Year A
 Isaiah 52:7-10
 Psalm 98
 Hebrews 1:1-4
 John 1:1-14

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

In the beginning was the Word…  and the Word was with God… and the Word was God…  and the Word became flesh and lived among us…  these words from John’s Prologue are among my favorites in scripture…  because they speak to the cosmic mystery that surrounds us…  they refer to that which makes little sense…  they speak to square pegs that fit into round holes…  to God’s realm of no-space and no-time… they’re an in-your-face challenge to the post-modern…  predictable machine-works universe in which we think…  we live…  and believe we understand… 

But I think that the Incarnation was inescapable… because the fabric of creation is woven with forgiveness…  redemption…  and the persistence of life…  and when covenant after covenant failed… when prophet after prophet was ignored or dismissed or killed…  then God…  like a mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings…  took a wiser…  more direct approach… 

Jewish Wisdom traditions were influenced by Greek thought…  Wisdom…  Sophia…  became…  a personal being standing by the side of God over and against the created world…  but not unconcerned with it…  and Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann believed that the Prologue started out as a re-written Logos hymn…  which came from a Gnostic community…  which traced its origins back to John the Baptist… ] and many scholars agree that the Jewish Wisdom tradition had significant influence in the language of the Prologue…  but John makes an important shift… Sophia is a feminine noun…  and is often depicted as a feminine character in Wisdom literature…  and so John uses the word logos… a masculine noun… and reshapes the wisdom tradition to reflect the specificity of gender…

John 1:1 highlights the eternal existence of the Word with God…  outside of time and space…  and evokes images from Genesis about creation out of nothing…  and as the Prologue unfolds…  the eternal Word will not stay outside of space and time… but will enter a time-bound world…  John tells us that…  the Word is what God is…  and the Word does what God does… that’s why Jesus said…  If you have seen me, you have seen the Father… and if you know me, then you know the Father… John’s Gospel tells us that the Incarnation…  and our Christmas celebration of it…  were inescapable…

We heard in last evening’s Gospel reading that the Emperor decided to register everyone…  to do a census… doing a census was about counting people and knowing who lives where… about establishing boundaries and creating districts…  it’s a way to figure out how much money the government will get… it’s an attempt to make things neat and tidy…  to put people into boxes…  even though no boxes exist in nature…  but it can pit people against each other… it can create an “us and them” attitude…

But the Word is not so neat and tidy… the Word will not be contained… and there can be some real discomfort when theology is too open…  though wideness is a quality which is expressed in Psalm 118:5…  it says…  I called to God from my narrowness… and God answered me with a vast expanse…  you see…  narrowness can be controlled more easily than vast expanses…  but Christ came into a world of boundaries as boundlessness…  and Christ comes in still… . and shatters our limited ideas… Christ comes as rebellion against our myopic outlooks…

And though maybe only dimly…  Herod understood the implications of Jesus’ birth…  he could see past the surface of things… he was familiar with myth and imagination… he understood that this child would topple his and all earthly kingdoms…  that’s why he killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and younger… hoping against hope that he could hold on to the worldly things…  which meant the world to him…

To me…  a myth is not a story that’s untrue…  but a story that carries a deeper truth… that draws us in…  as a five-year-old once said…  a myth is a story that is true on the inside…  and author Thomas Moore suggested that theological imagination is one of the most underutilized and undervalued spiritual gifts…  so I invite you to imagine yourself in the story of Jesus’ nativity…  because Jesus is not simply born to Mary…  he is born to us…

Are any of us King Herod…  fearful of losing power or privilege as God is doing a new thing…  or an Eastern sage seeking the starlight of inspiration…  or a shepherd routinely going about our business when the skies seem to open up…  or a prophet crying out in the wilderness…  or an empire’s bureaucrat choosing to stand apart on an unfolding human drama…  or one who judges a homeless unwed mother-to-be…  or a vulnerable child born into a violent world…

Richard Rohr wrote…  we see in the original Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth…  that there’s really nothing pretty about the first Christmas…  and sometimes…  the only way human beings can understand spiritual things is that they have to be presented in physical…  material form…  otherwise we just can’t get it…  we have to see it and we have to touch it…  perhaps as Thomas did…  and how God comes into the world would also seem to be very important…  as if to say to us…  this is where God is to be found…  the great question has always been…  what is God…  who is God…  where is this God hiding…  ]  because initially…  God isn’t really obvious to most people…  the mystery we celebrate today is the acknowledgement that the divine has chosen its hiding place in the world…  it is hiding in all material things…  and now…  all of creation becomes summed up in the body of Jesus…

And where is this infant God being revealed…  not in the safe world…  but at the edge…  at the bottom…  among those where we don’t want to find God…  where we don’t look for God…  where we don’t expect God…  ]  the way many of us have created Christianity…  it seems like it’s all about being nice…  pretty…  middle class…  normal…  and under the law…  ] but in the Gospel stories…  Jesus…  Mary…  and Joseph are none of those things…  so maybe we ought to be looking elsewhere…

The Good News of Christmas…  is that no matter who you are or what role you play…  you are one of God’s beloved… just as God’s voice from heaven spoke at Jesus’ baptism…  and said…  This is my Son…  in whom I am well pleased… this is what God says about each one of us… no matter how hard we may try to make it untrue… no matter what tapes play in our heads…  or what anyone in our lives or in the media says to the contrary…  or about why we’re unworthy…  we are God’s children and God could not love us more…  and that’s reason enough to say Merry Christmas…