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. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

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. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:1-18).

In the Christmas season, we remember a story. Something happened in Palestine two thousand years ago, and the world has never been the same. The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – tell of dreams and angels, a pregnant older woman rejoicing with a pregnant virgin, travels and hardship, birth among cattle out back, shepherds rushing from their flock and astrologers following a star, a paranoid governor and the slaughter of innocents, exile into Egypt and return. Yet, no one would ever have noticed or remembered except the child grew up and awakened the world.

Despite its lyrical play of abstractions like, “The Word was with God and the Word was God,” John’s prologue tells the same story. Only John zooms the camera back and tells it from a cosmic perspective. Rather than Palestine in some debatable point in time, John’s location has no boundaries, his timeline no endpoints. The Word is worldwide, prehistoric, and eternal.

He frames the story’s conflict in the loving visitation of the eternal into the muddy, bloody mess of mortal history. This Word-become-flesh goes unrecognized for who he is and how he saves, rejected and killed by those to whom he gives life and light in the darkness. Nevertheless, John foreshadows a happy ending since this incarnate Word opened the eyes of some. Those who truly see him recognize his voice and form a community bearing witness to a truth too wonderful for most to see.

“In the beginning was the Word,” refers back to Genesis 1 in which God creates the world with words, speaking into existence light and darkness, creeping creatures and flying things, waters and wilds and men and women. That telling too implies the love of the Creator who called all things good and completed the work by making a sacred day to stop working and simply enjoy the blessings. So you would think the life of good human creatures in this very good world would be an orderly symphony into which all can settle and bask in the sublime.

Yet, we know from experience it is not. Human history tells and retells the same drama on countless stages of our insatiable appetite for more resources than God allotted to meet our needs, more power than our neighbors. It records the senseless suffering we impose on each other as we claw for survival, oblivious to the abundance God provided for all if only we would share. According to Genesis 3, it all starts with our dissatisfaction with being enough for God and receiving enough from God. For we naively fancy something more appealing: being gods ourselves. 

You studied enough history in school to know what I’m talking about. In fact, you check the news today, so you know what I’m talking about. And if you are really mature, you look in the mirror and search your heart, so you know what I’m talking about.

The prologue of John tells of a second coming of the Spirit of God to chaos. Genesis 1 tells the first when the Spirit comes as a category five creative wind that tackles chaotic waters and whips them into shape, an orderly nature that pleases God. In John, the Spirit comes as a human being into the chaos we made subsequently and continue to make. Remarkably, John does not give up on the promise of a loving order to things despite the disorder we make, although the more we compete with each other for power and status, the more we rationalize and justify the disorder to ourselves. Christ came as a powerless peasant with perhaps the only perspective that sees the chaos for what it is. 

“The Word became flesh,” John sings. “The Word” translates from the Greek, logos, meaning the rational principle behind all things or the divine plan for the ordering of society and nature. In short, the Word is the mind of God, and Jesus Christ, the Word become flesh, is the mind of God among us. The tragedy and ultimately the comedy of this story unfold as the ordering mind of God invades our chaos and literally all hell breaks loose with only a few very unlikely chosen ones privy to the beauty behind it all. Little wonder: The mind of the eternal God becoming mortal human flesh makes pigs flying, two plus two equals five, and snow in July look commonplace.

Mix order and chaos, and chaos fights back. Nobody can understand a word the Word is saying. Professional servants of God cannot stop arguing with God incarnate. His mercy scandalizes the priests, and his miracles so transfix the common folk that they cannot shift their gaze to the God who will make them whole. Jesus heals the sick, and when he literally resuscitates a man dead for days, that is the last straw for the priests who then plot to kill him. When they bring him before the governor to ascertain the truth and administer justice, the governor asks, “What is truth?” Concluding Jesus did nothing wrong, he hands him over to be crucified. A placard atop the cross reads, “King of the Jews,” and of course, he is the only real king in the story, a dying man whose reign never ends.

Then all heaven breaks loose. The powers-that-be can manage hell breaking loose much better, so Christ’s resurrection rips the veil of political and religious pseudo-order covering the chaos. But the promise of real order and beauty survives in the life of the Word made flesh “from (whom) we have all received grace upon grace” (v.16b).

For John, Christmas marks the arrival of real order and beauty, not the order we think we have with political conquest, material accumulation, and technological prowess. Those things enslave us, then they pass, leaving us bereft. Bereft, that is, until we wake up and see. Until we recognize the real king and follow him. Then we really awaken to Christmas morning. 

Christmas answers Advent longing then introduces new longing. For the Word still dwells among us, unrecognized and unwelcome, yet working through us to establish the order for which we long. We yearn for a just order that disrupts the chaos of polarization and meanness that appalls us but in which we participate. We long to see the God made known through the face of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, risen now and dwelling among us, full of grace and truth despite his scars and humiliation. Then we not only talk about but realize God’s love for us despite our sin. And when we respond with love for God and neighbor by giving whatever gifts we can in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, the outlines of the peaceful order for which we desperately long glimmer through our darkness.

I delivered this sermon at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rome, Georgia on December 29, 2024. For the YouTube recording, click here. While I encourage you to view the entire service, you may listen to the sermon only by forwarding to 32.00 minutes. 

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Loving and Knowing the Way: A Reflection on Philippians 1:3-11

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God (Matthew 5:9).

Image, “Chaos and Order,” Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.