"Children of God" (John 1:1-14, 18)

Scripture: God on Bended Knee

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

For Matthew and Luke, the Christmas story begins with Joseph and Mary and angels and shepherds and “a decree…from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered” (Luke 2:1). But for the gospel of John, the Christmas story begins a lot earlier, with the sun and the moon and the stars, with the first blades of grass that ever broke through the earth, with the first creatures that ever crept and crawled and swam and flew. For Matthew and Luke, the Christmas story is confined to a time and a place. For the gospel of John, the Christmas story is cosmic. It is timeless rather than time-bound, universal rather than regional.

To put it bluntly, for John, the Christmas story is one and the same as the creation story. John begins his story using the same words that Genesis uses for its creation story: “In the beginning…” (Gen 1:1; John 1:1). But John puts his own twist on creation. While Genesis tells us the “what” of creation (light, sky, plants, animals—these are “what” God created), John takes a more poetic and spiritual perspective and tells us the “how” of creation. And the “how” is simple. Contrary to popular imagination, creation does not begin with divine magic or might. God does not wave a wand or wrestle the elements of creation into submission. Rather God uses words. “In the beginning was the Word…” (John 1:1).  Which is an extremely vulnerable way of doing something. Words alone do not have the force of compulsion. There are no guarantees that a request will meet with an appropriate response, that an invitation will be met with a willing response.

There are only three things (three nouns) that the Bible identifies God with using the equation “God is this” or “God is that.” The Word (John 1:1), Spirit (John 4:24), and love (1 John 4:8). All three seem equally vulnerable, equally powerless. Yet all three reveal something crucial (and counterintuitive) about God. Namely the “how” of God (including the “how” of God’s creation). The “how” of God is love. There is no force in love, no compulsion. What we see in creation may be interpreted as a loving dialogue, a call and response, where God invites the elements of creation into their fullness—“Let there be,” “Let there be”—and the elements of creation respond willingly, rousing themselves to meet the call of love. (E.g., “Let the earth put forth vegetation,” and then moments later “the earth”—its own subject, its own player in the story—“brought forth vegetation.”) So when John says in the beginning was the “Word” (or logos), by “Word” he means something like God’s overture of love. The “Word” is akin to God’s proposal.

The Word—from which all creation emerges—the Word is God getting down on bended knee, a ring in his hand.

Scripture: A Gleam in God’s Eye

2 He [the Word] was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

Sometimes people will refer to a time before they were born and say they were just a “gleam” in their parent’s eye. Well, everything here on earth and in all creation began as just a gleam in God’s eye. John insists that everything in all creation—from birds to bears to dogs to spiders to Mother Teresa to Hitler—everything here has life because of the Word, which is to say, because God loved it and told it so.

And nothing, John says, can take that away. No number of evil deeds, no amount of disease, can change the fact that every person here bears within them the gleam of God’s eye (what some religious traditions have called the “divine spark” within us). Everything in creation echoes with God’s love. And nothing has silenced that echo yet, John says. The darkness has not overtaken the light—the gleam.

Scripture: “Yet the World Did Not Know Him”

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. (Here the gospel of John is referring to another John, namely John the Baptizer, the guy with long hair who lived in the desert and ate locusts and honey and proclaimed that the kingdom of God was coming.) 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John’s Christmas story started at the beginning of all creation, where “life” and “light” come into existence through the Word. But here we’re finally approaching a specific expression of the “light,” namely Jesus, whom the gospel of John calls “the true light, which enlightens everyone.” The gospel of John seems to be suggesting that the light of the Word that has shined since creation had nevertheless begun to dim or be obscured, and so Jesus came into the world as “the true light,” which is to say, the original undimmed light, an individual expression of the Word that was there in the beginning giving life and light to all.)

