John 1:1-18 - "Word Search" (1-4-09)

On Christmas day, we retold and acted out the birth story from Luke’s Gospel with our kids. Lest we think Jesus just showed up, we hear from the Gospel of John that “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The eternal broke into the temporal on Christmas day and we celebrate that good word.

When it said in Genesis that God said let there be light… there was light. Words spoken create an image and life. When I suggest a word to you, like ice cream, the image takes hold and the word takes on a life of its own. Words create life. Words spoken bring life or can cause pain.

The word that broke the silence was UGH. It was January 2^nd and I had just been in the office for about 30 minutes when I realized that I didn’t order the Lutheran Study Bibles at the reduced price before January 30^th. So then I called Augsburg Fortress and said, “Wa,wa,wa” the lady said, “Let me check with my supervisor.” I waited and then the word was spoken, “Yes you can have them at the $25.00 price.” I rejoiced. The words couldn’t express the gratitude I was experiencing.

So as we start a new year, perhaps a new years resolution is to order a Lutheran Study Bible. The next 16 people can still get them at the price of $25.00. Order now and pay March 1^st when they are shipped. We have 34 accounted for and I ordered 50. In this New Year, I encourage you to search out the Word of God. We search out the word of God to discover that the good word for us today is Christ, the living word that came searching for us.

It’s like at Christmas, my daughter received a princess vanity from Tammy’s grandparents. My usual way of building these things that have too many parts is to just have at it. But I was smart enough to go through the instructions.

Today is the 11^th day of Christmas. If you search out the meaning of the words to the familiar twelve days of Christmas, you’ll discover a time when people were persecuted because the word of God was being misused to repress one form of Christian faith and another. Those holy wars between Catholics and Protestants of England recall a time when the words of the song were used to teach the faith. One partridge in a pear tree depicted Jesus Christ (the mother partridge feigns injury to decoy predators from her helpless babies). Two Testaments; Three gifts of faith, hope and love; Four gospels; Five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch); and today is the eleventh day of Christmas - Eleven faithful disciples.

Yet all eleven disciples who received the word also rejected it when push comes to shove. When the word became flesh and dwelt among us, those disciples were amazed. The eternal and cosmic word – “the eternal word will not stay outside time and history, but will enter into the time-bound world.”[1] The Word cut across dimensions and lifted them up to hear a good word.

John came to bear witness, using temporal words to point others to Jesus Christ. He was not the light or the word – his words point to the light of the word that gives us the power to become a child of God. 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.” There is a changed relationship between the distant God out there to the God that is here in the midst of the heart of the problems. The Word comes from God and is God and lived and we heard the good news and we are called to hear it again.

Perhaps we do not see the good word in our limited searching of the word. Perhaps we do not hear them in our busyness. But God has spoken and we have this sense that there is something divine; bigger than ourselves, something that binds and holds all things together. Something that pulls and presses upon us in such ultimate and yet so simple a manner that we think… aha…what is that word? This word we have experienced in the faith has been received – the way all twelve received. We rejoice when we hear this word.

Ye we also resist the word, the way the twelve resisted what this word meant when they denied Jesus. Yet they surrender to it even after failure. We resist the word sometimes because it will cause us to radically change our behavior toward one another.

The word is also perverted and distorted for ungodly things that lead to death, war, destruction, brokenness, misused and abused words that are spoken or withheld from one another. When the word is distorted it becomes resisted, we turn the word into law! We turn the Word that is Christ and the mystery of God’s presence among us into a form or a tradition that becomes mandated and codified in our faith.

The struggle is that we often have turned the Word of God into a law. The word holders become more important than what we witness to; that we have no words to face sin, death, war, impeachment, a new year, joblessness; poverty… we have no words but the mysterious word that is eternal that cosmically comes to us in community and brings light to a world of darkness. We want the word to be law so that we can say what you did was right and wrong. Grace be gone, the extraordinary loses meaning and the ordinary is held above the divine and worshipped. Whenever any “holy book” is codified, the easiest thing to do is mandate how we live with one another, leading to using words that demonize and gives us the authority to kill, mame, war and abuse in the name of God.

We resist this word perhaps because it calls for change in us that is too uncomfortable and we cannot bear such confusion. The word doesn’t remove us from the anxiety and struggle but gives us courage[2] to face the silences that search us out; that we might know that the dimension between this life and the eternal one has been bridged with a single word: Jesus. The only way to face the silence and the only word that brings life and light is Jesus Christ.

We are left in the silence, in the emptiness of our souls and the word of God is speaking to us again; the word is search is out in order to break through from eternity into the present; from the eternal to the temporal; from the cosmic to the here; it is always trying to help us perceive, understand and do the will of the one who is the word, Jesus Christ!

Let us pray:

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[1] The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 9, page 518ff

[2] Paul Tillich, The New Being, page 119