REFLECTIONS ON THE LIGHT OF GOD

By

Dana Prom Smith


Meditations and Prayers
for
Advent and Christmas
based on
The Prologue
to
The Gospel of John



Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 1976










In Memory of

my Father and Mother

from whom I first heard the gospel

and learned to pray.








PREFACE


During the seasons of Christmas and Advent, Christians pay special attention to three books of the Bible, Isaiah, Luke, and Matthew, and although the church uses John now and then during these seasons, the Fourth Gospel is largely ignored. This state of affairs while understandable is sad, for John is first and foremost the gospel of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany. It is the gospel of the incarnation. In one simple statement, John summed up the Christmas narratives of Matthew and Luke when he wrote: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 RSV)
The charm and poignancy of the Christian narratives in Luke and Matthew account for some of the neglect of John. They are beautiful and tender stories and are a part of the glory of the Christian witness; however, their charm is also a part of the problem we have at Christmas. We become so enchanted with the story that we miss the point.
John never lets us get off the point. His language is every bit as graceful as the stories of Luke and Matthew. As a matter of fact, the Prologue to the Gospel of John is probably one of the most deft and well-written short testaments to the gospel ever penned. It flows with such grace that one cannot but help get the message.
John serves as a good balance for our Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany thoughts and prayers. He does not let us get away from the meaning of what happened.

In addition to John’s thought itself, the flow of his thought naturally suits our celebrations of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. He began with the deity and creativity of the Word, and after a brief discourse on John the Baptist, he took up the theme of Advent with the coming of the light of God. He then wrote of the meaning of Christ’s coming in terms of a renewal of life before he took up the heart of his Prologue, the incarnation of the Word. This is, of course, the heart of Christmas. In the final two sections, he spoke of the life in Christ and the Epiphany, the light of God for the whole world.
As a parish minister for 25 years, I have been struggling, along with a lot of other believers in Jesus, with the opportunity of making Christmas a special time of realization of the meaning of the gospel. But far more important than that, for years I have been personally captivated by the Gospel of John and especially the Prologue. What John said and the way he said it have always been near to my heart and mind, and I never tire of reading the Prologue.

For these two reasons, my love of John’s Gospel and my concern for an Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany that enhances our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I wrote these prayers and meditations. I hope that they will help others to take delight in John, as I have, and will, more important than that, be enriched from the wealth of Christ who gave us his grace and truth.






FOREWARD

In the history of religious literature, the worded prayers and meditations of the especially sensitive souls have earned a truly unqiue place. I predict that Dana Smith's book will find its way to that place. These Reflections on the Light of God come just at a time when they are so urgently needed by our culture. We will do well to listen in as this man of the Spirit shares with us his moods and feelings, insights and observations about the Light. Every page is a blessing.

William S. Banowsky
President
University of Oklahoma





IN THE BEGINNING

WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1a RSV).

In The Tempest, William Shakespeare wrote that “what’s past is prologue”, and what is to come is in our “discharge.” He meant that while the past sets the conditions for the present, we are responsible for what we do now and in the future. Yesterday is irrevocable, but our decisions today and tomorrow are not inevitable. Also, Shakespeare pointed to a deeper meaning. If we wish to act in the present and anticipate the future, we must understand the past.
In the Prologue to his Gospel, John not only introduced the themes of his Gospel, he also wrote of God’s history. The past as prologue for John was not so much human history as it was the history of God’s dealing with people who were the reasons for our creation and redemption.
Our lives are not merely chronicles of our accomplishments and failures, for we live in the context of God’s movements amongst us. The way we look at our lives is more than what we have done or failed to do. It is what God has done with our successes and failures.

A person’s relationship with another is conditioned by what has happened between them in the past. It does not determine the way they get along in the present and the future, but it gives them a network of meaning. When John used the phrase “In the beginning” from Genesis, he spoke of the history of God’s dealing with people. This history is God’s ability to take the confusion of our lives and turn it to his purposes.
The author of Genesis spoke of God’s ability to bring order out of the formlessness and void of life. John spoke of God’s creative and redemptive power working through our lives to turn them from shame to glory. Perhaps Paul said it best when he wrote, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom. 8:28 RSV). The divine power unleashed in the creation continues today in our redemption.

WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE

Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
in whom there are no yesterdays
nor are there any tomorrows,
we have forgotten our histories in Thee
and have neglected Thy purposes for us
thinking that we live like Thee
timelessly and eternally.
Help us to remember our past
that Thou mayest teach us
making a tutor of our times,
which are always in Thy hands.
Deliver us from the burdens
of carrying our past mistakes
and remind us that our lives
are not merely the sum total
of what we have done with them
but are indeed that ironic amalgam
of our vices and Thy graces
that form the stuff of Thy purposes.
We thank Thee for intruding Thyself
into the muddle of our lives
and turning our failures to good effect.
Give us the assurance

that sleeping or waking,
failing or succeeding,
we are yet in Thy hands.
For we pray in the Name of our Lord.
Amen.

THE POWER OF THE WORD

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1a RSV).

When people are first given positions of authority, they expect that when they give an order, it will be carried out. The brighter ones soon realize that power does not consist in giving an order but having it accomplished. In their naivete, they think that they can act like God creating by the power of their word, but later they find that they are merely men who cannot create the deed by their word.
We often miss this point in reading Genesis, but the author repeatedly wrote “And God said” meaning that God created by the power of his Word. John picked up this theme of creation by the Word, but he elaborated it by developing the belief that the Word who created is also the Word who redeems.
May of us in our harsh and hard-bitten era have a hard time believing that the God who made this world is also the same God who loves it, that the God who created life also redeems it. We cannot see the divine connection between the gospel and our rat-race. Oddly enough, we find ourselves rejecting life that our lives might be saved.
The same cynicism afflicted John’s time, but with a bold stroke of faith he linked the Word who created people with the Word who redeems them.

Cynics, who are often idealists gone sour, habitually separate words and deeds knowing from experience that words are cheap and deeds dear. While their disillusionment often goes from man to God, it seldom extends to themselves, and they are left with only their powerless words.
John’s point was that unlike the naïve youth and cynical elders, God’s Word is also his deed, for the Word who created the world had become a man. The awesome Power and Intelligence who flung out the stars in their courses confined himself to a womb so that in the manger we catch a glimpse of space, time, and eternity.

THE POWER OF THE WORD

Almighty and merciful God,
who art more ready to hear
than we are to pray,
we have overshot the mark
in our ambition
and have fallen short because
of our apathy.
We have thought ourselves pure
when we were stained
and great
when we were small.
Spare us the arrogance of thinking
we can create by our words
without investing our lives
and give us the faith to thank Thee
for speaking and acting in Thy Word
when from the dust Thou didst make us
and save us in the flesh of a Babe
and by the blood of the Cross.
May we remember that it was amidst
straw and dung,
not in lofty words,
that Thou didst speak

Thy deed of grace
in an Infant.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

STATIC AND DYNAMIC

“And the Word was with God” (John 1:1b RSV).

The tyranny of words affects the way we believe, for we are dominated by their emotional connotations. Few want to live in a static society and everyone wants a dynamic leader, but we all want stable communities and steady leaders. While we may want God changeless, we are not sure we want him static.
Getting beyond these emotional qualities to words is hard, especially when we probe our deepest convictions.
The Greek philosophers observed long ago that we need something fixed in a world of flux. They spoke of a changeless God, but did they mean a God without movement? How do we square the living God of the Bible with that fixed and absolute Creator of our creation? As usual, John provided us with a way.
In one of those tantalizing hints at the Trinity in the New Testament, John pointed to the oneness and manyness of God. By his use of the phrase “In the beginning”, he suggested the deity of the Word, but when he used the phrase “with God”, he more than suggested it, he pointed to a relationship between God and the Word, a movement within God.

One of the delights in reading John is his subtlety, for he is like a fine wine. A lot of pleasure is in the aftertaste, the nuances to steal into the mind after the idea has first been savored. He first suggested the deity of the Word, but then he leaves an afterthought, God was not a static being eternally fixed by the wit of man in the heavens, but a living God moving among men.
In a world of flux, we may long for the static and absolute God of the Greeks, but John and the Bible witnessed to a living God who spoke to men in their flux and flow by becoming a part of it. For John, the changelessness of God was his steadfast love for man which compelled him to move among men. Just as the Word of God was with God, so God moved among men when he became our Immanuel, God with us.

STATIC AND DYNAMIC

Almighty God and Eternal Father
in whom there is no variableness
nor shadow of turning,
deliver us from fashioning Thee
not so much after our images
but after our anxieties.
We have tried to fix Thee snugly
in a sure and permanent place
making Thee a perpetual part
of the furniture of our needs,
and have tried to hide from Thee
by making Thee something Thou art not
so that we might go on our way
demanding justice of others
and pleading forbearance for ourselves.
O Lord, we thank Thee for living
amongst us in our shapes and forms
almost as a divine trespass
in our walled-off and narrow world.
Thou didst not become what we had planned
but rather hast moved among us
in ways we did not anticipate.
Give us the grace to discern Thee

where we did not expect to find Thee,
such as a cradle and a stable.
In the Name of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

TIME AND ETERNITY

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1 RSV).

Greek, the language of the New Testament, makes a distinction in the past tense between a continuous past and a punctiliar past. For instance, when John referred to God himself, he used the continuous past, but when he referred to something God had done, like creating the world, he used the punctiliar past. The continuous past is the tense of eternity, so to speak.
When John used the predicate “was” in the continuous past tense, he revealed a lot about the relationship of the Word of God to God. It was eternal, not temporal; divine, not mundane.
Saint John Chrysostom, the golden-tongued preacher of the fourth century, was one of the first to see the deftness of John’s thought. “Was” occurs three times in the first verse but each time with a different twist. The first verse is really a triplet. In the first line of the triplet “was” with the phrase “in the beginning” ascribes an eternal existence to the Word. The Word was not created. In the second line, the predicate ascribes to the Word an eternal relationship with God, and in the third line, the predicate refers to the inherent deity of the Word. John said it simply, “The Word was God.”

In the three successive lines of the triplet, John went from a hint at the deity of the Word, to a reference to it, and finally to an unequivocal assertion of it.
In other words, Jesus Christ, who was the Word of God, was not just another witness to God, not just another symbol somehow vaguely related to God. The eternal God gave himself in his Word at a given point in time under the reign of Caesar Augustus. The timeless God assumed the lot of time, and the eternal Word became a part of history. Then as now it is hard to believe, but then as now it is just as rewarding.

TIME AND ETERNITY

Eternal Father, our God,
who art nearer than our touch
and yet farther than our reach,
forgive us for fiddling around with Thy Word
for thinking that we can tinker with Thee.
Give us that awe that befits deity,
sparing us that easy familiarity
which we often confuse
for the intimacy of Thy birth.
Deliver us from looking within ourselves
hoping that deep inside we might find Thee
and remind us that Thou art searching for us
in Thy Word who forsook eternity
and enfleshed himself in time and space.
Help us recall that Thine eternal truths
are not fixed in timeless ideas
but were molded in creation’s clay
when Thine infinite Word
became a finite man.
We have sought phantoms that fade away
and pleasures that melt in our mouths.
Make us hunger for the infinite
and thirst for the eternal

that we may be satisfied at Bethlehem
and quenched by the Babe.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

A POINT OF CONTACT

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1 RSV).

Missionaries often have a bad name among many moderns because it is commonly believed that they try to force a strange god down the throats of hapless and otherwise happy pagans. While the charges may be wrong, they raise a crucial question about the Christian witness to Jesus Christ.
Sadly, a lot of so-called Christian witness is merely a series of neatly memorized answers to questions no one has asked. Many of those who witness to Jesus Christ intrude forcing their way into someone else’s life. It is a form of tyranny, a kind of religious imperialism.
The purpose of John’s Gospel was missionary. He was trying to communicate the gospel to the people of his time, and in the process, he gave us an authentic technique of witnessing.
He did not tyrannize. He established a point of contact with his readers. He began with an understanding of those to whom he was writing.
His use of the word “Word” is an example. It was true to the biblical heritage going way back to Genesis, Proverbs, and the Psalms. In these the Word of God or the Wisdom of God was the creative person and power by which God had formed the world.

But it was also true to his non-believing readers, for the Greeks, too, had a heritage of the Word which for them was the means by which their remote, aloof, and absolute God communicated his message to men.
John took both of these strands of thought, the Greek and the Hebrew, and wove them into one of the finest threads of insight into the relationship of Jesus Christ to God. He went beyond both of the two heritages, but yet he was true to both.
In this he was, of course, faithful to his Lord, who in becoming a man did not come to deny our humanity, but to affirm it, who ventured amongst us not to tyrannize us but to liberate us.

