ISAIAH 61:10-62:3
PSALM 147: 13-21
GALATIANS 3:23-25; 4:4-7 JOHN 1: 1-18

SERMON - 12/31/06

Now, it's time to savor what Christmas is really all about. Let's get beyond the very special holiday that is Christmas and lay to one side thoughts of whatever has been done or left undone, whatever hopes have been realized or shattered, whatever struggles have been undergone or declined. Let's get beyond our satisfaction, our disappointment, our delight, our sadness, who we're seeing this Christmas and who we're not, who we've heard from and who we haven't or haven't yet, what we've received and what we've given. Let us contemplate the Event itself.

The opening of John's Gospel doesn't give us any angelic revelations to Mary or Joseph, any stories of travels to Bethlehem or from Bethlehem to safety in Egypt and later to Nazareth, any homely pictures of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus snuggling in a barn with the animals nearby, any epiphanies to wise men or shepherds. John's Gospel also does not let us for a moment imagine that the story of Christ, God the Son, began with his incarnation as a human being at his birth.

The birth of Jesus is important not because it represents the beginning of the story of Christ but because the birth represents the pre-existent, eternal God coming into the world as a real, flesh-and-blood, vulnerable human being. Christ was never created, John 1: 1 clearly states: Christ always was, way before Creation, for “All things come into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”

Christ is described by John in ways which consciously evoke the first chapter of Genesis, the Creation Story itself, now being embodied and brought into the world arena as the Gospel says, “What has come into being with 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.”

The darkness and sin which have gripped the world since humanity's ancient rebellion against God, symbolically represented in the Garden of Eden story, has now been decisively challenged as the very source of life and light come to earth, incarnate as a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. It is not accidental that Jesus, in John's Gospel, later proclaims, “I am the Light of the World.” It is not accidental that one of his most dramatic miracles is the healing of a man born blind, and that his final miracle is the raising of Lazarus from the dead. It is not coincidence that, after Judas leaves the Last Supper to betray Jesus, John writes, “and it was night.”

It is not accidental that the resurrection happened just before dawn on Easter Sunday.

It is also not accidental that St. Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation.”

Christmas celebrates the coming of the Author of Life into the world to offer new life – abundant, extravagant, overflowingly lively life, – to all who accept him in faith as Lord and God, in the climactic words of the Apostle Thomas in John 20. We are invited to be made new, and to have that being made new continue into eternity with no limits we can understand to the possibilities before us.

It is appropriate indeed that in the Fourth Century, the Church chose to celebrate the Coming of the Light into the world at the time of year which, in the Northern Hemisphere, is the darkest. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Monmouth Junction, NJ

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