Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the first Sunday after Epiphany, January 12, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Wisdom 7:7-8, 10, 21-8:1; Ephesians 3:5-10; John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

                      –John 1:1

     We all know there are four Gospels, but only three of them have Christmas. Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, doesn't mention the birth of Jesus at all. Matthew and Luke tell stories about it — human stories, stories that we tell lovingly year after year after year and never grow tired of them.

     Luke includes the angel Gabriel making his announcement to Mary, and Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth, and the journey to Bethlehem, and the birth in a stable, and the host of angels appearing to the shepherds in the fields by night, and the shepherds rushing to the manger, and Mary keeping all these things and pondering them in her heart. Matthew has Joseph learning in a dream that God has chosen Mary to mother the Christ, and it has the star in the East and the wise men with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and the Mary and Joseph fleeing with their baby to Egypt to escape from bad King Herod.

     Wonderful, beautiful stuff, all of it, and if we didn't have these stories we wouldn't know what to do at Christmas, we might not even celebrate Christmas. We certainly wouldn't have pageants and crèches!

     You can be Christian and not have Christmas. The Puritans did exactly that. It's safe to say that in the earliest days of Exeter our very own church didn't observe Christmas and strongly disapproved of anybody who did.

     And then there's John. You just heard John's Christmas story. It doesn't give us any material for pageants and crèches . No shepherds, no wise men, no star, no mother, no manger, not even a baby. John gives us a poem, a song, a hymn, about God and the Word, and John places that story not in Bethlehem of Judea but in the void of interstellar space, and not during the reign of King Herod but in eternity.

     Christian theology has always insisted that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully God. Not a hybrid, not half and half like a mule, but totally human and totally God. I know that doesn't make sense. It's almost impossible to hold both sides of it in your head. So the Gospel writers choose to look at it from one side or the other. Matthew's and Luke's Christmas stories put us in touch with Jesus as one of us, a mortal man. John's poem confronts us with the immortal, infinite, cosmic Christ. Which do we prefer?

     In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. What is a Word, anyway? Forget about nouns and verbs and parts of speech. Forget about dictionaries and spellings and grammar. This isn't about any of that. Think instead about the first chapter of Genesis, the beginning of everything. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, there was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

     God speaks and the whole universe begins to exist. Where there was nothing, suddenly there is something, and God made it happen with a word. That's the kind of Word John is talking about. The Word that overpowers chaos with order. The Word that calls worlds into being. The Word that makes history possible, and life.

     You don't have to call that the Word of God. You can call it the creative principle if you want. You can call it the laws of physics if you want. You can call it the logic of material reality. You can call it anything you want. But our ancestors in faith called it the Word. They understood that naming and creating are the two sides of one coin. Give a thing a name and you make it real. So the Word was and is God's companion, partner and agent in the process of creation.

     They called it the Word, but that's not all they called it. They also called it the Spirit, because Spirit for them was another word for wind or breath. They saw in their mind's eye God's breath blowing like a wind over the deep, pushing and moving things. Spirit is an invisible power that shapes and orients events.

     So they called it Spirit, as they called it Word, but that's not all they called it. They also called it Wisdom, because Wisdom defeats chaos. Wisdom discerns patterns and connections. Wisdom makes sense of things. Wisdom offers direction and purpose. Wisdom communicates and teaches.

     Spirit, Wisdom, Word: Three different ways of saying that God is not some abstract principle, God is living and active and does things, makes things, makes things happen. God is at work. God is up to something, and having realized that, it's only natural that we should be forever curious about what, and we should seek to discern more about it.

     So the Bible includes great hunks of material that we call Wisdom literature. The Book of Job is loaded with it. So is Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, and those strange books of the Apocrypha, like the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Sirach.

     But the people who strung those words and books together weren't any more satisfied with abstractions than we are, in fact less so. They could relate to Wisdom better if they could put flesh and bones on it. So they began to describe Wisdom as a person — specifically, as a beautiful woman who stands at the side of the road and in the marketplaces and calls out to passersby, inviting their attention, trying to attract them to herself. So a mortal like you or I might praise Wisdom in the language of a love affair, as we heard: I love her more than health and beauty, and I choose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.

     That image of Wisdom as a beautiful woman was the Hebrew Bible's answer to the opposite image, also found in the Bible, of Foolishness as a seductive woman, a woman of loose morals calling to men from the roadside — a siren, a hussy, basically a streetwalker. God isn't going to let the Devil have all the interesting metaphors.

     And can you guess why Holy Wisdom is pictured as an attractive woman instead of a hunk of a guy? Of course: because the Bible was written mostly by guys, and I mean the kind of guys who weren't about to admit that a guy could look as good as a gal.

     But there's one thing the Gospel of John says about this holy Wisdom or Word that was never said before: The Word became flesh and lived among us. That is distinctively Christian. That is why the New Testament is called New. The Word became flesh. God climbed down off the throne of heaven, as it were, and took on the human predicament. The immortal took on our mortality, the all-powerful took on our weakness. Physically, not just metaphorically. As real as the flesh on our bones, and just as vulnerable.

     Thereby humanity gets a glimpse at God, but in the matrix of all our history it was only a glimpse, and a fading one too, at the remove of these two thousand years. When that happens it can begin to seem as if we never saw anything or even as if no one ever saw anything, it was just an illusion, a mirage, a chimera. So as John writes of the Word that became flesh, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him.

     Don't you dare interpret that as a swipe at his own people, the Jews. John is talking about the whole universe, and certainly about humanity writ large. Christ's own people who did not accept him and mostly still don't accept him or even recognize him: That's everybody. That's us.

     One of the most haunting sentences in all Scripture is the one near the end of Luke's Christmas story: But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. Don't you wonder exactly what was going through her mind? Maybe it was John's unfolding of the great mystery of the Incarnation. 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, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.

     Amen