A POINT OF CONTACT

Almighty God, our heavenly Father
who didst engrave Thyself upon us
by molding us to Thine image
and marking us with Jesus Christ,
we have denied Thee among men
thinking we have borne Thee witness
because we did not try to know
those to whom we dared speak for Thee.
We ask Thee to forgive our arrogance
in attempting to impose our answers
upon those who still seek their questions.
O Lord, we need patience,
for we like to force Thy will
trying to bring to pass
what we think Thou dost want.
All things happen in Thy good time,
for Thy Word didst come amongst us
in a place and at a time
that no one at all expected.
We long for Thee
and ask that Thou
wilt come to us
as Thou didst come
in Bethlehem
quite tenderly.
All because of Jesus.
Amen.

THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

“And the Word was God” (John 1:1c RSV).

George Orwell in his essay on Salvador Dali’s autobiography wrote that a person’s “life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Outwardly, someone else may appear to have a series of successes, one triumph upon another, but from within that same person may see himself never quite making it, with defeat upon defeat. When a person is aiming at one hundred percent, ninety is a defeat although everyone else may have been somewhere about seventy.
Orwell, as usual, spoke to the heart of the issue. We all know that things could be better. In a way it is not so much the tragedy of life that afflicts us day in and day out, as it is our poignancy.
When John wrote that “the Word was God”, he spoke to our hears when we want to hear that somewhere, someplace in life there is a word of truth, a note of authenticity, something that is not compromised. The means by which God spoke and what he spoke were the same, for both the medium and the message were the same, God himself. The Word of God was not a substitute nor a surrogate. He was God. The means and the medium was the flesh of Christ. In short, Jesus Christ was the Word of truth, the note of authenticity.
Both the Jews and the Greeks could take the first two lines of John’s triplet, but they would stumble over the last line, just as they would stumble over Jesus Christ. Paul said of Jesus Christ that he was a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks, but to everyone who believed he became both the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:23,24).
George Orwell wrote of our poignant ambiguity. John and Paul spoke of the power and wisdom given us by Christ. The reason was simple. The message became the medium. The message was God, and that message became a man.

THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

Dear Lord and Father of us all,
who art near at hand
and yet beyond our grasp,
we have tried to hide from Thee
pretending to be someone else
hoping that because we were well-hidden
that Thou wouldst not find us out.
Give us the wisdom and power to see
that the awful truth of our inner failure
is but a prologue to a life with Thee.
We thank Thee
for not giving us one more message
but for investing Thyself in Thy Word.
We turn with confusion
wondering who to believe and what to doubt
often finding ourselves on the verge of despair,
but we know that in a world of propaganda
we can turn to Thee
finding in Jesus Christ
our wisdom and power.
Give us the capacity to get beyond
the fleshy slogans and clarion calls
to that simplicity
of Bethlehem.
In the Name of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

BEYOND THE BIG LIE

“He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:2 RSV).

The Big Lie is often thought of as the heart of propaganda. Actually, facts are more important because propaganda is not so much a telling of lies as it is a perverting of the truth. The problem does not rest in the facts but in how people look at them. When a prisoner is brainwashed, he is not given a new set of facts. He is given a new interpretation of them.
Propaganda is the verbal battleground in the war of ideologies, and as with a lot of wars, a great many innocent victims get chewed up. They are innocent because they believe what others tell them. This is why ideological “true believers” are often the inexperienced young. They have not yet found that most claims to truth do not square with all the facts.
Often the gospel is treated by both its proponents and opponents as an ideology. It is offered as a truth, an exclusive one, that will explain everything from foreign policy to ways of getting rich.
However, it is more than an ideology. It is a relationship between God and man, and, as such, it gives man the capacity to live beyond ideology.
In the second verse, John did more than reiterate the triplet of the first verse. Using one of the strongest pronouns, the demonstrative, as a personal pronoun, he made clear that the Word was not an idea, but a person to whom one could relate. The Word was not an “It” but a “He”.
Later in his Gospel, he picked up this theme when he quoted Jesus as saying “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6 RSV). The Word of God is not an ideology, but a person. Ideologies do not give life. They create death. Persons give life, and the person of the Word of God gave us life by being born amongst us.

BEYOND THE BIG LIE

Eternal Lord,
who appearest so far off
and yet who art so nigh,
spare us the folly of believing our lies
and giving ourselves over to our truism
for, dear Lord, Thou knowest better than we
that yesterday’s truth is often today’s lie.
The flags we have followed
and causes we have espoused,
have brought us the sadness
that our truth is dim indeed.
The sweet taste of righteousness
has turned sour when mixed
with the acids of life.
Give us the strength to go beyond
what we believe about the world,
about life, death, and destiny,
to find in our Immanuel,
that Word enfleshed in a Babe,
not one more ideology
but Thee in our frame and our dust.
May we thus be released
from the grip of our fears
to thank Thee and obey Thee
that we might love as Thou hast loved.
Through the power of Jesus Christ.
Amen.


LIFE, LIGHT AND DARKNESS

THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS

“All things were made through him” (John 1:3a RSV).

Often the God of the Old Testament is contrasted with the God of the New assuming that the former is harsh and vindictive and the latter loving and kind; however, such a contrast fails on two counts. First, it does not square with the biblical record if one recalls the beauty of the 23rd Psalm and the harsh saying of Jesus about hypocrites. Also, it does not stand the test of experience.
In John’s time, as in ours, many people separated the world into realms of spirit and matter, the one being good and the other evil. The function of religion was to help people escape the material world into the spiritual, to flee from darkness into light. It was a religion of escape.
Also, in John’s time, the material world was often thought of as the domain of the Old Testament God and the spiritual world the New Testament God. The difficulty with this was simple. How could God love an essentially evil world? How could he assume its wicked and filthy flesh? Well, he could not, but the aim of this outlook was to damn the world and run away from it anyhow. The result was that Jesus Christ was an illusion. God never really became a man.
One of John’s principal purposes was to combat this outlook, for he correctly saw it as a contradiction of the gospel. He began his task by saying that the Word of God who enfleshed himself in Jesus Christ was the creative agent through whom the world was made, but he said more than that. He did not use the word “world”. He used the phrase “all things” which meant that all the dirt and muck, all the beauty and grace, indeed everything, was from God’s hand.
In some ways, it is easier to separate the world along the lines of bad and good, matter and spirit. The difficulty is that it is simply a defeat for life. A person runs away only when he has lost. John was preparing believers not for defeat, but for victory.

THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS

Dear Lord and Almighty God,
who hast stunned us
by the surprise
of our Lord’s birth,
with our indulgence in momentary pleasures
we have forgotten the ancient treasures
of Joseph, Mary, and the Infant Jesus,
because we have felt that life is askew
we have lived as if Thou wert divorced
from the grime, shame, and glory of life.
Give us the capacity to live beyond our fears,
to take the journey of faith
and live as if all things
were, indeed, in Thy hands.
Deliver us from escape
and strengthen us to conquer
our fear and frustration
that we might not forget
all those whom we find distasteful.
As we prepare our hearts for Thy coming,
we ask Thee to engrave upon our hearts
the knowledge that Thou didst come
among the poor and outcast
and will likely be appearing among them
today and tomorrow.
Through the power of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

EVEN THE LITTLE, TINY BABIES

“And without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3b).

Although John wrote in Greek, he did not shake some of the patterns of thought and expression of his Hebrew forebears. In the first verse and again in the third, he uses a familiar device of Hebraic poetry, called parallelism. Rather than depending upon rhythm, meter, and rhyme, as does much of English poetry, it used parallel lines of expression. One finds this throughout the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms, and in many places in the New Testament, such as the Beatitudes and the Prologue to the Gospel of John.
Although the lines are parallel, they are not mere reduplications. With each successive line, a new emphasis is added. In the first verse, we could see John developing his thought in each line, and in the third verse we find him restating the first line negatively in the second line.
Also, John wanted to make sure that everyone got the point, so, in the second line, he used the phrase “not one thing” as a parallel for “all things” in the first line. John was saying that God’s creation was not just a matter of the stars, the moon, and all the other glories. It also extended to the last little things in the nooks and crannies of life. As the old gospel song said, “Even the little, tiny babies” are in God’s hands.
Then, just to make sure that everyone got the point, he added the awkward phrase, “that was made”. “All things great and small” were made by God. All men mean and good are a part of his plan. Nothing is left out of his love.
The heart of the issue was simple. If the world was inherently evil, then God could not have become a man. So John, like the author of Genesis, had to say that in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, this is really God’s world because he made not only the whole thing but everything in it.

EVEN THE LITTLE, TINY BABIES

Creator of us and all living things,
who out of nothing
didst make everything,
who assumed our flesh
to subdue our death,
didst fashion life,
we have tried hard to live
and yet we know we die
because we have tried
apart from Thee.
Forgive us for believing in the dark
and for banking on the evils of life.
We live as if corruption will win the day
assuming that the good is but a shadow
that fades in the deepening of the night.
O Lord, so much appears out of kilter
and so many things are askew,
and it is easy for us to believe
that nothing much matters.
Help us remember that
from the greatest to the least
Thy love extends to all
because Thou didst make
all things and every little thing.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

LIFE IS A CHOICE

“All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3 RSV).

Death colors all of our lives, for we are all terminal cases. This is the true brute fact with which all men must contend, and no matter how much we speak about joy and happiness, this one absurd event still remains to end it all.
When John wrote as he did about “all things” and every little thing being in the hands of God, he had to answer the question, “Well, what about death?”
There are several possible choices. Some ancients and many moderns flee their worlds seeking to escape through religion, drugs, and pleasures from the pain and injury of life. Still others, ancient and modern, resign themselves with either a dull bitterness or a genteel submission to life’s final absurdity. All of these, however, have made a common decision about evil. They think it is the final reality, and goodness merely a deceptive interlude.
John, too, made a choice, for he assumed that finally it made more sense to think that evil was a corruption of goodness than to think of goodness as a strange interlude in evil. Things like this can never be proved. They are assumed. Each man makes his own choice by faith.
In terms of amount, there may be more evil, but the amount is not the final issue. More important that that is intensity. Death is tragic because life is so dear. Evil is horrible only if one assumes that life is good and beautiful, that things were not meant to be the way they are.
In a way, a choice is an act of faith, and John’s faith was that life was the final reality, else death would not be so poignant. If, indeed, God did make everything, then he came himself to redeem it that the dearness of life not simply end with death.

LIFE IS A CHOICE

Almighty God and gracious Father,
who hast pursued us
while we have fled Thee,
we have driven so hard after our goals
that all we have seen are the stop signs
and have forgotten how to enjoy the journey
so consumed have we been by our destination.
Deliver us from such arrogance
so that we can savor the sights and smells
of the beauty and glory all around us.
We have been so taken with evil
and have become so bitter at death
that we have forgotten all about life
thinking that goodness is but a dream.
Give us that sturdiness of spirit
that allows us to persevere
amidst a plentitude of evil
because we have seen the goodness
of Thy creation in the cradle of Jesus.
Let us not use our despair and bitterness
as an excuse to ignore our clear duties
to care for the poor, to lead the blind
and to give our flesh
and to spill our blood
as Thou didst care for and lead us
at the innkeeper’s stall
and the lonely hill.
For the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

EXISTENCE AND LIFE

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:14 RSV).

The certification of death is one of the most perplexing problems in modern society. Some think that death occurs when hearts stop pumping. Others think a person dead when he stops breathing, and still others speak of a brain irreversibly damaged. Blood, breath, and electrical impulse are used as the measure of life and death.
However, when someone lies in the hospital with all three of these vital signs operating but suffering frightening pain, it is common to hear someone say, “Well, if you ask me, that’s not what I call living.”
There is obviously more to life than vital signs. Widows know this when they say after the death of their husbands, “I feel as if a part of my life has gone.”
People are distressed by death not so much because of the physical end, as they are by the termination of treasured relationships. When people move from one town to another, they suffer a form of petite death as they are separated from people they love. Many people bear the scars of grief when they lose a close friend through a misunderstanding or dispute.
The life of which John spoke was not physical existence. He was speaking about that experience that makes physical existence enjoyable and rewarding, the experience of loving and being loved.
He elaborated this later in his Gospel when he quoted Jesus in his great prayer, “And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3 RSV). The word “know” did not mean for John an intellectual understanding, but rather an immediate experience of trust and love.
When God became a man in the infant Jesus, he was reaching across the chasm of space and time to offer us life. Blood, breath, and thought are merely preludes to this life, for the life itself is the experience of God’s love.