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

The real problem with the world is not that people are evil, but that people have forgotten that they were once a gleam in God’s eye. They have forgotten that they are unconditionally loved and accepted by God. The gospel of John says that when Jesus came into the world, proclaiming God’s love for all people (which, remember, is how creation began, with God’s loving overture to all creation), the people scratched their heads. They were confused. The timeless tragedy of our world, as true thousands of years ago as it is today, is that we are inclined to forget and even deny that we all bear the gleam of God’s eye within us, that we are all indelibly marked with God’s eternal and unconditional love. So when Jesus comes preaching something like that, we wince and shake our heads. (We need only look at how Jesus was received by the religious folks of his day. They predominantly taught that God’s love is reserved only for the righteous and socially respectably, and so they were scandalized when Jesus starts eating with tax collectors and sinners.)

Scripture: Born of God

12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God

Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation program in the world (based out in Los Angeles), tells the story of a “homie” or former gang member, Danny, who was riding a bus home one night. Another guy on the bus was studying his sweatshirt, which read “Homeboy Industries: Jobs Not Jails.” The guy nodded to Danny and asked, “You work there? Is it any good?”

Danny responded simply, “They helped me. I’m not going back to prison.” Then he scribbled the address of Homeboy on a scrap of paper and passed it to the man, saying, “Come see us. We’ll help you.”

The man took the scrap of paper, said thank you, and got off at the next bus stop. “What happened next,” Danny later told Greg Boyle, “never happened before [in all my life]. People were staring at me, nodding and smiling at me. For the first time in my life, I felt admired.”

Greg Boyle tells this story to insist on a counterintuitive truth. People do not change because of shame or judgment or the expectations of others. Rather, people change, he says, when they are cherished.

Or as John puts it in today’s scripture, all who received Jesus and his good news of God’s love, became children of God, born of God (cf. John 1:12-13). John speaks so poetically, so metaphorically, I don’t take his words as part of some equation that outlines the mechanics of salvation, suggesting that first God deems us as some alien matter and only later waves a wand over us and deems us “children of God.” I take these words instead as a broad brush stroke, painting the cosmic arc of humankind. We came into being through God’s love, already children of God. But through fear and shame we can become so estranged, so alienated from our true nature, that we need an example, a reminder, someone to make it clear beyond a shadow of  a doubt that God loves us. We need to hear again the loving overture that God made at creation.

And so…

14 [T]he Word—this is the Word through whom all things came into being— 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.... 18 No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

The Birth of You and Me (and Everyone)

John’s cosmic Christmas story reaches not only reaches back to the beginning of time, it also reaches forward into every future. For Matthew and Luke, the Christmas story is about the birth of Jesus. But for John, the Christmas story is not only about the birth of Jesus but also about the birth of you and me (and Danny and everyone else) as children of God.

Jesus, John says, “is close to the Father’s heart” (1:18). The Greek literally says “bosom.” Jesus is close to God’s bosom. Which is to say, Jesus knows that God is hugging him. Jesus lives in God’s embrace. And that is the good news that he ultimately seeks to share with others. That God loves us too, that we are God’s children too, that God’s embrace is for us too. It is the good news that we do not need to strive after success or status or wealth or whatever else we think will secure our lives because we are already secure in God’s unconditional love and delight.

To conclude, however, I must confess. Talking about God’s love can be an awfully abstract enterprise, a sort of mind game that doesn’t always map onto our bodies and how we feel. I think about Danny on that bus. He may have heard before that God loved him, but it wasn’t until that epiphany where he actually felt (for the first time) other people’s admiration  that he caught a glimpse of what God has felt for him since the beginning of time and will feel beyond the end of time. The whole point of Jesus coming into the world, I think, is that God’s love needs to be incarnated, given flesh, again and again, here, there, everywhere, or else it will just be an idea that falls on deaf ears.

And so everywhere Jesus went, he shared with others God’s loving gaze, God’s warm embrace, the knowledge that they were children of God, and he started with the people who had received this news the least (the tax collectors and the sinners). With that in mind, I’d like to close with a poem by an ancient Persian poet, Hafiz, who invites us to acknowledge God’s love as our identity and who invites us to share God’s loving gaze with others we meet.

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

Prayer

Creator God,
Whose Word is love
…
As we prepare to receive
The baby Jesus in our embrace
In just a few days’ time,
Prepare our hearts also
To learn from him
Who lives in your embrace,
That we might know ourselves
Children of God
And that we might share this good news
With all the world. In Christ, the eternal Word: Amen.