A sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas Day, December 29, 2024. The scriptures are Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7, John 1:1-18, and Psalm 147 or 147:13-21.
John of the Cross has poem in which he mediates on the Gospel we just heard. The poem is really an extended meditation on the Incarnation—what it means that God has come among us and God continues to move within us and around us as God-in-relationship, or as we say in shorthand, God as Holy Trinity.
John wrote in 17th century Spanish and the Bible he knew best was in Latin, so there is a lot of room for translation of his words.
The Latin phrase for the beginning of today’s Gospel is straightforward,
In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum,
et Deus erat Verbum.
Typically this translates to what we heard this morning, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
But instead of translating the Latin Verbum as palabra, Spanish for “word,” John includes some wiggle room, he writes, En el principio moraba el Verbo, y en Dios vivía …
My favorite English translation of John’s poem keeps this nuance and puts John’s poem like this:
In the beginning resided
the Verb, and it lived in God,
in whom it possessed its infinite happiness.
God was the Verb itself,
the beginning was spoken.
It lived in the beginning and it had no beginning.
It was the beginning itself;
That is why it lacked it;
The Verb is called Son, born from the beginning.
In the beginning resided
the Verb, and it lived in God,
in whom it possessed its infinite happiness.
I love John’s poem version of the Gospel of John because of its movement, its energy, and its life.
The Gospel is beautiful and central to the hearing of the Christmas message. But it’s easy to hear it passively. The Word WAS, Was, Is, …. My role is to receive.
And yet, we know from the live of Jesus that to receive without responding is to live without faith. The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” But faith is what moves us, it’s what animates us. Faith is what builds bridges and makes peace. Faith feeds and clothes and comforts.
The Word is a verb, and that Verb lives in us and moves us out of ourselves and into the world.
We see the activity of God’s Word at the beginning of time. Our Biblical account of creation happens by a word. In Genesis we read, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God said, Let there be this, and let there be that, and after each thing was created, God spoke a single word again: “Good,” God said, “It’s all very, very good.” The Word was busy, shaping and making and proclaiming and blessing.
When John speaks of the “Word,” the Greek term he uses is Logos, and Logos meant more than just a word, more even than all words put together. Way back in Greek philosophy, in the 3rd century BC, Heraclitus said that the Logos “governs all things.” And yet, the Logos is also present in the everyday. Later, the Stoics took up the idea of the Logos and used it to mean “the principle that orders the universe.” So when John uses Logos, or Word, he’s using a term that would have worked as a kind of hyperlink, culturally. To say that the Word was with God and the Word was God, and then to say that this Word, this ordering principle of the universe is completely summed up in Jesus of Nazareth, John is pulling together a lot of different ways of understanding the world.
The Word is a Verb when we allow Christ to be born in our lives. And that frees our bodies and loosens our tongues to be faithful. So often our politicians and religious leaders offer words, but no actions. As we end one year and begin another, it might be helpful for us to pray about the ways in which we do the same thing.
Are there ways in which we have offered words, but not acted in any way to follow up, or make the words come alive? Are there words we’ve used, or thought, or prayed, or framed our lives with that have been mostly nouns, but could accomplish so much more if they were verbs?
The old prayers used in Salisbury, England give shape to words we might use, and so we can pray
God be in our hearts, and in our reaching;
God be in our hands and in our building,
God be in our feet and in our moving,
God be in our heads, and in our understanding;
God be our my eyes, and in our looking;
God be in our mouths
and in our speaking and in our acting.
Amen.
