Worship
Sermon Archive
Sunday December 27, 2009
11:00 am - Saint Thomas Church
Preacher: Fr Austin
John 1:1-18
Where Art Thou?
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The phone rang this morning at 7:00, creating the usual jump. “Oh, Victor,” my wife said, “you’ve got the house bug.” Father Austin was and is quite indisposed with what ailed his little granddaughter Lucy. A similar thing blew through my house at Thanksgiving.
“This has never happened to me, Andy,” said Victor, meaning being out of commission on Sunday when you’re the duty priest. Well, we agreed, better than an unedifying, alarming departure in the middle of things. “I can send you my sermon for what it’s worth,” Victor added. Thanks, I said, it might help me get some thoughts together. I got the sermon, read it, and thought, it’s worth a lot, and it would be a shame to lose it. I’ve never done this before – read another priest’s sermon. But we know the author, and you’ll have to pardon another voice. It’s the thoughts that count ― ACM
_______________
The opening of Saint John’s gospel (John 1:1-18) is an evocative, sublime, and (in the true sense of the world) mysterious summation of the entire story that we celebrate at Christmas. I am glad our church gives us this gospel for the Sunday after Christmas. It’s an occasion to step back and savor what it all means for us.
At the beginning of the biblical story, as early as the third chapter of Genesis, we have an account of what has gone wrong with human beings. Created by God to enjoy the whole world and friendship with one another and, to top it all, friendship with God, we (in the persons of our primeval parents) chose instead to go it alone, thus fragmenting our relationships with the world, with each other, and with God. In the biblical story, the fragmentation is first shown when God walks in the garden that he had made for us and for all things, and finds that Adam is trying to hide himself from God. What God says is rightly called the saddest sentence in the Bible. “Where art thou?” Adam, where art thou? It is a parent’s question. Where are you? Have you done what I told you not to do? —Except it is peculiarly painful, and sad, to hear this question coming from God.
Where indeed are we? We are in a world of terror and confusion, of cruelty, a world in which lands and fields and trees and crops must be worked and do not simply yield their fruits without our labor, a world of sickness and sadness. It is a world in which many people have no sense of God. God does not seem to be here, does not seem to make a difference; like raw nature, God does not seem to care what happens to us.
That’s where we are: broken off from God in a hopeless downward spiral. The end of it, as of course I do not need to say, is death.
We have the beginning of John’s gospel today. Right in the middle of that gospel is a story that is occasioned by the death of a friend of Jesus’. Word comes to Jesus about his friend’s death, and Jesus goes on a multiple-day’s journey to be with the man’s sisters. When the first one comes to him, the first thing she says is this: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
For many people in this fragmented world, God is simply not in their consciousness. But even for those of us who have some sense of God, or at least some sense of the importance of God, when we come to these points of infinite fragmentation, when one beloved human being is cut off from another, we might well say, “Lord, if you were here, this would not be happening.” Things are going on as if God were completely outside the picture. “Lord, if you were here, my brother would not be dying.”
Do you see how the question turns around? God first asks Adam, “Where art thou?” And then sinful Adam, for hundreds and thousands of years, turns his voice to God and cries, “”Where art thou?”
The good news of Christmas is that God has chosen to answer: “I am here.” This is what the prologue to John’s gospel says in terms supremely sublime: God’s Word, who has always been with God and who in fact is God: this Word, through whom all things came to be, himself, at a particular time and place and with a particular mother, became incarnate. He took on human flesh and became one of us. To the question, “God, where art thou?” God has given the answer: “I am with you.” John writes: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
It is important to emphasize that God is with us in a particularly messy way. God is not with us as a feeling or as a “spirituality”: he came to be with us in human flesh, as a completely human being. This means everything that goes with our corporeality. All those things babies do (apart from sin—if you think babies sin)—all those things, Jesus did them also. He was charismatic and he drew crowds, but (being human) he also went off alone away from the crowds (and when he was with one crowd he couldn’t be with another). If you cut Jesus, he bled; if you hanged him on a cross, he died.
This is messy: not only physically, but theologically. It means that Jesus as Emmanuel is God with us (“Where art thou, God?” “I am with you”). But it is not easy for God to be with us. To be with us, God has to come into our darkness, which is what our sin has made in the world. He shines in the darkness, yet, so long as it is darkness, it has never understood. “He was in the world . . . and the world knew him not.” People that he came to be with, rejected him. So it is costly.
When things fall apart, the easy thing is to walk away from the pieces. You’ve fallen out with a friend? Well, get another. You don’t like what’s happened to your neighborhood? Well, move somewhere else. We all know that sometimes one must walk away from the pieces: we are only finite. But if it is possible to stay, that’s the harder thing.
It was possible for God to stay with us, and that was the harder thing. The baby in the manger is exposed to all the diseases of the world, particularly the moral diseases. He will not catch the disease of sin, but it will kill him nonetheless. But: that is not the last word.
For Jesus rose from the dead, and he lifted up our human nature with him. That is God’s last word on us: we will not be left alone in our fragmentation and suffering and ultimately death. Not abandoned, but embraced, taken on, we in Christ will be lifted up in our complete humanity into his divinity. For those who receive him, who believe in the power of his Name, there may be rejection, there may be suffering, there will be death: but we will never be abandoned to our loneliness.
The Christmas story begins with God’s question in the garden: Adam, where art thou? In a great reversal, it answers that question: if we wonder where God is, this story tells us he is with us. But he is not with us in the cleanliness of nostalgia, but in the messiness of the world we have made. He is with us in complete honesty and authenticity, and in the end, if we receive him, he will be our friend for ever.