First Sunday after Christmas
December 30, 2007
The Rev. James Richardson

John 1: 1-18

Gracious God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives. Amen.

This morning, I want to take you to two places several hundred miles apart. Both are here in California, and both are along rivers, one on the eastern side of the Sierra and the other in the far north. The first place I want to take you is an old cattle ranch near the head waters of the Owens River. This ranch is located in one of the most stunning places on the planet, with high peaks above, and the desert unfolding below.

Many years ago, more years than I care to count, and more hair on my head than I have now, my buddies and I observed an annual tradition of converging on this ranch for a week of fishing. The ranch owner would rent us an old cowhand cabin for the week. Our one-room cabin was richly appointed with cots and bunk beds, and an old wood stove. In other words, for a bunch of 20-somethings, the cabin was absolutely perfect.

The Owens River meanders for about five miles through the ranch and we fished every bend and riffle. We would release nearly all of our fish, but we’d keep a few big ones for dinner. Each evening we had a feast. One evening, after an amazing day of fishing and an amazing meal, I walked outside into the brisk desert night and went for a walk down the dirt road leading to the river.

And to this day, I can still picture what I saw that night as vividly as if it were last night. The stars in the sky were sharp and bright, and there really were billions and billions. The mountains around me shimmered in the star light. The road I walked seemed to lead beyond the horizon and into the sky around me. The sage brush seemed as awesome and mysterious as the highest mountains beyond. Everything seemed so connected and so infinite.

The connection I felt to the stars and mountains and sagebrush was truly beyond my capacity to describe – I can only describe this connection as the Holy, as God’s life-power surrounding me. It was night, but there was no darkness to it.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In science, there is a principle that it is easier to have nothing than something. It would be easier to have nothing in the universe than something. It would be easier to have a blank vacuum than to have stars and sagebrush.

But we are very definitely something, and we are very definitely here, and we are awash in light, and the darkness does not overcome it. We are all connected through the Holy, through the Word that was in the beginning and all things came into being through the Word. That we exist at all is a miracle, and it is more than a hint of the Godliness that is in us and surrounds us. We are touched over and over by grace upon grace.

* * *

I’d like to take you to the second scene:
Some years ago, Lori and I led our church youth group on a service project rebuilding houses on the Kuruk Indian reservation, up on the Klamath River a couple of hundred miles north of here.

Our kids worked pretty hard that week, and my work team put a new roof on a house that was on a sloping mountainside. So to keep our ladder stable, we propped it up on one side with a big flat rock, which by the way, the kids dubbed “The Jesus rock.”

Toward the end of the week, a Kuruk holy woman, Georgianna was her name, came to our camp to meet us and tell us about her people. She had three tattoos down her chin. Now, here is the amazing thing, she stood for two hours telling stories, both of her feet firmly planted on the ground, and she never moved.

And here is the more amazing thing. Our normally squirmy fidgety teenagers never moved either. They sat at her feet and listened for two hours. One of the things Georgianna told us was that the rocks in the mountains contained the souls of her ancestors. She said she could feel the presence of her ancestors when she walked in the mountains.

She asked the kids to not take any rocks home, to leave them in the mountains. I can tell you, after hearing that, the kids left behind “the Jesus rock” at the end of the week.

When Georgianna said her ancestors were in the rocks, I think I know a little of what she meant, and it was because of my walk long ago down a road on the Owens River that I could catch this, if only a little. Everyone – all of us – and everything around us is connected through the life-giving force of the Holy.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

John’s gospel, rendered into English, uses this peculiar term – “The Word” – for the Greek term, “Logos.” The English translation flattens the meaning of Logos. It might be better to say “the mind of God,” but even that flattens the word. Logos is the will of God, the deepest longing of God, to create something from nothing, to fill the darkness with light, to bring wholeness and healing to every place that is wounded and hurting. The Logos wills to give us grace upon grace.

And into that void comes Jesus, the One we call the Christ, the “word made flesh.” God longs to be with us, and so comes to us as a human being, as someone we can touch and talk with. God longs for us to understand that we are all truly connected to each other, and connected to every living thing and to every rock and every speck of star dust in the universe.

And so God comes to us as a living, breathing person, to demonstrate that there is another way to live besides dwelling in blankness and death. “From his fullness,” John tell us, “we have all received, grace upon grace.” Yet John’s gospel also sounds a discordant note, and we would be remiss to not hear this discordant note today: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

Those words, to our everlasting shame, have been used to justify the persecution of Jews for two millennia. We need to own up to that, to name it. That is a sin we inherit as members of this Church, a stain that does not go away. John’s gospel goes on to describe the conflict that leads to the death of Jesus on the Cross, and it begins in those few words. The march to the Cross and Easter begins today.

So let me suggest that we need to hear these words really as they are meant. Those people who did not know him are, of course, us. Not some distant other, but us. We are the ones who turn away, who break the holy connection we have to each other by our actions, by our grudges and jealousies, by our inability to truly love our neighbor as ourselves.

It is not for nothing that Jesus tells us that to love God and to love each other are the greatest of the Jewish commandments – which, by the way, is known as the shema. Jesus knows that keeping the commandments to love each other strikes at the very heart of our connection to our Creator, and to each other and to the universe. He also knows those are the hardest commandments for us to keep.

“That we knew him not” – We can take these words from the Gospel of John as an indictment, which they are. But these words are also an opportunity to rise above our hurts and meanness, to step beyond doing things the way they have always been done.

We are challenged to know the Word made flesh, to truly fathom the holy in our life, to discover again this Jesus, the anointed One, Emmanuel, the Christ who walks among us this Christmas season and always. And we can begin, today, with each other by letting this light of the living Word enkindle our hearts and shine forth in our lives.

AMEN