EXISTENCE AND LIFE

Dear Lord and Father of us all,
who didst imprison Thyself in our flesh
that we might be set free by Thy Spirit,
trifles have overcome our lives
and we have dallied with Thy mercy.
We have been wandering among the side-shows
while the elephants have marched by
and we have wondered why,
we have missed the main event.
Give us wisdom to attend to the important
and to forgive the trivial
that we might not simply be
well clothed dead men.
Help us heal the hatreds
that have caused us grief
over the loss of those
whom we once loved.
But more important than that
give us grace not to fear
our grave any more than our bed
because our life with Thee
is securely held in Thy hands.
We are grateful that Thou hast pursued us
down of our years
even when it meant
becoming one with us.
In the Name of our Lord.
Amen.

A BEAM, NOT A FLOODLIGHT

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4 RSV).

John did not live in an age of fluorescent lights. His was an age of candles and torches, and one has to keep this in mind in reading him. The image he used here is that of a beam piercing the darkness, something like a lighthouse on a headland sending its rays through the gloom of night.
The overwhelming experience of mankind is an experience of darkness, a wandering around uncertain of which way to go and fearful that every decision might be wrong. John’s image of light is like a beam searching that darkness with hope, beckoning the lost around the shoals into homeport. The light of God is not a light of exposure, but a light of leading, bringing men out of darkness.
The fear of darkness is not the fear of the unknown so much as it is the fear of being lost, of wandering around not knowing where one is going. Light is treasured because it shows the way out.
The peculiar thing about John is that he thought that light came after and flowed from life while most of us think the opposite. We want to know before we live. We want all the roadmaps before we start every journey. We want it all figured out. We want floodlights rather than beams leading us in the way.
But the fact is that a person learns as he lives, that understanding flows from experience. No amount of knowledge can prepare one for life, but life opens up the possibilities of understanding.
The light of God did not come to us in a series of abstract truths about God, man, and the world. The light came in a life, and the liveliest life of all in that of an infant. The real light of Christmas was not the star which the Wise Men followed. It was the radiance that surrounded the crib, for there God’s light was shining in the dark of the night.

A BEAM, NOT A FLOODLIGHT

Almighty God,
who created the blessings of the light
and yet who in darkness still art near,
often we have sought the darkness
fearing the exposure of the light
preferring to wander a while
hoping against hope
that we might find the way.
When our lamps are low
and our hopes fade away,
dear Lord, may we see Thy beam afar,
beckoning us from our darkness.
Spare us the folly of shouting in the dark
and thinking that the echo is a response
deceiving us that we are not far from shore.
Help us turn deaf ears
to all the noise of life,
to the loud hurrahs
of the uncertain,
that we might hear
the cry of a Babe
in the night
and see that simple beam
shining through
our darkness
leading us
home to Thee.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5 RSV).

Malcolm Muggeridge, the British wit, wrote in his essay, “Backward, Christian Soldiers!” “Pessimism has, indeed, been Christianity’s greatest strength, and reason for its survival.”
This outlook has been a minority report for most of the twentieth century, for the general belief has been that life is getting better day by day.
However, the same twentieth century has been hard on such optimism. Dachau, Hiroshima, Vietnam, genocides, and communist tyrannies have all taken their toll of that sanguine outlook. When optimists face the facts about life, they likely become deep pessimists thinking that rather than being an escalator, life is really a squirrel cage.
The basic question that John faced, as all of us do, is the relationship of the darkness of the world to the light of our hopes. Some thought that there was an eternal warfare between the forces of light and darkness and that life was an eternal struggle and battleground. Others fled the night hoping to find a perpetual day within themselves. And still others, giving up hope, indulged themselves in the seeming pleasures of the night.
Only modern man with all of his created terrors has dared to think that things were getting better, and as he made instruments to carry out his dark purposes, only he has called himself enlightened. The sadness is that he has believed his own lie, and those who stopped believing it have been so overwhelmed by their darkness that they could see no light at all.
The darkness is what men have done with the world, how they fouled their own nest, and the light is what God intends to do with the world, how he plans to redeem it. Sometimes the lamp flickers, but it never goes out.

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

Everlasting Father,
Who hast made us for Thyself
so that our hearts are restless
‘til they rest in Thee,
we have tried to make the shows of peace
while we have been at war within.
We have assailed others
to hide the assaults of our fears.
Deliver us from our inner turmoil
and spare us our secret fears.
O Lord, sometimes we act like glowworms
creeping along with only the gloom
of our own wisdom to guide us.
Keep us from looking to the stars
and searching our hearts
to find some message from Thee,
for Thou has given us Thy Word
in the flesh and blood of Jesus.
May we no longer
arrogantly believe our own lies
about the enlightenment of modern man
and may we turn
faithfully to Thy Word
enfleshed in the dark of night
with an ancient message of grace.
Because of the grace of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

A PURGATION OF THE SOUL

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5 RSV).

The purpose of a tragedy according to Aristotle was a purgation or cleansing of the soul. By imitating human life, only on a large scale, a tragedy first caused fear in the people as they saw the actors come to a bad end for the same causes they found within themselves. Then moved by pity, the people were cleansed of their emotions having been reconciled to human fate.
John did not write a tragedy, nor did he write a comedy. The end was frightening but not defeating as in a tragedy, and it certainly did not turn out all right as in a comedy. The Gospels of the New Testament do not fit the customary categories of tragedy and comedy, and John told us why. The darkness did not overcome the light.
John probably meant two things by “overcome”. First of all, it meant an understanding. the children of darkness simply did not understand the children of light. They thought they were daft. Indeed, they were considered either lunatics or drunks.
Secondly, it meant a quelching. The darkness did not defeat the light.
John pointed to God’s birth among men when he wrote, “The light shines in the darkness”, but he pointed to the crucifixion and resurrection when he wrote “and the darkness has not overcome it.”
A few at the birth of Jesus had a slight grasp of what was going on, but mostly they were baffled. No one understood what was going on at the crucifixion.
The world simply does not grasp the gospel, but also the world can never conquer it. It appears insane, but it endures and prevails while the world fades away.
The reasons are simple. Light illuminates darkness, but darkness cannot swallow the light. Darkness can do nothing to the light, but light can destroy the darkness.

A PURGATION OF THE SOUL

Almighty God and merciful Father,
who hast touched our lives with Thyself
while we have made diagrams of Thee,
forgive us the fugitive quality of our lives
as we try to run away
from ourselves and from Thee.
May we understand that darkness
is merely the absence of light
and has no power of its own.
Firmly plant our lives in the certainty
that Thy light can outshine our darkness
and that if we need fear anyone,
it is not Thee, but ourselves.
If we have seen Thy light, dear Lord,
spare us the folly of condemning
those who still walk in darkness
for all that separates us from them
is Thine opening of our eyes.
We thank Thee for Bethlehem,
for Golgotha,
and for the empty tomb,
for Thy light being born in the dark of the night,
still shining in the heat of the day,
and breaking the grip of the dark
as he rose from the deep of the night,
on an early morn at the break of day.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.


A WITNESS TO THE LIGHT

THE CHOICE

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John” (John 1:6 RSV).

John the Baptist was in a long line of prophets whom God sent to man, and as with everyone in that line, he was noteworthy for two reasons. First, he was sent, and secondly, he was sent with a message. Without those two reasons, John the Baptist would simply be another face in the crowd.
We live in an age which lays heavy stress upon human choice. We disagree with ideas like predestination, thinking that they take away human freedom, but actually the opposite is the case. Freedom does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in a context of possible choices.
God sent John the Baptist to men that they might be given a choice about their own lives. Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that God forces the choice upon us by demanding some sort of a response.
The message was simple and hard. Men had to choose between light and darkness. The darkness was the way of the world, the convenient lies that form the wrap and woof of every society. The light was living by that small ray of God’s graciousness that pierced through human pretension and fraudulence.
It is understandable that men would choose the darkness because it is easier in the short run but damning in the long run. It is easier because it demanded less of them but damning because they would eventually lose their soul to the darkness.
But that is not the prime issue. The important point it that God is searching for man, not man for God. It is God who sends out his Word and becomes a man to find us, not we who become like God looking for him. Our freedom is not in our choice of God, but rather in the quality of our response to his choice for us.

THE CHOICE

Most merciful Father,
who didst make the light
to overcome the night,
forgive us for claiming to be wise
and for calling ourselves enlightened,
for we have really preferred our darkness
and have shut our hearts and minds to Thy light.
Sadly, we come even to believe our own lies
confusing fact with fiction,
and mistaking truth for falsehood.
Spare us such foolishness
for we deceive only ourselves
and perhaps a few other bewildered souls
but surely not Thee,
for we should know by now
that what Thou dost believe about us
is far more important
than what we believe about Thee.
We are grateful that Thou didst not wait
for us to find Thee by searching Thee out,
but didst haunt our darkness with Thine Infant
and bother us with Thy prophets
disturbing our darkness with Thy light
and discomfiting our ignorance
with Thy Word.
In remembrance and power of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

A WITNESS

“He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light” (John 1:7 RSV).

Our English word “martyr” comes from the Greek word “witness”, for a martyr is someone who has witnessed to Jesus Christ by his death.
Originally, the words in both the English and the Greek were legal terms. They mean a person called into court to speak about something of which he has direct and immediate knowledge. Thus, there are two things of importance about a witness, his knowledge of the event and his connection with it. Other than that, he is unimportant. The important thing is the event.
John the Baptist’s importance lies in the light of God, and in a time when spiritual autobiographies are passed off as witnessing, it is important to recall that a witness points beyond himself to something else.
A great deal of what passes for Christian witnessing is something like the before and after pictures in the advertisements in men’s magazines for body building programs. The witness points to what he was like before and shows off what he is like now, palming himself off as a recommendation for the program.
However, the witness is unimportant in himself. He is simply one thirsty man telling another thirsty man where the water is. The water is the important fact, not the thirst.
We cannot commend the gospel by commending ourselves because of ourselves we have nothing to commend. The only people who might be interested in our before and after stories are the idly curious, not the seriously concerned.
A witness is someone whom God has called to testify to what he has done in Jesus Christ. John the Baptist witnessed to the light which had come into darkness to illuminate the way to wanderers. He was one man in the darkness telling other men in the darkness where the light was.

A WITNESS

Almighty God,
who sent Thy son to us
that we might be sent to men,
forgive us for trifling with Thy Word
making it a thing for our arrogance.
Give us the ability to be simple and direct
and spare us the liability of being indirect
by pointing to ourselves rather than to Thee.
O Lord, Thou hast done so much for us
in sending Thy Son in our frame and dust,
in suffering with our flesh and blood,
that we wonder
why we are still impressed with ourselves.
Guide our hearts and minds
helping us to grasp the simple truth
that as Thy Word became Thy Deed
so our witness must become
the loving act of our lives.
May we remember all the days of our lives
that our diagrams and charts of Thy will
are merely the busy work of idle hands
so that we not pass off our truths
as easy substitutes for Thee.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

THE TRANSPARENT BELIEVER

“That all might believe through him” (John 1:7b RSV)

Just as there is confusion about the nature of witnessing, so there is confusion about the nature of belief. As is often the case, the key to a verb’s meaning is in the prepositions that go with it. For instance, the word witness points beyond itself by the use of the pre-position “to”. A person witnesses to something else.
The difficulty with the word “believe” is that a variety of prepositions and pronouns can follow it leaving a great many possible meanings. Often “that” follows “believe” making the word mean an agreement with an idea. People either believe that God exists or does not exist, and while such an idea is very important, it is not what John meant.
The usual preposition that follows believe is “in” or particularly in John “into”. While the existence of God is part of it, it does not mean an intellectual agreement so much as trust in a person. One person has to know something of the quality of another person of he is to trust him, but the heart of belief is not the knowledge but the act of handling over oneself to someone else.
John does not follow believe with “into” on this verse, however. He uses the preposition “through”. He means that people saw through John the Baptist to the light, for the purpose of John the Baptist’s testimony was that people might believe through him in Jesus Christ. He was simply a means to an end. The less he intruded himself into
what he was doing, the more effective he was. The best window is the one a person does not think is there. The most effective witness is the one who does not make us conscious of his presence.
In many pulpits there is a plague facing the preacher which reads, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.” It is a quotation from, John’s Gospel, and it captures the meaning of this verse. The witness is transparent. People see through him to Jesus Christ.

