Sermon for Christmas 2, 2011

Sermon

Text: John 1:1-18

I spent this last week at my Grandparents in Boyden, IA. While there I spent some time playing scrabble with my cousins and it reminded me of a great Calvin and Hobbes strip. The two of them are playing Scrabble and Calvin has just laid down a word. He exclaims “Ha! I’ve got a great word, and it’s on a “Double Word Score” Box!” Hobbes counters and disagrees with him, “ZQFMGB, isn’t a word! It doesn’t even have a Vowel!” Calvin responds, “It is so a word! It’s a worm found in New Guinea! Everyone knows that!” “I’m looking it up.” Hobbes threatens. Calvin replys, “You do, and I’ll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the x’s and j’s!”

What’s your score for ZQFMGB? 957.

Words are powerful things. They define not only things, but who we are ourselves. I am Erik Kent Olson. Each on of those words define who I am. Erik means Eternal Ruler, my middle name Kent is my Dad’s name, and my family name is Olson. And, there are no other Erik Kent Olson’s that I know.

Every year countless people spend money to go to psychiatrists to find out who they are. Words like sane and insane, stable and unstable have larger social meanings behind them thatn just as words. Words have more meaning than their mere definition. And the use of words is of great importance not just for communication, but for our very life.

I heard a NPR story a couple of weeks ago about deafness and sign language, and just about how we think. The entire method of thought, thinking and intelligence is based around words and language. In the story they talked about how before the creation of non-verbal languages like sign-language often deaf people were called deaf and dumb, because with no language function, they had very limited thinking and thought function. We think in words. But interviewing deaf people fluent in sign-language they found that they also think in words, just in physical words.

Words define who are, and make up who we are as intelligent people.

In our text for today, we hear John’s story of beginning. It is not the traditional Christmas story like from Luke, but a retelling and a recasting of the creation story from Genesis. “In the beginning God created” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

A brief side story about this passage.The pastor of my parent’s congregation, who unfortunately died of cancer this summer had a great story around that beginning. He was in Madison, WI at that time and one day a Jehovah Witness came to his door and tried to convert him. At one point he asked Andrew “Have you heard the story of creation from John?” and to this Andrew just rattled off the passage, but he did it in the original greek. I can only do the first line, “en arche ha logos.” In the beginning the Word. But, he said the expression on the Jehovah Witness’s face was priceless, he was not expecting that. The words Pastor Andrew used had more power than him just being able to recite it from memory, it divulged part of who he was.

Our text is not just about the many words that define us, but the Word. Big W and everything. Jesus is the Word. Our text tells us that He is what defines us. Jesus, the Word, came to us, at the beginning. Jesus is our creator. Jesus is our life, he is our light. In him is life, and the life was the light of all people.

The Word is light and life for all peoples.

The Word is in the world. The Word is the Light that came before the darkness and cannot be overcome.

But we don’t always know the Word, we have seen his glory but we still turn away. In this story we see ourselves turning away from God to other things. We look for life elsewhere, we look for other lights in the darkness. We try to create our own lights, our own life. We work to define ourselves apart from God. And we fail. The other words we seek fade, meaning shifts. The other light we look for fades, dying away. And we are lost.

But, God came to us before we could turn away. Before we turn, God is returning us. God gave life before we could die, not just our life here, but complete life. Before there was darkness, there was light. The Word, our creator, our life and light, came to us. While we constantly search, and struggle to find words, the Word, life and light, God, has come to us. God has searched us out.

When I was younger I would often sleep with books in my bed. My alarm in the morning was not to wake up, but to tell me to stop reading and to get ready for school. One evening when I was around 6 or 7 my parents said they heard a lot of moving and noise coming from my room. Finally after a while it stopped and later they checked to see what was going on. They found me asleep with my arm as far behind my bed between it and the wall as possible reaching for a book that had fallen back there. Striving to reach the words I felt I needed right then.

It is a motion that we all find ourselves in at some time, not that particular one, but the motion of striving for something just out of our reach. Something just beyond us. Something that we think we need beyond all comprehension. Striving for God, striving for purpose, striving for life. But, God has already found us in our nook or cranny, in our empty field, locked room, or hospital bed. God has come to us, breathed into us the words of life. Lit up our darkened world and given us all grace upon grace. Grace for every moment of our days, Grace for the great times, the bad times, and the times when we don’t really know who we are. Grace so we know that even if we seem to not find or see God at times, God always finds us. God loves us and God strives for us.

Let us pray,

God, you are the Word, you are what gives us life, what gives us light. Be with us and hold us. Give us strength and keep us calm. In this time of Christmas we give you thanks for coming to us, we know that it is you who define us, not what gifts we have, or resolutions we have made. But you. Continue to give us grace upon grace.

Amen