“Grant that this light, enkindled in our
hearts, may shine forth in our lives…”
The Prologue
of John is a reading made for a Christmas season which comes at the time of the
Winter Solstice. With its imagery of light and darkness, of new creations at
the start of a new year, John’s Prologue reflects this season of hope. Not
surprisingly, it has a very interesting history.
Biblical
scholars believe that the opening to John’s Gospel was a hymn that long predated
the writing of the gospel itself. It may well have been used in communal
celebrations much as we use the Gloria today. Called the Prologue because it is
distinctly different from the remainder of the gospel which follows, this
opening meditation on creation, order and revelation of the divine is a
masterful use of thought from two different cultures: the Hebrew culture, whose
account from Genesis it retells, and the Greek culture from which its images
and language come. The author of this gospel has done a masterful job of
interweaving the values, symbols and words from these two cultures which will
become the basis for a new religion called Christianity.
We hear
this Prologue through distinctly modern ears. The hymn that is the Prologue is
offered as reverence for the logos. While that term can be translated as
“word,” in the Prologue, that is at best a secondary translation. When we only
translate logos as “word,” we lose its depth and its richness. And when
we confine logos to the written word found in the scriptures themselves,
we have missed the point entirely.
Logos comes from the Greek
world in which 700 years before the birth of Jesus philosophers spoke of a
rational and spiritual power that permeated the universe from its very
creation. The Greeks saw the logos as providence, nature, god, the soul
of the universe. The Greeks believed that the logos was the emanation of
god into a space where nothing previously existed and where it was then put
into order by reason. It was the logos as emanation of god that created
the cosmos and the logos as the ordering principle of the universe that
put it all into place to form the world we know.
We hear
echoes of that Greek thinking in today’s Gospel. Let me reword it using the
Greek word:
In the beginning was
the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The Logos was in
the beginning with God. All things came into being through the Logos, without
whom not one thing came into being.
We
Franciscans have long called Creation the First Testament. It is the place
where G_d’s creative power, emanating from the Source of all Being, can readily
be observed by those who have eyes to see.
It is in the Creation that we see the goodness of G-d’s creative power,
the providence that ensures that there is always enough to meet all human need
even as there will never be enough to satisfy human greed.
But the
marvels of Creation alone have never proven sufficient to remind human
creatures of the G-d from which they and all Creation have come. As the Gospel
writers tell us,
“The Logos was in the
world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know
him. The Logos came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept
him.”
It is our
very human tendency to be self-focused and to look only to one another for
affirmation. We often baptize that myopia with the description “common sense.” But
in doing so, we lose sight of our origins. And so, the writers of John’s Gospel
tell us, our Creator sends messengers to humanity to call us to remember the
G-d who resides in the depth of every human soul, the G-d whose image is borne
on the faces of all living beings. G-d knows that it is when we come to see
ourselves as somehow cut off from our holy source that the worst of human
depravity – including that which becomes coded into tyrannical religious
ideologies – comes into being.
In
today’s Gospel reading from John, there are two messengers. The first is John the Baptist. The
writers of John’s Gospel feel it is essential to tell us two things here.
First, John the Baptist is G-d’s messenger who has come to tell us to wake up,
to pay attention, something new is happening in the world. He does so
faithfully and pays with his life. But, John is not the final act – he’s just the
warmup. And he points toward Jesus.
This is precisely
the point in the Gospel that we see a decided switch from the abstract
philosophical language of the Greeks to the earthy, material language of the Hebrews:
And
the Logos became flesh and lived among us…
While all
that abstract, ideal language of the Greeks is all fine and good, for the
Hebrew people, the Holy is only taken seriously when it takes material form.
And that is true for many of us as well. A G-d who is tangibly present with us
in our lives and particularly in our hearts will always be more compelling than
one who remains bound to the mere conceptual realms of our minds.
But what
makes Jesus different from John is the scope of his ability to reveal the G-d
from whom all Creation comes. Jesus was so attuned to the will of G-d and so open
to G-d’s calling to him that he became transparent and the G-d that was within
him – and within all of us as well – shone through. Again, the writers of John put it
very elegantly:
“We
have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and
truth.”
Almost
immediately, humanity lost sight of Jesus’ calling to us once we saw the divine
within him. Jesus tried to convince us over and over: “YOU are the salt of
the earth….YOU are the light of the world….Don’t look here nor there for the
Kingdom of G-d. It is right here among you, indeed, within you!” The G-d
that Jesus revealed was neither confined to the heavens nor isolated to
himself. The G-d that Jesus revealed is all around us in the Creation and
within each living being, simply waiting to be revealed.
Jesus knew
he was not going to be with his followers forever. And so when he departed, he
deputized them to take up his calling, to be revealers of G-d in the world.
Because a world that does not recognize the divine even when it is staring them
in the face is never going to become conscious of the holy within themselves
unless the followers of Jesus live into their own calling to be the revealers
of G-d.
Wow. That’s
a pretty big calling. So what does that look like? I think I have an idea.
About six
years ago, a dear friend of mine had been evicted from his Section 8 housing in
downtown Orlando because, as a legally blind man, he was unable to see how
filthy and infested his apartment had become. His friend from the Society for a
Creative Anachronism, the group that produces the medieval fairs, took him into
his place near here on Howell Branch Road.
Charles
didn’t make very good first impressions. His clothes, which came from
charities, rarely matched and often were not clean. He couldn’t see to shave
and his hair was wild and out of control. That reflected a life of having been
in and out of eight different foster placements as a child, a number of them which
forced him to endure physical and sexual abuse. The medication he took for his
glaucoma had a psychotropic effect that prompted Charles to utter things that
most of us, without knowing him, would have presumed were the rantings of a
mentally questionable homeless person.
I had met
Charles while a parishioner at the Cathedral downtown. Given his love for the
church, I proposed to him that I take him to church on Sundays to get him out
of the house and ensure he got at least one good meal a week. St. Richards was
the closest parish and so we began attending the main service each Sunday.
This was
at a point in my life when I had come to believe that the Episcopal Church and
I had said everything to one another that we needed to say. To say I was
tentative about any dealings with the church is an understatement. As I have
often told people, in my life in the church, I always stand near the exits.
But I was
more concerned about how Charles would be treated. I watched carefully as
people interacted with him here. They treated him with respect. When I asked
him how he was experiencing his time here, he always said, “These people are
kind to me, little brother.” And so we began to come on a regular basis until
Charles got sick and disappeared into the maze of elderly indigent health care.
Two years later we consecrated a brick in our memorial garden to celebrate the
life of Charles Miller. And four years later, I am still here, in your pulpit
today.
This is how the light of the logos is revealed in the world. It does not come
from getting the theology right, though theology is not unimportant. It does not
come from zealously upholding moralistic standards that define the elect from
the great unwashed, though morals and ethics are important as well. Rather, it
comes from the willingness to be the revealers of G-d’s love in this world, to
let your light shine in the vibrant ministries you carry out here. And it comes
when you let the warmth of G_d’s love embrace all who might come through your
doors.
Presiding
Bishop Edmund Browning articulated this challenge you have undertaken well when
he said,
“I
want to be very clear – this church of ours is open to all – there will be no
outcasts…”
Our
collect today reflects this task to which we are called and so I close with it:
Almighty
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; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. AMEN.
[N.B., A sermon preached December 29, 2019, First Sunday
of Christmas, at St. Richard’s Church, Winter Park, Florida]
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2020
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