THE TRANSPARENT BELIEVER

Merciful Lord,
who needest not one of us
but takest delight in us,
forgive us for puffing up ourselves
and palming off our selves as examples.
When we can think of nothing else
and we are feeling morbid about ourselves
but want a little attention,
we try to display ourselves as bad examples
so that others might learn from our mistakes.
When we have thought we have done well,
and enjoy whistling in the dark,
we try to commend ourselves to others
by telling them how great things are.
From both of these follies,
Spare us, dear Lord,
for we are seldom as bad as we make out
and we are never as good
as we would have others believe.
Deliver us from all such lies and conceits,
for we are more often than not
the chief victim of our folly.
May we forget all the tinsel and wrappings
that seem so important in our lives
and get to that simple and crude manger
where there is some sense amidst our nonsense
and light in our darkness.
Through the power of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

SETTING THINGS STRAIGHT

“He was not the light, but came to bare witness to the light” (John 1:8 RSV).

This verse seems almost superfluous, for John had already made his point about witnessing and believing. One wonders why he had to say it again. The reason is obvious. Someone had not gotten the point.
John the Baptist had been a popular figure among the masses, for he had caught their fancy just as striking religious figures do from time to time. They had been oppressed and victimized by both the Roman and Jewish authorities, and John the Baptist seemed to be proclaiming the beginning of a new era. The down-trodden always respond gleefully to someone who says that a new age is dawning.
John the Baptist was right about the new era, but the masses had missed the point. The new era was not a political insurrection. It was not ushered in by armies, but by a Babe in a manger.
People had a hard time connecting John the Baptist’s message with the reality of Jesus Christ, and John the Baptist remained probably far more popular among the people than Jesus ever was. The problem was not John the Baptist, but the people who heard him.
John felt that he had to set John the Baptist in a correct relationship to Jesus Christ to counteract the popular enthusiasm for John the Baptist’s memory. This is why John was at pains to set the record straight.
However, John’s pains should serve us as a good reminder that messengers are often mistaken for the message. In times past it was often the custom for the king in his anger to slay the messenger who bore evil tidings. Often we find among believers in Jesus Christ the mistake of equating the message with the messenger by exalting the messenger because he bears good news. Great preaching means that one does not notice the great preacher so enchanted is he with the great message.

SETTING THINGS STRAIGHT

Almighty God and merciful Father,
whose message
and person
are the same,
we have too often confused ourselves with Thee
thinking that we are higher than we really are,
and when we have been disappointed in ourselves,
we have begun to confuse others with Thee.
O Lord, it is not the Wise Men
who had all the answers,
for they came just like everyone else
loaded with their secret burdens,
to find release from their sins
and strength for a new life in Thee.
Let us not make more of men
than they can bear,
for we will crush them
with all our acclaim
and deceive ourselves
with a misplaces faith.
As we try to get past the throngs
and work our way through the hubbard
of our Christmas celebrations,
may we not be deflected
by the charm of others
from finding Thy charm
on Mary and her Child.
In the Name of the Holy Child.
Amen.

THE REAL THING

“The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world”(John 1:9 RSV).

In a plastic society we all years for something genuine. We want to get beyond the “authentic reproductions” and the “genuine imitations” to something we remember was once there. We call it “the real thing.” Not satisfied with the cosmetic smiles pasted on the faces of all the nice people we know, we would sometimes even rejoice with relief at a display of anger for the joy of knowing that someone real is there.
We speak of “the feel of real leather,” “the taste of whole grain wheat,” and “the texture of weathered wood.” Some people even buy the boards off old barns to hide their plasterboard walls. Wool is in short supply because people have grown tired of polyester.
Our yearning to get beyond the polyester society to the real thing is itself genuine, but often our attempt to fulfill that yearning is plastic. In a time of wistfulness for the authenticities of the past, real people are often in just as short a supply as virgin wool. The reason is simple. The real thing is not sought through things real or phony, but in a person, and it comes at a price, the cost of God’s gift and the expense of our lives.
Jesus Christ was the genuine article. He was not a substitute for God. He was God himself. When John speaks of the truth, depending on the word he uses, he means either faithfulness or genuineness, and here he means that the true light was the genuine light.
He did not say that there were no other lights. He simply said that the light of Jesus Christ was the real thing. If a person yearns for something genuine, the place to look is in the cradle where the real God became real man. If we go there, then we can begin to speak about authenticity because there we will see it and just might catch it.

THE REAL THING

Eternal Father,
who hast pierced our walls of plaster
with the cry of the Babe in the manger,
forgive us
for turning that Infant of Thine
into painted and plastic reproduction
cosmetically fit
for television sets,
cocktail tables,
and store windows.
Help us recall the fears of Mary and Joseph
and how those fears were sadly confirmed
when it came time for him to die.
We have been so taken in
by our tinseled society
that we are hard put
to tell the real
from the fraudulent.
If there were world enough and time
we could but begin to thank Thee
for replacing our imitations
of flesh. blood and love
with a child gasping for air
who it turns out at last
was Thee grasping for us.
For Christ’s Sake
Amen.

ON SEEING IN THE DARK

“The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1:9 RSV)

One of the most oft-heard complaints against the Christian faith, in general, and Christians, in particular, is that the Christians claim that Christianity is the only way. Indeed, some Christians drive around with “One Way” bumper stickers on their cars. It is difficult for non-Christians, and sometimes even Christians, not to be offended by such seeming arrogance.
To begin with, one must disengage the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ himself to be the light o God from what many Christians have done with his claim. John wrote that Jesus Christ was “the true light that enlightens” all men, and Jesus said of himself, “I am the light of the world.” (John 8:12 RSV) The witness is clear, but Christians have made it muddy.
Jesus and John were pointing to an exclusiveness of authenticity, not one of access. They were saying that the authentic light of God was available to all men. They were not saying that if a person did not subscribe to a specific creedal formula of some Christian group that he would be damned.
Jesus’ exclusive claim had an inclusive aim. Its purpose was not to keep people out, but to bring them in.
In short, Jesus Christ did not come to man to damn him, but that he might be saved. No matter where a man is, what he has been doing, or what he believes there is something in that man’s life that causes him to ache for the love of God. The exclusiveness of Jesus Christ does not mean that Christians are right and non-Christians are wrong. It means that the light of God reaches our to all men, Christians and non-Christians alike.
The point is that Jesus Christ is the light, not that Christians have the light. The light that radiated from the stable irradiated all men, but they, ironically, can only see the light if they are aware of their night.

ON SEEING IN THE DARK


Merciful Lord and Father of us all,
who didst become one man
that all men might see Thee,
often as not, we think our darkness is light
confusing the faint glimmering of our ideas
with the radiance of Thy light.
Help us, we ask Thee,
to distinguish our sight
from thy light
and deliver us
from that repelling arrogance of believing
that because Thy light is for all men
all men should agree with us.
O Lord, we all see through our mirrors dimly
each of us reflecting
only a part of Thy light.
May we find reflected
in those whom we find baffling
and those with whom we disagree
something of the fullness of Thy light.
Give us the grace
to come to Bethlehem
offering not our wisdom
but our gratitude
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

THE DIVINE BRIDGEHEAD


“The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the worlds” (John 1:9 RSV).

“There’s nothing you can’t prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited,”2 commented Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’ murder mystery, Whose Body? He was replying to the theory that God is a secretion of the liver. He thought that the theory was all right as far as it went but it did not go nearly far enough.
Most theories of God are all right, for they are never totally bereft of some truth. The verse at hand goes far enough, for in it John spoke about God coming into the world. Most theories about God leave him safely tucked away in the heavens where he cannot come to any harm or by chance afflict human beings, or neatly hidden somewhere in the human soul where he can be kept like some heirloom treasured, polished, but irrelevant.
John had a persistent habit of speaking about the Word of God in two ways, immediately and awesomely. And in Jesus Christ the immediacy and the awesomeness came together when the light of God came into the world. An understanding of God that does not go that far never goes far enough. It is all right to speak about God in the heavens or in the soul, or liver, if you will, but unless God becomes a part of the muck, glory and tedium that makes up the most of human life, then while he may exist, there is not much to it at all.
One can trace the development of John’s thought in the Prologue as he starts with the deity of the Word of God, goes on to the creativity of the Word, pauses for a reflection on the witness of John the Baptist, and then resumes with the approaching humanity of the word. It was John’s advent message for the Word of God moved from deity, to creativity, to humanity, not changing as he moved, but remaining God, Creator, and Man.

THE DIVINE BRIDGEHEAD

Almighty God, our gracious Lord,
who art timeless and yet timely
because Thou art
both God and man,
forgive us for confusing
the ordinariness of Thy birth
with familiarity with Thee,
for we have assumed
that since Thou are near
Thou art no longer afar off.
Aid our understanding
that we may see
in the common-place quality of Thy birth
an awesome immediacy
which draws us
in an enchanted fear
to the inevitable
of a God with flesh.
We thank Thee
for all Thy wonders
and signs of mercy,
but, above all, we thank Thee,
that Thou didst not wait
for us to search Thee out,
but didst come to us
whose ways are so obvious.
In the power and presence of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY


“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not” (John 1:10 RSV).

The word “world” for John did not mean the created universe or even the earth. It meant the world of men and affairs, the sound and the fury of civilization.
John expressed a constant ambivalence for the world, for in it he saw the object of God’s love and the cause of Christ’s crucifixion. It was to be embraced but not trusted.
The remarkable thing is that anyone would believe that the Word of God could be in the world. It is difficult to believe especially for those who believe in purity.
There are some believers in Jesus who think that a person should not mix religion and politics because politics is too dirty. They want to keep their religion safe and secure, unspoiled and uncontaminated by the world. While their aim may appear laudable, it does not set squarely with the gospel, for John said quite simply that the Word of God was mixed up in this moral confusion called the world.
The purpose of Jesus Christ was not purity, but redemption and the only way he could redeem the world was by becoming a part of it. Paul said it strongly when he wrote: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (II Cor. 5:21 RSV)
Nothing ever gets done in this world by keeping clean. Somewhere along the line someone has to get dirty, and that is exactly what happened in the birth of our Lord. The scenes of his birth in the church look sanitary, but symbolically and actually he was born on filth.
God loved us enough to send the very best, but he also loved us enough to send the very best amidst the very worst. God got dirty that men might be cleansed. God had to be one with man that men might be one with God.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY


Eternal Father of us all,
who wast born of flesh and blood,
that we might be born of fire and Spirit,
we are sick and dying,
and our healers do not know why.
They speak of our environment,
about our mothers and fathers,
about our pressures and stresses
and about our dreams in the might,
nut, O Lord, we know that we are
too much in love with the world
and have forgotten
that as it crucified Thee,
so it will crucify us.
Give us the wisdom of the serpent
that we might go into the world
and not be taken in by it,
and the innocence of the dove
that we might go into the world
with love for it, but not love of it.
When we remember Thy birth,
may we not be enchanted
by the shepherds and angels,
but the charm
of the Babe in the night.
In the dear Name of Jesus.
Amen.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER THE ALTERNATIVE


“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not” (John 1:10 RSV).

