THE WORD BECAME FLESH

December 29, 2002, 1 Christmas, Calvary Church 

On Christmas Eve in our Gospel reading we heard the beautiful, haunting story from St. Luke's Gospel of the birth of the Christ Child, the long-awaited Messiah, to Mary and Joseph as they arrived in Bethlehem with no place to stay. It is the reading every year on Christmas Eve. Who would want to hear any other story on Christmas Eve except that story? It is so beautiful; it is so simple; it is so heart-aching, if one has not become too jaded to the story.

But now, on the First Sunday after Christmas each year we hear in our Gospel another Christmas story, one very different from that read on Christmas Eve, what is called the Prologue to St. John's Gospel. This reading has none of the simple beauty of Luke's story, but it is beautiful in a different, and much more profound, way.

St. John has no story of the birth of the Christ Child. Instead, he places that birth in a cosmic context, in an account that begins at creation where he tells us that Christ, who is the Word of God, was present. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The only reference in this Gospel reading today to the earthly life of Jesus is that unforgettable sentence, "He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him." That does not raise for me the specter of anti-Semitism, but rather, it raises the question, What would I have done were he to have come to me in the manner in which he came?

"The Word became flesh and lived among us," St. John says. The Word (with a capital "W") is Christ himself. But what is a word? Well, a word is a sound; a word is a message; a word is a means of communication; a word is a form of self-disclosure. Each time I speak to you I utter a sound; I have a message; I attempt to communicate something to you; and in the process of all that, I disclose to you something of myself.

Preaching, if it is done honestly, is a disclosure by the preacher of something about himself or herself. Preaching is very revealing, and in doing it the preacher makes himself vulnerable: the topics, the words, the stories may be appropriate to the Scripture that is chosen, but they also say something about the preacher.

If someone listens to the same person in the pulpit for a period of time, and if he or she is a good listener, that person will know something about the preacher because what has been chosen as a topic about which to preach, and then what has been said about that topic, can be very revealing. I'm not talking, I'm sure you know, about telling cute little stories about his children or vacation experiences. I'm talking about the preacher's fears, his doubts, his hopes, his dreams, his faith. I become very vulnerable to you each Sunday morning as I stand here because I have to do what you don't have to do (and in many cases don't do), and that is, I have to reveal something of myself without knowing how it will be received or if I will be rejected for what I say.

I went down that little side alley about preaching for a moment, not really as a digression, but because I wanted to set you up for understanding better what St. John meant when he spoke of Christ as the Word of God. He is the revealer of God. He is God clothed in all the vulnerability of human garments. He is God communicating in human terms. He is God telling you the truth and not knowing how you will receive it.

God chose to speak to us, not through an intermediary, such as the prophets of old. God chose to speak to us, not through a written text such as the Torah. God chose to speak to us, not through a miracle of nature as at the Red Sea. God chose to speak to us, not as a hidden voice as God did to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

But instead, God spoke directly to us, for the Word of God, the intimate and vulnerable disclosure of God, took our poor human nature upon himself so that we could see and hear God in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

That, among much else, is what this Gospel is saying to us today. Oh, of course, there is much, much more in it; but if you allow yourself to play with word "Word," as I have led you on to do, you will begin to have some insights of your own as to the meaning of Christmas.

The Word -- the perfect expression of God -- came among us in the most profound of ways and yet in the msot simple of ways, in the Baby of Bethlehem.

Many years ago from a novel I read I jotted down something that one of the characters said. It is this: "A silly life is based on appearances. It aims only at seeming. It wishes to seem interesting, intelligent, beautiful, well informed; sometimes it even wishes to seem good, altruistic, courageous. To the stupid, being is not important, seeming is."

It is not enough for God to seem concerned for us. It is not enough for God to seem to want to help us. It is being that is important, and in Jesus of Nazareth God came to be with us so that there could be no doubt as to God's love for us.

"And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." (Jn. 1:14)

Richard H. Humke