“Seeing Jesus”
Sirach 24:1-12 John 1:1-18
January 4, 2009 Second Sunday after Christmas
First Congregational UCC/Reverend Deb Davis
I was fortunate to see two very different plays during this Christmas season.
One was the Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival at Plymouth UCC in Fort Wayne … a production I have seen many times over the past 30 or so years.
As you watch that performance you can’t help but think of the birth narratives from the gospels of Matthew and Luke … there’s Joseph and a pregnant Mary turned away at the inn and taken instead to a stable … there are angels announcing the birth to the shepherds out on the hillside … there are the three Magi traveling to Bethlehem from foreign lands … bearing gifts for a wiggling, newborn baby Jesus.
All in all … it is a beautiful portrayal of the traditional Christmas story.
And then … along with many of you … I watched the children and young people of this church perform their play here on Christmas Eve … another wonderful play entitled, “Will You Say Yes?”
Even though these young people agreed to say “yes” to their parts … it was very evident to all who were watching that these were just regular kids … wearing their regular clothes … taking some time out of their regular lives … to be a part of the Christmas story.
Unlike the Boar’s Head at Plymouth … theirs was not a traditional play. Even though there were some children who said they would be angels … and shepherds … and even Mary and Joseph … it was not a traditional play … even though Erik Finley joined a cardboard cutout to become the third Wise Man … still … it was not a traditional play.
No one in this play was trying to make us believe they were any of the Christmas characters … they weren’t acting out the scene at the inn … or the angels proclamation to the shepherds … or the Magi’s journey.
And the baby Jesus in our play … did you notice? … The baby Jesus was an American Girl doll … an Itty Bitty Baby to be exact … dressed in a stunning green silk dress and matching hat.
Normal, average kids … a common enough doll … willing to do their part.
No … no one would claim our Christmas Eve play took its plot from the Gospels of Luke or Matthew like the Boar’s Head does year after year.
Rather the play we saw here on Christmas Eve came a lot closer to portraying this text from the Gospel of John … a text that tells us God dwells among us … among regular, ordinary human beings.
The poetic prologue we just heard … is the only thing that comes close to being a “birth narrative” in this fourth gospel. It is a prologue that provides one of the key moments in Christian theology … because it makes the claim that God’s Word or Logos … that which the Hebrew Bible calls Wisdom … took on flesh in the human being Jesus.
This text makes the claim that God’s message was no longer only spiritual … but rather it had a face, a voice and a pair of hands … that a flesh and blood person … in a specific moment in history … embodied God’s mind and heart on earth.
And this prologue also tells us something else … it tells us that our very own flesh and blood bodies … will be given power and authority to become children of God … to also become a part of God’s story in our own day.
This text raises our ordinary human bodies into important roles … tells us that even without an angel’s voice or a Magi’s gift … our very own flesh and blood bodies … have a part to play … that God values our human bodies … and so by extension … God values the whole physical world.
Perhaps now that the glow of the Christmas celebration has faded somewhat … perhaps we can take some time to ponder all of that … take some time to dig more deeply into what it means that God has bridged the great gap between heaven and earth and has come to live among us.
Because no matter how much we love the traditional Christmas story … how much we love the Christmas Jesus … that baby in the manger does not give us the complete picture of incarnation … doesn’t get at the heart of the mystery of what incarnation says about God … what it says about us and all of creation … doesn’t get at all of that like this prologue to John’s gospel does.
Our children’s play … a gospel prologue … a baby dressed in green silk … all can help us to see that the incarnation was about them, then … but it is also very much about us, now.
This gospel text helps us to take off our blinders … helps us to realize that we aren’t spectators of an ancient drama … but rather we, too, are asked to play a leading role in a story that is new every day.
And if the claim made by the author of John’s gospel is true … if the incarnation continues to happen again and again … then we are challenged this morning to think about where we still see Jesus in the world today … asks us to think about how we would “know” Jesus if we ran into him … and what our response should be.
Rather than expecting a perfect Christmas baby … perhaps we should step outside the box … and think about that baby Jesus dressed in green silk with a hat to match … let that unorthodox baby Jesus remind us that even though Jesus is present with us … he might not look like we expect him to look … might not be dressed like we expect him to be dressed … that we might actually see him … where we least expect to.
We just have to read the rest of this gospel … the rest of the New Testament … keep reading it and laying it down beside our very own, ordinary human lives.
Then … we will know Jesus when we see him … whether he’s dressed in a white tunic or green silk … we can be sure it’s him … because he will always summon us to wholeness, healing, harmony, reconciliation, salvation.
We will know Jesus when we see him … because no matter if he comes as a baby or a teenager or an old woman … we can be sure his truth will always be a cheek turned, an enemy loved, an outcast embraced, eyes opened, circles formed, fear conquered, power yielded, another chair pushed up to the table.
We will know it’s Jesus … because no matter if we run into him at the grocery store or on a mountain top … we can be sure that in his presence we will sense a new beginning, a new world, a new you and a new me … a repair of what is broken.
We will know its Jesus … because no matter if he meets us in the morning or at midnight … we can be sure a light will appear in our darkness.
Paul and I spent New Year’s Eve this year at Cahoots. Earlier in the day Paul and John Eddy had taken our grill over to the coffee shop … and had gathered some wood … so we could build a small fire in the grill at midnight.
The idea was for the kids at Cahoots to symbolically throw some of the baggage in their lives into the fire as the year ended … to symbolically let go of some of the bad stuff from the past year … so they could begin the New Year in a better place … perhaps carrying a lighter load.
The kids had worked on this idea with Rita on Tuesday during their regular “Tell It like It Is” session … and again on Wednesday during the day with the barristas. They wrote down on paper what they wanted to throw into the fire and put the paper in a sealed envelope.
Most had colorfully decorated the outside of the envelope with their names … and then we took a hole-punch and punched two holes in each envelop so that a 4th-of-July-type sparkler could be threaded through it.
Then the whole thing could be tossed in the fire … the sparkler would ignite … and it would be pretty cool.
As we were waiting for midnight to arrive … I sat and talked with one of the barristas … and a young teen came over and sat down and talked for awhile.
When she left … the barrista whispered to me that her older sister was playing a card game at the next table … and that her younger brother was on the computer ... and then she dropped a bomb shell on me … about this family.
The barrista told me that those three children’s dad had died just a few weeks earlier … that he had committed suicide … that those three kids really had some baggage to throw into the fire.
So when midnight came … we went outside … out behind Cahoots … and each of the kids and each of us adults threw our envelopes into the fire … those three grieving children threw theirs in as well … and watched with the rest of us as we symbolically threw away our baggage … as the sparklers sent flashes of sparkles into the night.
There was certainly a light in the darkness at midnight over there behind Cahoots … not just the light from the fire and the sparklers … but the light of presence with children in their pain … a light that perhaps lit up their lives long enough … that they know they are not alone in their darkness.
As the Gospel of John tells us this morning … no one has ever seen God … but with our ordinary human eyes and ears and hands and hearts … we have seen glimpses … Jesus taught us what to look for … so we would know.
Where have you seen Jesus lately? And perhaps just as importantly: Where has Jesus seen you? Amen.