Maurice Chevalier, the famous French entertainer and bonvivant, once said, “Growing old isn’t so bad—when one consider the alternative.”
There are many difficulties with the Christian faith, but when one considers the alternatives, the Christian faith comes off well, indeed.
One of the difficulties is the notion that the world was made by God through his Word, for if one believes that, then he has to answer for all the pain and anguish that afflict mankind.
It all goes back to that thing called freedom. God did not make the evil, but he created its possibilities. When parents give their children the keys to the car, they are creating the possibilities of pain, anguish and death. The alternative is to take away their freedom by not allowing them to drive.
In making the world and coming into it, God set up the possibility of his rejection by men, else belief in him would mean nothing at all, for coerced belief is merely a sullen submission, not an experience of joy.
One of the ironies of life is that while the Word of God was the agent through whom God make the world, the world did not know him when he came. The disciples who had been with our Lord during his days in the flesh did not recognize him after he had risen from the dead. Most of the world passed by the stable the night he was born.
Belief has to be free or it is nothing at all. Virtue cannot be compelled. If we wish to take away all the misery at one fell swoop, then we must too take away the freedom, but that takes away the joy. Just as God freely gave himself in his birth, so we can freely give ourselves in belief. Without that there is no joy at his birth.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER THE ALTERNATIVE


Almighty God, our dear Father,
who didst imprison Thyself in our flesh
that we might find freedom in Thy Spirit,
we have wandered around looking for a cause
telling ourselves that we are free
for having sold our souls
to this man’s claim
and that man’s promise.
Indeed, often we have turned
the freedom of the gospel
into a series of shibboleths
thinking that because we fetter ourselves
with dogmas and final truths
and prescriptions for happiness
that we will be free
from all the anxieties
that beset us.
Deliver us from selling our birthright
and give us the grace to live
without the customary means of support
that we may live freely with Thee
assured not by our ideas and programs
but by comfort of Thy presence
May we remember that Thou didst come humbly
that we might believe joyfully.
For the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

AND YET AS A STRANGER


“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not” (John 1:10 RSV)

The gaiety and joyousness demanded during the Christmas holidays often clarifies a reflection of inner sadness as a person looks through his windows at the outward happiness around him. But the Christmas poignancy of a man trying to cope with his present confusions while recalling happier times past is more than just an amalgam of present ambiguity and recalled joy. It is the realization that Jesus came amongst his own and traveled yet as a stranger. Born an outsider without respectability he lived under a cloud of illegitimacy amongst the offscourings of society.
On the verge of respectability, he moved in and out of the company of decent people, associating with outcasts, unaccepted and finally rejected. He died a common criminal on a trumped-up charge of insurrection.
The poignancy is right there in his birth. Like the scion of an ancient and honorable family he came to his ancestral home only to find it disfigured and disgraced by a ling succession of corrupt tenants. He could have thrown them out, but he chose graciousness over justice and goodness. He knew that the disgrace lay not in a disfigured creation, but in the scarred people who marred the beauty of the world with the graffiti of human civilization, such as concentration camps, wars to end wars, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, and uninhabitable cities. The fault lay not , however, with the works of their hands, but in the workings of their hearts.
Jesus came to that lonely crowd, a stranger among strangers. The world knew him not, as John said, because the world did not know itself and therefore, could not hope to know him. Thinking it owned the house, it was only a tenant.

AND YET AS A STRANGER


Gracious God,
who lonely walked the lonesome road,
yet strangely a friend to strangers,
forgive us our tinseled trappings at The Nativity
for we have tried to clothe our loneliness
with the fashionable garments of hilarity.
Deepen our sensibilities to Thy presence
that on finding ourselves alone
we know by Thee we shall be found.
May we be grateful
when the tide is full
and the sea is calm
and the moon lies fair
on the far shores
of our distant hopes
so that when our lives withdraw
on fortune’s tide
and the night wind
blows out the stars
we shall thank Thee
for that eternal strangeness
of an Alien who died
with few to mourn
and of a Stranger
most strangely born.
In Jesus’ Name.
Amen.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN


“He came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11 RSV)

In his novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe tells the story of a writer’s search for faith, and his gnawing fear that if he goes home as a part of that search, he will be destroyed. He has no place left but the future with the realization that his fulfillment “is yet to come.”
One of the ironies of man’s makeup is his capacity to draw on the resources of his heritage to gain strength the repudiate it. We think it common to adolescence, and if that be true, we are, as many would suggest, perpetually adolescent.
Thomas Wolfe’s hero never discovers the pathetic reality that when a man rejects his heritage, he also rejects himself, and that ironically, if a man would kill his father, he inevitably kills himself. There can be no “yet to come” without “a remembrance of things past.” The profound sorrow of parents spurned by their offspring is as nothing compared to the waste of the offspring. They can never go home, and therefore, having no place to leave, they have no place to which they can ever go. Without a past they have no future.
The Word of God could not come to the home he had made, but, paradoxically, as he was spurned by his home, he made a home for all the sons of Cain, all the wanders on the face of the earth.
God’s home in this world is oftentimes hard to find. It began in a stable among the poor and homeless and most of those with homes never found it. Their curtains were drawn, their doors were shut, and their eyes were blind, but the wanderers among the glories of this world found in that stable a hearth to warm their hearts, to nourish their souls, and a time to look ahead because they could look back as long as they lived to the quiet glory of that birth.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN


Dear God and Father
who didst not perish among the perishable
for having endured all the unendurable,
forgive us for not receiving Thee
for shutting our doors
and drawing our blinds
to the likes of Joseph
and stopping our ears
to the birth cries
of the forgotten Marys.
We often wonder
as we wander
why Thou didst come to be born
making home for us
while homeless we wandered
forgetting Thee.
We thank Thee
that among the ruins of our dreams
of pride and pomp and circumstance
Thou hast made a place full it seems
of grace and truth in abundance.
As Thou didst not forsake us
never let us forsake Thee
for if ever we would stand
we must kneel before Thy Child.
For the sake of the Holy Child Jesus.
Amen.

BUT HE’S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED


“He came to his own home, and his own people received him not”(John 1:11 RSV).

God is surprise. He dies not conform to man’s expectations, and as a result people have a difficult time recognizing him.
The natural tendency is to blame God and excuse ourselves for rejecting him because he is not what we expected; however, if he were what we expected, what use would he be? If God is predictable, then he is no better than we are, and that leaves us right where we are, which is where we do not want to be.
In the grand old tradition of pointing the finger of blame at others, Christmas have often pointed to the Jews as the ones who rejected God. While it is an historical fact that the Jews did indeed as a nation reject and condemn Jesus, they did not crucify him. The Romans did, so there is plenty of blame to go around.
But the point is not blame. The point is the wonder of men, both Jews and Gentiles, rejecting the one who made them, became one with them, and would die for them.
The irony is that those who claimed they had the truth did not receive the truth when it came. Those who thought they were the keepers of the flame did not see the light. The insiders became the outsiders.
One of the common themes of the Bible is that the poor, the foolish, and the weak are the inheritors and receivers of God’s grace. “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree,” (Luke 1:52 RSV) sang Mary, in the Magnificat. The reason is that the rich, the wise, and the strong trust themselves and thus they are unable to understand that God’s poverty, foolishness, and weakness are richer, wiser and stronger than men’s.
Luke said it graphically when he said “there was no place for them in the inn” although “he was of the house and lineage of David.” (Luke 2:7&4 RSV)

BUT HE’S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED

Everlasting Lord,
who wast quite extraordinary
because Thy birth was so ordinary,
we have a hard time with Thee
because Thou refusest to be
the tribal god we wish to see,
and sometimes we end up
preposterously believing
Thee dead to the world
all because Thou didst not
jump through our hoops
and play our games.
Dissuade us from all such
vainglorious enterprises,
for we know Thou dost not need
people puffed up in their conceits.
We pray that when the time comes
we may not be in the inn
loudly boasting of what
a good week we’ve had,
but may be out in the yard
idly watching the world go by
so captivated are we with
the peculiarities and surprises
of Thine appearances amongst us.
Through the merits of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

ACCEPTANCE OF ACCEPTANCE

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12 RSV).

Paul Tillich, the famous American theologian, in one of his many attempts to make the Christian faith intelligible to modern man, tried to define faith as the acceptance on the part of man of God’s acceptance of him. While appreciating his attempt, several fellow theologians faulted his definition as being too passive. Faith, they said, was a much more active and dynamic experience, As is often the case with many advocates and critics, they may have been talking right past each other.
The gospel has to “sink into” the consciousness of the person before he can do anything about it. John Dewey, the influential educator, called it the “Aha” experience, the realization of the meaning.
This sinking-in experience is not active, but passive. Things work on people, oftentimes unconsciously. They may have been bothered and disturbed, but unable to put their fingers on the problem, but then something dawns on them that gives them an understanding of things.
Faith is passive before it is active, and as a person grows in faith, he will find himself moving back and forth between the active and the passive phases. Indeed, if he is active all the time, he will soon run out of juice.
Paul Tillich, while his definition of faith may not have been complete, and in fairness to him he did not claim that it was, at least tapped something indigenous to the experience of faith. John spoke of the same thing, when he said, “to all who receive him.”
A person must receive Christ. That is to say, let the gospel sink in, before he can embrace Christ, that is to say, give himself over. With all the busyness of Advent and Christmas, it would be wise for believers to sit quietly by the stable and let that awesome message sink in, that God became a man.

ACCEPTANCE OF ACCEPTANCE

O Lord,
who became a man
that we might became
a little less than Thee,
we have been running around
trying to find Thy message
while all the time Thou hast been
standing quietly by
waiting for us to listen.
Sometimes, we have even claimed
to have Thy Word
when we did not,
pretending a piety before men
which covered us before them,
but not before Thee.
Give us the patience
to wait on Thee,
and spare us the impudence
of summoning Thee.
Reassure us that Thou wilt come
when Thou dost choose
in Thy good time.
as Thou didst come long ago
quietly in a back alley
among dumb brutes.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

ADOPTION AND SECOND BIRTH

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12 RSV).

“The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” is one of those commonly accepted bits of conventional wisdom in the religious consciousness of modern people. It is often used at gatherings where well-intentioned people wish to promote racial harmony.
It seldom does because it means almost nothing. It attempts to describe a state apart from a decision. While a man and a woman may beget and give birth to a child, that does not mean that they have made a decision to live the child, to raise it as their son or daughter. And some children never get around to accepting their parents. In other words, fatherhood, sonship, and brotherhood only come about when one person embraces another.
In the New Testament there are two dominant images used to illustrate this. Paul spoke about conversion as the image of being adopted into God’s family (Rom 8:23). John used the image of being born anew (John 3). One of the arresting things about both images is that the adoption and the new birth are the result of God’s action. Belief is not simply a decision on the part of man to choose God. It is the decision of God to turn us around, to make us his sons, to give us a new birth. In short, a believer is not one who has made a decision for Christ. He is one who knows God has made a decision for him.
The original image of father and son assumes this. A father must first love the child before the child can love the father. Faith then is not so much our decision for God, but our response to God’s decision for us.
We first heard of that decision when God became a man to stand with us. Perhaps, it was best expressed by Christina Georgina Rossetti in “Love came down at Christmas.” When the Person behind that message overcomes a man, then he believes.

ADOPTION AND SECOND BIRTH

Almighty and merciful God,
who before the beginning
didst foreknow the end
and before our birthday
didst foresee our death-bed,
we have been taken too much with our decisions
and have rested our faith in our commitments,
forgetting that we believe only because of Thee
and not by the strength of our decisions.
Indeed, dear Lord, even our response
is in Thy hands,
and our love for Thee
is not pulling us
toward Thee.
Help us keep things in perspective
that we may be more modest
about our claims on Thee
and more confident
of Thy claims on us.
We are deeply grateful
that Thou didst come to us
transgressing the barrier of our sins
and adopting then in Thy birth
that we might be adopted by Thee
in our second-birth.
Take away the defenses of our piety and disbelief
and overcome us by Thine Infant and His grace.
Through the mediation of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

NOT A CHOICE, BUT A CHANCE

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12 RSV).

In times past while driving through the countryside one often saw on fence posts and barnsides such religious slogans as , “Jesus Died for Your Sins.” Nowadays, urban religious placardeers plaster billboards and automobile bumpers with a new variety of slogans of which one of the most peculiar is, “Give Jesus a Chance.”
While that particular slogan is long on catchiness, it is short on intelligibility, for the problem is that man dies not give God a chance. As John pointed out, God gives man a chance. John raises the issue with the concept of power. Actually, he uses two words which we translate power, authority and ability. In this passage he means authority, or, to use the vernacular, chance. Jesus Christ gives man the right to become a child of God, a chance to call God his father.
Several years ago a famous teacher on hearing that a young man had claimed to be one of his students replied: “I recall that he attended my classes, but he was never one of my students.” Attending classes was open to all, but being called a student was a right given by the professor, not a choice made by the young man.
If a man would be a child of God, God must first offer him that right which, as John says, is not received cheaply since it is received by faith. In short, the love of God in Jesus Christ gives man a chance to make a choice about himself, not about God.
The first sign of that love was the birth of the Christ Child, for he was not man going to God, but God coming to man with the chance for man to make a choice about his destiny.

NOT A CHOICE, BUT A CHANCE

Almighty God.
who didst give us
a choice about ourselves
by offering us
the chance of Thyself,
we have slipped
into the sentimentality
of our hard and harsh time
by treating Thy child as a favorite
forgetting the awesome quality of the time
when the splendor of Thy radiance was confined
to a womb, a cord, a birth, and a Babe.
We thank Thee that Thine advent
was not heralded with bombast
but with the anguished cry of a mother
and the whimper of a newborn Child.
As Thy children, help us
use our birthright
to love Thy child
by whose birth
our right
to call Thee Father
and hear Thee call us sons
was wrought not
in steel in stone
but in works
of flesh and bone.
For Christ’s sake.
Amen.

