The Second Sunday after Christmas, January 5, 2025

In the beginning…it should really sound familiar to you. John here is purposefully asking us to draw up images of Genesis. The powerful, spooky, graciousness of God’s action is called up here as John describes the Word of God.

John makes an unprecedented claim, that Jesus *IS* that Word through which the world was called into being. Even to early Christians who were a little more comfortable with the notions of gods becoming human, this was a remarkable claim, because they were used to God’s exercising power, great power, in powerful and awesome ways! And here, John is making the opposite claim. Here, in the human being, Jesus, the world came into being. John is asking us not to accept a paradox, but to re-think who God is.

And, I think we still have some work to do in wrapping our heads around who we know God is because of Jesus Christ. John is attempting to lead us past limiting our thoughts about God–that story we are often told or tell ourselves about an omniscient and sometimes capricious God. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Job, where this all-powerful and all-knowing God makes a pact with the adversary to heap misfortune on one man in order to prove he is actually faithful and not self-serving. In the process of testing this pact, Job loses everything and everyone he loves tells him to curse God and die. The moral of this tale from many of our pulpits is that God has the power to give and to take at whim, simply to demonstrate God’s power, and ensure that human beings do not presume to be able to know God’s mysterious ways.

This is the picture of God that many people hold. And it’s wrong. How do we know it’s wrong? Easy. God sent the corrective answer to that misconception, in the form of an infant, born to an unwed teenage mother, raised in the heart of poverty, violence, and oppression. The story of Job is not in fact a study about who God is, so much as it is a morality tale about how we are supposed to behave. The warning from Job is not supposed to be that we are to live in fear of this arbitrary, and frankly abusive God. The warning is that we are supposed to *not* judge people who undergo misfortune and bad circumstance as any less loved by God. It is a warning to people to remember that bad stuff happens to *everyone* and it could happen to you too, so show some compassion. Now, how do we know that’s the moral to the story, and not that we should be living in fear of an abusive, arbitrary god? Easy. Simple. Because God became a human being. Not just any human being – God didn’t become the Emperor of Rome. God became a poor boy, born into awful circumstances, in a horrible period in human history. Why? Because, God is not abusive or arbitrary.

This brings us to today’s text from John. If you, dear preacher, are like me, it may be tempting to stand in front of your congregation here and do deep, complex theology with them (feel free)…but it’s not necessary, because God’s solution to our problem is simple, beautiful, and easy. John tells it to us straight. He says the world came into being through a loving God, that that world is good. Now we know that things went kinda bad, and that things can still seem kinda bad. But salvation has already come. Salvation doesn’t wait for the cross. It comes in Jesus, who simply by being born, makes humanity capable of living out the beauty we were created for. In the birth of Jesus, God tells us unmistakably, that humanity is not lost. We are not doomed to fail at the whim of an arbitrary God. We are often lost and confused, but because Jesus became a human, humans can rise above the worst of ourselves and live like God wants. It’s that simple. Salvation has so very little to do with God being mad at us, and so very much to do with God refusing to give up on us. God, our champion, our hero, who will not leave us to the destruction and evil that we are so prone to, sends a child to raise us up so we can reach that brilliant vision of perfection that God has for us.

I can hear the cynics of the world saying “Right. Really? Have you looked around this world? It’s going to Hell and religion is taking us there?” That’s a fair assumption based on how humans tend to judge things. We base what we consider probability on our experience. So, if the news reports are full of nothing but violence and war and murder, we get the real feeling that the world is a violent place. I could not stand in front of my congregation and say that everything is OK. But, I do want to say that the world is not falling apart. And, I will stand in front of them and say that because of Christ, we can make it better.

Although John has many, many points to make in these opening sentences of his gospel, I think that this is one of the most important. He says because The Word became flesh like us, we have the power to be children of God. That means that we are not required to behave like the baser powers this world tells us is good. Because of Jesus Christ, we are children of God. Because we are children of God, we don’t have to value material goods and wealth over the lives of other people. Because we are children of God, we are set free from the need to respond to the hurts and errors of this world with violence. Because we are children of God, we have a better way of living – one of light and love and peace. Because we are children of God, when we fail, we’ll be forgiven and encouraged to try again and again. Because of Jesus Christ, because we are children of God, together we can make this world better. Amen.