loves us so much that God became one of us, Emmanuel, God with us. Not a God sitting far off in some celestial palace somewhere, but in the most difficult and painful moments in our lives. losing his job, having a sick child, and in our joys – waking up to a beautiful sunrise, or finally getting over COVID and feeling better. To celebrate this fact with joy, this seems to me to be a very good way to do Christmas.
I certainly wouldn’t ever want to give up the story of the baby and the manger, but I’m glad we get to hear John’s telling of the good news once in a while too. The reminder that the very power of the Creator, the Light of our world, that Word that God spoke that brought heaven and earth into being is with us. Hunkered down, camping out, pitching tent and with us for the long haul.