DRIVING THE POINT HOME

“Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

John employed in his Gospel a number of contrasting images, such as life and death, light and darkness, and spirit and flesh, and sometimes we are misled into thinking that they are necessarily opposites. Death, for instance, is not the opposite of life, but simply its negation. Darkness is not a contradiction of light, but merely its absence.
The contrast between flesh and spirit is between weakness and power, between that which passes away and that which endures. When John contrasted the birth of God, he did not mean to say that the fleshy birth was evil in itself, simply that it was weak, for if it were evil, then the Word of God could not have become flesh.
So when John wrote that the second birth was not accomplished by the means of the flesh, he was not commenting upon the flesh. His point was that a person’s relationship with God took place because of God’s initiative. It was God who came to man, not man who came to God.
The natural question that arises in our minds is, “Where does man fit in?”
John’s answer came in the third chapter of his Gospel. Nicodemus asked Jesus how this second birth could come about, and Jesus answered with the tantalizing saying about the wind blowing where it wills. The answer, although enigmatic, was still quite clear. There is no human device by which a person can become a Christian. There is no creed, no certain feeling, no deed, no experience that will guarantee faith. It is God’s doing.
If Christmas means anything at all, it means that God came to man, and the purpose of that coming was that all might believe through Jesus Christ. Men, like John the Baptist, may witness, but it is God who turns the hearts of men.

DRIVING THE POINT HOME

O Lord, our God,
who standest astride the deep
and works the bellows of the winds,
we have been tilling ourselves
for some time now
how powerful we are ,
but every now and then
we find our creations
coming ‘round to haunt us.
Instill in our minds the irony
that the Nobel Peace Prize
was named after the man
who invented dynamite.
Dear Lord, our vanity
has come full circle
when we convince ourselves
that we decided for Thee.
Refurbishing our images of life
while we ignore their realities
we have trusted in our dimming dreams
and in our hopes in those things
that fade away.
Spare us from trusting in ourselves
and teach us to trust Thy Word alone,
for He endured the times
and over the winds prevailed
when He was born into our lot,
died the same death we died,
and yet did not die but rose.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.


DYING WE LIVE

“Who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John1:13 RSV)

Socrates in one of his farewell discourses before his death said that philosophy was the study of death and dying, that a philosopher prepared himself to die. In other words, he lived to die.
The Psalmist said that a man should number his days that he might apply his heart unto wisdom. In short, by contemplating his death he equipped himself to live.
John, while not contradicting these views, makes a contrasting point. A man is born again, or more accurately, born from above, so that he might live anew, but paradoxically being born of God is akin to death. If a man would live anew, he must first die to himself. In brief, he dies to live.
In one of the most daring passages in the New Testament, John compares the spiritual rebirth of the believer to the Virgin Birth of our Lord. Indeed, the analogy is so striking that many early Christians and some modern ones think that it is not an analogy at all but a statement about our Lord’s birth.
Contrary to what many fiery-eyed religious fanatics would claim, the second birth is not an orgy of emotionalism. It is the fundamental awareness that a man cannot know himself apart from knowing his father. A spiritual rebirth is a renewal of a relationship with God in which a man understands himself first and foremost as God’s child and God as his father and works out his life in light of that understanding.
The possibility of such a rebirth and renewal began when God was born of the flesh that men might be born of the Spirit. Just as God was born of the womb of man, so man is born of the womb of God.


DYING WE LIVE

Almighty God and eternal Father,
who wast born of Mary
that we might be born of Thee,
forgive our bafflement at Thy Nativity
for our wonderment should rightly be
in the meaning of our birth in Thee
and not how Thy birth came to be.
Help us remember how
we were born of Thy womb
so soft, supple, and warm,
so that amidst the hard necessities of time
we shall be tender to all those in need.
May we thank Thee as ling as we live,
for bearing our flesh in Thy Babe
that we might be borne
on the wings of Thy Spirit
high soaring beyond the limits
of tribe and the clash of clans
transgressing even the bounds of death
to a life as free as the winds
which to us bore Thee
when Thou wast born
under the lee.
Tender was the night
that gave Thee birth
and harsh was the day
that saw Thy death,
and night and day,
we thank Thee for the morn
that saw Thee rise.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

SHRUNK TO THIS LITTLE MEASURE

“And the Word became flesh” (John 1:14a RSV).

John F. Kennedy, in reflecting on his experiences while serving on a PT boat in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War, said that there was always some sailor at the end of the line who did not get the message.
John, author of the Gospel, in this short declarative sentence, has come to the end of the line of God’s message for man. No more words about God, no more ideas defining him, and no more prophecies concerning him, for the words, the ideas, and the prophecies come to nothing. So God enfleshed himself as his final word to man.
With the term “Word” John brought together two great strands of culture, the Greek and the Hebrew. For the Greek, which was the product of Indian, Egyptian, and Persian thought, it meant the reason and order seen in the visible world and in the mind of man. For the Hebrew, it meant the creative power of God through which the world was made. All this awesome order, wisdom, and power was shrunk to the little measure of human existence. The Word became flesh.
The power of God was enfleshed in the weakness of an infant. The wisdom of God was encased in a suckling child. The Creator of the ordered universe was crammed into the flesh of an infant.
Man lives by symbols. He finds love in the gestures of a friend. He receives his ideas by words. He is moved by the voice of music. John said that in this one great instant in time God broke through the symbols so that in that Babe in a manger the symbol and the reality were welded together in the flesh of a child. In the manger it was no linger a man pointing to the truth about God. Rather, it was God investing himself in the flesh of man so that there were no more symbols for God, but God himself.

SHRUNK TO THIS LITTLE MEASURE

Eternal Father, my God,
who gavest Thyself to us
that we might believe in Thee,
often we have responded
to Thine awesome birth
with the trivialities
of a misplaced mirth.
For the wonder of Thy flesh and blood,
coming among cows chewing their cud,
we can only thank Thee
with our whole hearts
since for Thy gifts
there are no counterparts.
We drift into disbelief and doubt
when we consider that the Architect
of the design of cause and effect
wast almost whelped, as it were
among strangers like a cur.
Help us see Thee
in Thine Infant
so when we kneel
before Thy Child
we shall pass by
the trappings of the time
finding Thee
clothed in our flesh.
For the sake of the Child.
Amen.

A MOVEABLE PRESENCE

“And dwelt among us” (John 1:14b RSV).

“Where is God?” is the inevitable question children put to their parents, and “Everywhere” is the invariable answer. As with most easy answers to hard questions, it is meaningless, for if God is everywhere, then he is obviously nowhere.
Other parents sometimes reply that God is in nature, but if the child has his wits about him, he will find the answer unsatisfactory. With its babbling brooks and tornadoes, nature is impersonal and ambiguous.
Still others might try the ploy of telling the child to look within, for God is in one’s heart. Such an answer is less than helpful, for the child is likely to mature confusing his own inner meanderings with the infinite wisdom of God.
The ancient Hebrew thought that God was particularly, but not exclusively, present in what Moses called the Tent of Meeting or the Tabernacle. It was a tent in which the moveable presence of God went with the Hebrews in their wanderings. Eventually, in the course of their history that moveable presence was fixed in the great Temple in Jerusalem.
When John said that the Word dwelt among us, he literally said that the Word of God tented among us, and he meant that the ancient Tabernacle which had been the place of God’s presence for the Hebrews had been replaced with a new tabernacle, the flesh of Jesus Christ. He had become the tenting presence of God among men.
So when a child asks the inevitable question, there is no need for a vague and evasive answer, for the parents can point to the manger. The customary answers are meaningless because they require no faith, but before a parent can point to the manger he must have made the journey to Bethlehem to worship the newborn King.

A TRANSPARENT SYMBOL

“We have beheld his glory” (John 1:14b RSV)

The Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the French writer of the 17th century, once said that speech has been given to man in order to disguise his thoughts. A great many people assume this skepticism when they want to know what another person is “really like.” Scandal sheets often score high sales when they deceive their readers into thinking that they can reveal the inside dope in some celebrity. Best sellers have been written on the private lives of public people.
The assumption behind such articles and books is that there is always a difference between what is seen and what is, that what a man appears to be is seldom what he really is. The skepticism is usually well-founded because most people learn to hide behind masks carefully wrought over a lifetime. This is why children are so often refreshing in their moral artlessness.
Thus it is a relief when we come to the figure of Jesus because he was so obviously transparent. He was the graciousness of God enfleshed on a man, and he pretended to be nothing else.
The word “glory” is one of the most often used but least frequently understood words in the church. For most people it has an aura of pious vacuity, ostensibly meaning something very important, but actually meaning very little at all. It is almost like a religious compliment thrown God’s way.
However, its meaning is precise. It is a physical brightness and radiance which reveals God’s character. Before the coming of Jesus this brightness was veiled from man’s eyes, but in him God’s character was fully revealed in his flesh.
There is a profound sense of ease and satisfaction found in men and women who have been found by God in Jesus Christ, for they have discovered life’s great secret. They know that in him they are surrounded and supported by an infinite graciousness finitely found in the Babe in the manger.

A TRANSPARENT SYMBOL

Almighty God,
who didst intern Thyself in my frame
that we might find ourselves unlocked
from serving the necessities of time,
forgive us for thinking ourselves alone,
and for fearing Thee deaf to our cries
when we looked at our lives and our fates bemoaned
desiring this man’s art and that man’s grace.
Deliver us from forgetting what we enjoy most
and clamoring for what contents us least,
for Thou hast not left us bereft of Thy presence
nor forgotten to ease the hurt of our souls.
We thank Thee, dear Lord, that
Thou hast not hidden Thyself from us
as we have tried to hide ourselves from Thee,
but hast lived as we live
that we might live with Thee.
No matter what betides us
help us sweetly recall the time
when from sullen earth Thou didst come
to give us both the art and grace
of a Child, a Virgin
and a resting place.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

“Glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14e RSV).

In book VII of the Republic, Plato used his famous allegory of the cave to illustrate human knowledge. Men were chained as prisoners in a great cavern, and all they saw during their lives were the shadows of objects on the cave’s wall, but they never saw the objects themselves. Plato said that human knowledge is like that, an experience of shadows. If the prisoners were taken out into the sunlight after a lifetime in the darkness of the cave, they would, of course, be blinded by the sun’s light.
Moses, too, had veil his face when in God’s presence, lest he be blinded and struck dead by the brightness of God’s glory.
Plato’s point and Moses’ experience was that men lived in the shadows and if they were exposed to the light, they would still live in the darkness having list their sight. There is a truth to that, for many people have gone to live in a great darkness of the spirit when they have had to face the truth.
John’s point was that all the brightness of God’s light shone through Jesus Christ. Men were no longer shadow-boxing with realities, for in Jesus Christ they were seeing the reality of God, and not just another appearance.
The ancient Hebrew believed that the son was the extension of the father, and if a person saw the son, he also saw the father because they were of the same stuff and substance. Today we would say that the son is a chip off the old block.
When people saw the Son of God, they were seeing God himself and not some shadow or substitute, and as the Son of God was enfleshed in Jesus Christ, so people saw the brightness of God’s light in human flesh.
The surprising thing was that the light was not harsh as Plato had expected but gracious. It was nothing to fear, and rather than blinding a person, the light gave man sight. Men first began to see in the light of the night when Jesus Christ was born.

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

Merciful Father,
who didst make the light
that we might have sight,
we have been blinded by our deceits
having run this falsehood
to that lie
looking for the latest word
that will solve our wounds
and bolster our ego.
O Lord, we speak about images of self
and keeping up our appearances
as if we speaking about realities
when all we do is play with shadows.
Please, spare us the folly
of using rinses on our spirits
because they have worked so well on our hair,
and give us the capacities
to get behind and beyond the trappings
to that simple reality of Thy presence.
We have looked to the hucksters for truth
and we have sought out famous preachers
and have even toyed with imported gurus,
anxiously trying to avoid that one simple step
of leaving the drawing rooms of pretense
in the inns of men
and crossing the threshold into the yard
and the stable of the Babe.
In the Name of the Babe.
Amen.

SPEAKING THE TRUTH IN LOVE

“Full of grace and truth” (John 1:14c RSV).

Nearly every human being has had the chilling experience of having someone say, “Now, it’s about time somebody told you the truth about yourself.” It is chilling because seldom, if ever, is the truth loving and gracious. It is almost always harsh and vindictive. When we hear that threat, we know that the truth teller is not going to speak the truth in love, as Paul told us to do.
Human beings tend to believe that the news about themselves will be bad, and because of this fear all they want to hear is good news. The truth of Jesus Christ is both good and bad, but the bad news is set in the larger context of the good. The bad news is the judgement of God upon human sin, and the good news is his mercy upon human sinners.
One of the characteristics of modern man is that he is so conditioned to expect the bad news that the good news has a hard time being heard. Also, he has heard Christmas carp about the sin of man so much that he is disposed to think that the gospel is really bad news.
God’s judgement upon human sin comes encased on his mercy toward human sinners. God comes with the message of grace and mercy first, and through that grace and mercy people begin to understand the depth of their sin.
Often Christmas get the whole thing turned around and run about preaching judgment before they get around to mercy, but if one reads the Gospels, one finds that the graciousness shines through even the words of judgment. The reason is obvious. Jesus Christ came to save men, not condemn them, and, therefore, his message was at heart a message of grace.
Jesus Christ came to men as the truth in love, judging us in his crucifixion and extending his mercy by the same act. His birth was a judgment upon man that he had to come, and the enactment of his mercy that he came at all.


SPEAKING THE TRUTH IN LOVE

Most gracious Lord.
who becomest a son of man
that we might become sons of God,
so accustomed have we become
to the deep fears of our hearts
that we have a hard time
believing anyone could love us
because we are hard put
to love even ourselves
knowing the truth about our lives
that we hide from others.
So when Thou dost tell us
that Thou didst come amongst us
to give us Thy mercy
we find it difficult to believe
and sometimes turn it aside
so afraid are we of believing
something good about life.
Give us the courage to reach
beyond our fears of self-knowledge
to that tender and gentle message
that came under a star
in the dead of the night.
We are grateful beyond our words to express
that Thou didst come to us
not as the world comes
but with the grateful truth
of Thyself in the child.
For the sake of Mary’s child.
Amen.

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

“Full of grace and truth” (John 1:14c RSV).

We have all mer people who put us on the defensive, and we generally blame them for decisions we have made about ourselves. It is called in psychological terms, “protection.” It is the attempt to put the responsibility on someone else for something we do to ourselves. “He made me lose my temper,” we say when we get angry at someone else as if to say we had no freedom either to stay calm or get angry.
The truth of the matter is that people do not put us on the defensive. We are on the defensive in the first place. The personality, attitude, words and actions of someone else are merely catalysts that cause the defensiveness to surface.
Protection carried to its ultimate is to blame not merely other people, but the whole world, the rat race, politicians, the church, the devil himself and even God. “The devil made me do it” is far more that a humorous line. Indeed, it is a humorous line because it reflects a fundamental human experience, the desire to put the blame somewhere else because we cannot take it ourselves.
Jesus came full of grace and truth. There was plenty enough to make him defensive, but he was not, and the reason is simple. He was not empty, and, therefore, he did not fearfully have to protect his emptiness by defensiveness. He was sensitive without vulnerability.
The point of his coming according to John was that fullness of grace and truth might be passed on to us. He was the means by which the favorable disposition of God and His faithfulness, namely, His grace and truth, were given to man. Paul put it simply when he said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” If a man is filled with that confidence, then he does not have to try self-confidence and its pitiful result, defensiveness. Having feared God, we need fear no man because we are no longer afraid of ourselves.


THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Almighty God and gracious Father,
who casts out our fears
if we but fear Thee,
trying to justify ourselves
we have attempted to confirm
our worth to all those around us
making them judges of our lives,
which they neither created nor saved
and which they have not loved
nor for which did they die.
Often we have been trapped by our own defenses
encircling ourselves with the iron rings of fear.
Deliver us from those judges
whom we created and whom we fear,
and remind us that Thou hast made us,
and in trying to be more
we have merely become less.
Help us to enjoy Thee
that we may be a joy
to those whom we love.
Fill us with the grace of truth
of our Lord Jesus so that
when we find ourselves alone
we may not find ourselves empty.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

THE SOURCE

“John bore witness to him, and cried, ‘This was he of whom I said’ “He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me!” (John 1;15 RSV).

In the Prologue John’s thought about the Word of God moved, as has been said before, from the deity and eternity of the Word (vss. 3-5), to his advent among man (vss. 9-13), and then to his incarnation (vs. 14). There was also the excursion about John the Baptist. (vss. 6-8)
John concluded his Prologue with a series of statements about the life in Christ. In other words, he moved from a description of the Word of God to the experience of the life of grace. He introduced the final section with a proclamation from John the Baptist.
At first John the Baptist’s witness seems almost an intrusion, for this verse seems to break the natural flow. Verse fourteen moves both logically and literally right into verse sixteen, but intrusions have their purposes sometimes. For one thing they arrest the attention.
John the Baptist’s witness was quite simple. He was pointing to the deity and eternity of the Word that John had just said was enfleshed. In short, Jesus Christ was not just another prophet or seer, and when men turned to Jesus, they were turning to the source of life.
There are two tendencies among Christians that are quite baleful in their consequences. They sometimes incline to a lessening of the humanity of Christ, making him something of a superman, and they sometimes dilute the belief that he was fully God, making him a demi-god. The result is a tertium quid, a third property who is neither man nor God.
The result is a loss of authenticity. There is no point to Jesus Christ if he is merely a great man who became something like God. John the Baptist’s witness was driving at the authenticity of God’s redemption and revelation in Jesus Christ. Jesus was fully God and fully man. He was God enfleshed in the cradle reaching out to man to feel him and restore him. It was a great way for John to begin his section on the Christian life.


BEFORE AND AFTER

Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
whom we tend to treat
as an honored guest
in Thine own dwelling,
we like things neat and clean
our hopes laid out like pins
row by row, wish by wish
fulfilled at our demand.
We thank Thee that Thou art larger
than we could ever envision Thee
and that Thou dost come and go
apart from the way we predict.
We have tried to make Thy faith
a tit for tat affair
with this good work
for that divine reward.
Remind us of the prodigality
of Thine appearance amongst us,
for Thou hast not given Thyself
according to our expectations
but hast come beyond our hopes,
and breaking our concepts
with a conception of Thy Spirit,
and a birth of a Virgin.
We can never thank Thee enough
for fulfilling us above
what we thought
we needed.
Through the merit of Jesus Christ.
Amen.

A PLETHORA OF POSSIBILITIES

‘And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16 RSV)

In our nomadic society most of us have had the experience of moving into a new neighborhood or having new neighbors move near us.

Among our new acquaintances there will inevitably be the kind that demand an instant immediacy, who almost move into our lives without being asked. Sometimes it is flattering, and even reassuring at first, especially if we are lonely. However, the closeness soon annoys and irritates, for we find that the newly found friends are spiritual parasites. They are sucking us dry of life’s vital juices.
The reason is that they come nor our of the fullness of kindness, but out of the need for intimacy. Since they are empty people, they leech off of others seeking to fill themselves with other people’s vitalities. They come not really caring about us because they are trapped in their need of us.
John spoke of the fullness of Christ. His love for us was not built upon his need for us, but of his care for us, and as such he fills us full of himself.
One of the most misunderstood things about the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ is that we think that fulfillment means the coming to pass of the predictions of the prophets. Actually, it means more than that. It means that the hopes, longings, and expectations of the prophets were filled full of a meaning beyond their greatest imaginations.
Where they had hoped for a Messiah that would rid them of their external burdens, the Messiah that came lifted the burdens of their hearts that they might be free to get rid of the external burdens of their lives themselves.
The fullness of Christ is not there that we might become pious parasites on Jesus, but that we too might be filled full so that our lives are lived not out of need, but out of completeness.
Luke wrote in the Magnificat, “He has filled the hungry with good things” (1:53 RSV).

A PLETHORA OF POSSIBILITIES

Dear Lord,
who hast no need of us
and yet dost still want us,
we have latched onto this cause
and have advocated that crusade
always looking for something in life
to give us a sense of well-being.
As a result, we have made nuisances of ourselves
hopping from one bandwagon to another
hoping that something might take for us
only to find that we still crave
that which we have sought.
Spare us the absurdity
of seeking phantoms
that fade away
of pleasures
that melt in our mouths
and give us that hunger
for those things that satisfy
and that thirst
which Thou canst quench,
so that our lives
may be fulfilled in Thee.
May we find in the season of Thy birth
that Thy dear Child
fills us full
with the good things
of Himself.
In His Name.
Amen.

THE MEANS OF GRACE

“And from his fullness have we all received grace upon grace” (John 1:16 RSV)

For the first time in the Prologue John used the word “we” in this verse. This is one of the indications that John’s thought had moved from a contemplation of the Word of God to man, but it is interesting to note that John did not use the pronoun “I.” He was referring to the church.
In a time of individualism in which people think that God speaks to isolated people, the little word “we” offers quite a stumbling block, for John’s point was that the grace of God comes through his church. Now, the word church does not mean some ecclesiastical organization. It means a community of believers.
Later in his Gospel, John picked up the same theme when he quotes Jesus as telling the disciples, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:21 RSV) The “you” is plural, not singular, and means a community.
The Christian faith is not an affair of isolation. It binds people in communities of love and grace for the simple reason that God’s grace comes through others.
During the Reformation Martin Luther preached a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers by which he meant to say that each believer was a priest to his fellow believers, and the function of a priest is to be a mediator of God’s presence. Luther’s quarrel with the Roman Catholic church was not that they had priests. It was that they did not have enough of them, for everyone was a priest.
The Christian faith is not an esoteric religion of mystery, for it is centered around the Word made flesh. Just as God spoke and saved in the flesh of Christ so he continues to speak and save through flesh and blood priests who bear his message. Matthew perhaps said it best when he quoted Jesus as saying, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matt. 18:20 RSV) Even at his birth our Lord gathered around him the lost sheep of the house of Israel.


THE MEANS OF GRACE

Most gracious Lord.
who bringest all men to Thyself
that they may find Thee in each other,
we have been trying to go it alone
for so long
that we have forgotten what it is like
to be together.
We become annoyed
with the demands of others
dreaming what it would be like
to get away from it all.
Help us remember
when we stand tall
we stand on the shoulders
of our fathers.
Impudently we have assumed
that we need no one else
ironically trying to prove ourselves
in comparison to others.
We need no more of those illusions,
and we need those whom
Thou hast given to us.
Spare us the arrogance
of giving
without receiving,
for Thou didst give
that we might receive.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

PERMISSIVENESS AND STRICTNESS

“And from his fullness have we all received grace upon grace” (John 1:16 RSV)

Permissiveness has become one of those watch-words and catch-words afflicting modern society. Maladies all the way from dope to rioting in the streets have been blamed on permissiveness, and the regularly advocated remedy has been to instill a little of what is called “the fear of God” and some strict up-bringing upon miscreants.
However, as one surveys the scene of adolescents there seems to be little correlation between permissiveness and strictness, on the one hand, with stable and stable behavior, on the other hand. The difference is that some children are raised in an atmosphere where they believe their parents are antagonistic. Permissive parents more often than not simply so not care about what their children are doing, and the children sense it. However, many parents give their children a great deal of freedom because they are concerned about them. The children can tell the difference between indifference and concern.
Sometimes, strict parents simply do not want to be in touch with flesh and blood children and impose a whole series of rules on the children as a means of avoiding them. Other times, parents, out of love for the children, keep a tight reign on the rearing.
The distinction is not between permissiveness and strictness, but between those parents who seem glad to have the children around and those who think that they are a nuisance.
In one home the reality is grace upon grace, and in the other indifference upon indifference. It is this experience of grace about which John was writing. The one is infused by grace, and the other is suppressed by indifference. The believer in Jesus Christ is a person who lives in the context of God’s favorable disposition toward him in Jesus Christ. It makes all the difference in the world.

PERMISSIVENESS AND STRICTNESS

Almighty God, our Father,
who didst give us the law
that we might live by grace,
we have spent a great of time
trying to find someone to blame
for what has gone wrong with our lives,
We have even investigated procedures
thinking that if we try a different way
we might have better results.
But the problem, dear Lord, as Thou well knowest
is nor in the way we do things
but in the why we do them.
We have been fearful
thinking that we had to prove
something to someone
with the sad consequence
that we have displayed merely
the worst to everyone.
We do not need more or less rules
or even none at all,
we need Thee,
and the sadness is
that Thou hast been there
and we have not seen Thee
so busy have we been
kicking against the rules
or looking to enforce them.
Help us return to our dear Lord
who wast Thine favor for us.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

I’VE DONE IT A HUNDRED TIMES

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17 RSV).

Mark Twain once said that giving up smoking was cinch. He had done it a hundred times. What he meant was that good intentions and resolutions are irrelevant.
There must be something else in life other than desire and procedures, and this is why the law of Moses was not enough. It rested upon man’s capacities for self-provement, and man is his own chief enemy.
However, the law serves a purpose. It is a tutor in failure. If a person could ever go over the New Year’s resolutions he has made year after year, he would learn a lot about what he wanted to be in contrast to what he has become. Ideals not only goad action, they also remind us of our failure. So it is with the law of Moses. We may try to be good, but it never seems to turn out that way.
Paul said poignantly, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom. 7:18b-19 RSV) He spoke for us all.
For this reason, the Christians faith at its deepest is a religion for adults. Children and adolescents seldom seem to have that profound experience of moral failure that prepares one for an awareness of God’s grace.
The law of God does not contradict the grace of God as some have believed. Rather it is simply one aspect of it, for it leads a person from the self-righteousness of thinking that he is all right to an awareness of his moral failure, and then ushers him to the threshold of forgiveness.
John said later in his gospel that the law was an accuser (5:45) but Jesus is the savior. Jesus is the one who has the words of eternal life, not Moses.
Some have believed that once they are saved, they no longer need the law. It is perhaps they who need it the most, for no man in this life ever reaches that state in which he no longer needs that prompting it grace. The law teaches us what is good and reminds us of our failure and thus points the way to Christ.

I’VE DONE IT A HINDRED TIMES

Almighty God,
who hast graciously reminded us
of our failure to meet our hopes
that we might find our hope in Thee
rather than in our righteousness,
we keep on attempting the very schemes that betray us
as if one more try will do the trick
and turn the tide of our failure.
Something in us, dear Lord, keeps us
from what is best in us.
It has been variously named
by this savant and that seer,
as heritage, environment, and flaw
but in our deepest need we know
that whatever it might be
it simply points to our need of Thee.
More often than not
we do not want to hear
what we must hear
if we want to arrest
our headlong slide
into our dimming despair.
And thus we thank Thee
for those seeming harsh words
that draw the lines of our malaise
and lead us beyond ourselves
to that marvelous grace
that takes us failure and all.
For the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.


THE PROCESS OF DISILLUSIONMENT

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17 RSV)

Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the grand savants of our century, was the author of the famous prayer used by the Alcoholics Anonymous, “O God, give me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the difference.”
In his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, he wrote something perhaps more profound, if less well-known. “One who has lost his illusion about mankind and retains his illusion about himself is insufferable. Let the process of disillusionment continue until the self is included. At the point, of course, only religion can save from the enervation of despair. But it is at that point that true religion is born.”
Niebuhr wrote of the experience of man’s moral failure and God’s redeeming grace. The grace-filled life requires two hard and simple things. Firstly, a person must have come to terms with himself, and, secondly, he must have been overcome by the graciousness of God. The first experience removes from him the capacity for condemnation of others, for he, too, falls victim to his own edict.
The second experience of God’s favorable disposition not only tempers his judgment, it also transforms it. He can look favorably upon himself and thus on to the others because he knows that God has looked favorably on him.
The fraudulence of much of the modern happiness cult id its inability to treat honestly the human experience of moral failure. It tries to pass it off as a product of our puritan past, a bad home life, or a sick and twisted personality.
The gospel knows the reality of despair, and it does not deny it but it works through it. The result is not a cosmetic smile plastered on the face of anxiety. It is a confidence and joy welling up within a man who knows he has been loved and loved well. He can afford to live gracefully because God’s love has overcome his malaise. He can live as if he were OK when he knows he is now because God has made him OK.

THE PROCESS OF DISILLUSIONMENT

Eternal Father, our Lord,
who dost ho beyond our sin
to find us lurking behind some pretense
to give not another law
but all the love of Thyself in the Manger,
we have not come to terms with either
Thy law or even our dimmest dreams,
and we have merely wandered around
looking for an easy way out.
We have been living a life
of surrogates and substitutes
claiming that Thy Son was a great teacher
and paying lip service to Thy law and his words
while we knew in our hearts of hearts
that we did not need more rules
but something beyond them,
something that would give us life.
Infuse our lives with Thyself
that in all our comings and goings
our meanderings back and forth
we may sense and feel Thy grace
that our single reality be
the sheer delight of Thee.
Give us grace to go beyond
all our posturing
to find in Thy cradled Infant
all our desiring.
Through Jesus Christ.
Amen.

THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17 RSV).

In Hebrew there is no word for truth in the abstract, and thus when they said that God was the truth, they did not mean that God said true things, but that he was true, which is to say, he was faithful. Now God may say true things, but he says true things because he is true to himself.
The truth of God is then his integrity and faithfulness coming through Jesus Christ to man, and the result is freedom from the conventions of society. Most men live by what others think of them. They let society tell them who they are, what they should do, and how well they do at what they were told to do.
John, later in his gospel, elaborated this theme of truth and freedom when he wrote: “And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (8:32 RSV)
Freedom is an experience which is both from and to, for a person who is merely free from some oppression is nowhere at all unless he is free to be something else. A person is free in Christ because he is no linger tyrannized by all those substitute gods that afflict society. Paul expressed this well when he wrote, “If God id for us, who can be against us? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies, who is to condemn?” (Rom. 8:31, 33,34a RSV)
Freedom from tyranny is a result of grace of God. Once it sinks into a man’s life that he lives not by his accomplishments, but by the grace of God, then he is free from all the manipulative schemes of man and society.
Freedom to be oneself is the positive side of freedom. Often the Christian faith is seen by outsiders and some insiders as another oppression in which a person is hemmed in by a long line of pious constraints. Not so. Our redemption is the liberty given us by God to become what he intended. It is not another imposition.
Christ leaves us with all of our freedom intact. He simply obliges us to be what our Father made us to be.

THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE

Merciful Father and everlasting Lord,
in whose word of truth
is not embodied an idea
but a person full
of the grace that makes us free,
for a long time we have been dead in our tracks
trying to fire up the engines of our lives
with the fuels of yesterday’s failures.
We have been imprisoned
by the pretenses of our lives
by the expectations of others,
and by our past mistakes,
and although we have heard
that Thou dost free us
we are not sure
we want to run the risk.
Overcome our reluctance to something new
and our fear of some things old
that the truth of Thyself
may liberate us
from the petty tyrannies
of time, place and station.
Get us off the ground
and teach us to fly
that we may soar
with nothing to carry us
but the winds of Thy Spirit
and the wings of Thy grace.
Through our Lord and Savior.
Amen.

VIA NEGATIVA

“No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18 RSV).

At nearly every cocktail party when the talk drifts away from outright trivia into the superficially profound someone will invariably say, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I like to think God is like,” and with that the listeners are treated to a list of private prejudices that are given the weight of exclusive illuminations. What it all amounts to, however, is simply a shared ignorance.
When it comes down to the facts of the matter, no one knows what God is like, Everyone is ignorant of the reality. The Bible has a word for this ignorance of God. It simply says that God is a mystery which is a polite way of saying that he is beyond our knowledge. Of coarse, if he were within the bounds of our knowledge, then he would not be much different form what we are.
Now, we may know how God relates to us, such as, his live, wrath, mercy, and justice, but our knowledge of God of himself is simply a blank. One can see this in the words we use for God. Some words, like Father, Lord, King, and so forth, come out of everyday human experience, and they indicate the way in which God relates to us.
However, the words we use for God in himself are all negatives or ultimates, such as, Infinite, Omniscient, Eternal, and Unchangeable. As one thinks about them, they say nothing at all about God and a great deal about the limits of human knowledge. In contrast to the word Father which comes out of our experience, the word Infinite means nothing at all. It simply says that God is without limit, and, therefore, beyond our knowledge. It says not one thing about God.
The plain fact of the matter is that our experience of God is at root, of nor at branch, what Rudolph Otto called a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a tremendous and fascinating mystery. The word for the experience is awe, and oddly the greatest awe was when the Unknowable became known in the manger.

VIA NEGATIVA

Everlasting Lord,
whose infinity
became finite
when Thy Word became
our flesh and blood,
one of the peculiar things about us
is our tendency to cut Thee
down to our size.
It may be that we want a convenient god
that we can pick up and drop off
at Thy church once a week,
or, worse yet, to trot around publicly
for all of our friends to see
how near and dear we are.
Liberate us from the fetters
that we have put, not on Thee,
but on our understanding of Thee,
for, dear Lord, as Thou well knowest
we need not a duplication of ourselves
but fresh light from Thee.
The odd thing is that
we cannot even know ourselves
and find each other a mystery,
and, if that be the case,
then why are we so sure we have Thee
neatly at the end of a syllogism?
Give the capacity to stand in awe
of One Whom we do not know
who became known
in a Babe.
of all things.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.

THE LOVE OF GOD FOR HIMSELF

“No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18 RSV).

The Christian faith is a constant surprise and John never ceases to startle his readers. And right toward the end of his Prologue he tells us that God loves himself, and here all these years we have been told that it is wrong for people to love themselves.
In another one of his tantalizing hints at the Trinity John wrote of the relationship of God the Father to God the Son, or the Word of God to the Father. It is as intimate and tender as lying in someone’s arms.
But then we should have known this if we have believed that God is love, for we cannot love someone else unless we love ourselves. If God is a God of love, then he must love himself.
Also, for a long time, we have believed that we were made in God’s image, and if that is the case, then any hint of God’s way is a suggestion about our way. Earlier in his Prologue John had said that grace and truth characterized the Word of God, and then in the verse just previous he told us that through Jesus Christ grace and truth characterize our lives.
Now, going even beyond that John spoke of the internal love of God within himself which serves as a mirror of our love for ourselves.
This is one of the greatest rewards of the gospel. Too often the church has exclusively emphasized guilt as a means of provoking people to love one another. The result is bitterness, for guilt is gall. The reality of the gospel is that God loved man because God was love in himself, and the same holds true for man. One person loves another because he first loves himself. He gives out of his fullness, not our of his need.
This is perhaps a greater mystery than the simple unknowableness of God, and that may be as it should be. A man can lose himself because God loved him. The chain of love began with God and became known when his Son became a man.

THE LOVE OF GOD FOR HIMSELF

Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
who hast reached out to man
because Thou hast loved Thyself,
we have been afraid of Thee
not so much because we are guilty
of hidden deeds of which we are ashamed,
but because we have been afraid
of being loved by such power
that we would lose control of our lives.
Give us that ease within
which comes from
not only accepting oneself
but also loving oneself.
We have been anxious too long
worrying about who said what
about what we did and did not do.
Help us become aware
that if Thou dost love us
we can love ourselves
and canst bask in that warmth
which comes from lying
in Thine arms.
Hand us over to those precious times
when we are so consumed by Thy love
and so secure in our own
that we can forget ourselves.
Take us in awe
and wonder
to Bethlehem
where it began
when Thou didst forget
Thou wast God
and became
a man.
In the Name of the Word who became a man.
Amen.


HE HAS MADE HIM KNOWN

“For no one has ever seen God; the only Son, who id in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18 RSV).

When young children nowadays taste fresh orange juice, they frequently turn up their noses because it does not taste like the real thing, namely, frozen concentrate.
In modern society there are so many substitutes for the real thing that one sometimes wonders if there are any real things left. The problem not only includes what we take in our mouths, but also what we take in our minds and souls. How do we know?
John said that Jesus Christ made God known. For some this means a series of doctrines about God, man, and the world, but that is not what John meant by know. He meant a personal knowledge of God.
There are two types of knowledge, knowledge about things and people and knowledge of people. The one distant and impersonal, and the other immediate and personal. But personal knowledge is paradoxical, for in knowing someone else one finds that one knows oneself better. When God reveals himself to us, the result is a greater revelation of ourselves.
In II Corinthians Paul said that because of our knowledge of Christ man could no longer see himself and others from a human point of view. He had been given a new perspective on life. Perhaps it is best summed up by the late Archbishop William Temple who once said in commenting on the Gospel of John that when one knew God in Jesus Christ the reward was the ability to see life steadily and them see it whole because one saw it sub specie aeternaitatis, with the view of eternity.

HE HAS MADE HIM KNOWN

Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
who abidest when we stray
and endurest when we fail,
we limp between this and that opinion
looking for something to keep us steady
in a world rocking along to mayhem.
We have striven to cut Thee down to our size
thinking ourselves better off with a small God
in a big world
than with an infinite God ruling over
a confusing world.
We art grateful
that Thou art not
predictable,
for then we would be
right where we have been
a little to the left
of nowhere at all
and slightly to the right
of nothing at all
which as usual with us
means missing the bull’s eye
of faith, mercy, and grace.
Remind us when we are listening
that knowing Thee in Jesus Christ
gives us the wisdom and the grace
to endure and prevail in Thee.
In Christ’s Name.
Amen.