Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Recall for a moment these words we have just heard from the opening of the Gospel of John:
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.
We heard this same lyrical, powerful passage just three days ago, on Christmas day. The passage is easy to miss on Christmas, hidden among stories of the babe in the manger and of shepherds keeping watch over their flocks. Next week, we’ll hear more Christmas stories; we’ll listen to the tale of the newborn babe visited by wise men from the East and hear about a scheming king Herod. The stories are concrete. They give us an image in our mind of the baby and his mother. But Christmas is not only a story tale. It is a time of transformation, when light appears in the darkness, and grace becomes flesh. Here, in the middle of these stories, in John, is their key.
The Word became flesh and lived among us…. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Those words are like a small, unnoticed gift lying Christmas morning among the discarded wrapping paper, spent tinsel and half-finished mugs of eggnog. But that unnoticed box is the one that contains the jewel; inside the box is the pearl of great price, the jackpot. John’s words are what we must come back to when we remember the Christmas season.
When I was young, my parents used to pack us kids into the car and haul us out to West Virginia for long winter weekends in an old farmhouse owned by my parents’ friends. Perhaps because this was West Virginia, there was a good supply of whiskey in the house, but very little heat. We cranked up old electric heaters and hunkered down around a wood stove. One weekend I slept at the end of the house far from the heaters. When I turned off the lamp, the darkness seemed to seep in at the windows from the surrounding woods. The cold was so bitter that as much as I rubbed my feet together and piled on blankets, I feared there would be no relief until daylight.
Earlier during the day, we children had taken turns running down an outdoor porch, jumping off into a pile of hay. The floor of the porch had grown warm in the afternoon sun. As I now lay in the cold, I remembered the pooling yellow sunlight and I could still feel the warmth of the porch boards beneath my hands. Shivering in the pitch-black I experienced myself surrounded by a bright, warming light. I felt myself grow warm. I detected blood heating my fingers and toes. I fell asleep wrapped in a warming, remembered light that became real.
I think John is talking about something like this in the Gospel passage we heard this morning. God is the light and warmth we desire. With all the power of our imagination and faith we must open ourselves to that warmth — God’s reality — in our lives. In John’s Gospel, the Word gives form to the light and truth — like a fingerprint made visible by graphite powder. Our journey on earth is to locate the light of God — like a glowing fingerprint in our hearts. Our journey is to ask God that his light enter into our beliefs about ourselves and other people. We ask for the Word to be made flesh – the light to be made real, the abstract to become concrete — in our actions.
Christmas is one time in the Christian year – Easter is another – when we come smack up against the physical, living Christ. Jesus is what the Word looks like, Jesus who 2000 years ago was born, mewling like every human infant to be fed and have his diapers changed. Jesus – the baby born three days ago – is the Word made flesh. He is both God – the power of love, an idea that we humans can never fully understand – as well as the very human, concrete person who embodies love.
The lyrical opening passage of John shimmers with poetry, images lapping against the shore of the mind. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not,” says the King James Version. This poetry gives us the taste of God’s Reality. We taste the Word but, like light shining in darkness, it is too beautiful for us to comprehend and we cannot grasp it fully. John’s poetry creates an otherworldly place where the abstract and the concrete move back and forth exchanging places, and we can get a small taste of God’s grace.
Two thousand years ago, darkness was an inescapable condition. The author of the Gospel of John could not reach to the wall beside him to switch on a light. Darkness had a reality we may find hard to fathom. A week ago at the winter solstice the sun rose after 7 am and went down before 5 pm. Washington received a measly nine and a half hours of light. I woke that Sunday morning to the sinking feeling of being engulfed by the darkness. My gloomy feeling was leavened by the fact I knew the Earth would continue to rotate around the sun, drawing us more deeply into the light.
Earlier this autumn, my sister Cecilia and her husband Dean held a party on a piece of property they own out past Frederick. Dean builds timber-frame houses, and in the barn the tables for eating sit cozily amidst large tools for shaping wood: band saws, planers and lathes. At the party people eat and hover around galvanized tubs of beer bottles talking fast and watching the children chase each other. If you step away from the buildings, though, you’ll see the sky lit up with flame. Each year in a dark field Dean and Cecilia light an enormous bonfire visible from miles away. Party guests amble with their beer down to the fire, which is as wide across as a good-sized house. Time slows down around the bonfire. People stand together mutely watching the flames. From next to the fire, you hear the trucks on the distant highway rushing by and the snap, crackle of new branches bursting into light. The dark seems deep, cold and very close. It feels foreign and frightening, yet familiar, like a half-remembered bad dream. Sometimes a spark from the fire leaps from a branch, singeing a jacket or lock of hair, and you step back from the light of the fire, because it too is powerful and unrelenting. The Darkness comprehends it not.
The pairing of light and darkness in the Gospel also signifies the moral choices we make. We stumble into darkness, into uncertain decisions, ever day of our lives. John’s image of a cosmic battle represents our own human spiritual struggle.
What do the darkness and light of our spiritual struggle look like?
Darkness is the counterpart of Light. In Genesis, Darkness came into being before the Light. Darkness covered the face of the Earth at the beginning of time. There was no Light. And then Light appeared and God blessed it. He saw that the Light was good. The Darkness did not overcome, did not comprehend the Light.
The ways of this Darkness are oblique. It is present when we don’t see it. Darkness is the master of denial. It is the woman who covers with make-up the bruises on her face. It is the colleagues in her office who pretend not to notice the dark swellings. Darkness is small things in our daily lives. It is the temptation to drive away when your car’s fender inadvertently scrapes a gouge in the side of a parked car. Driving away is a small thing, really, and no one sees what you do in the dark. Darkness is the nagging voice of uncertainty in difficult times. Darkness is the voice that tells you to pass by the homeless man on the street – no one will see you. Keep your dollar in your pocket; keep it safe and secure in the Darkness.
Darkness is in big things as well. It is the panic in the United States occasioned by Ebola this autumn. It is unthinking fear and prejudice. In October, school children in the Bronx beat viciously two American boy. The boys had returned to New York from Senegal, where there had been one case of Ebola, months earlier. The Darkness whispered in the school children’s ears, “Ebola” and from their fear grew a response reeking of prejudice – and Darkness.
The Ebola outbreak in Africa and in the United States gave rise to fear in some of its uglier, more unthinking forms. Ebola became even larger than itself and reflected the unclean and shadowed immorality that each of us shrinks from in others and in ourselves. Many editorials noted the overlay of racial prejudice in fear of Ebola. Darkness is the simmering fear bubbling over in Ferguson, in Staten Island and across the country. The slaying of young black men, and this week New York cops, adds to that weight of darkness in our country. Darkness is not skin color. Darkness is a metaphor for separation from God.
The Gospel of John is full of opposites – light and darkness, God and humanity. John’s Greek-influenced audience would be accustomed to understanding the world according to a system of ideas always in tension with each other – good battling evil. John’s opening speaks of truths, like good and evil, which are greater than our understanding. The Word is one such truth. The “Word” is our translation of the Greek word logos, which is the logic and Wisdom of the universe. Through the Word the opposites begin to disappear.
Each of us carries within himself the shadow of Darkness. Each of us also holds the possibility of making a choice to move away from Darkness toward Light. That is our personal spiritual struggle, contained by God’s love. Through the process of the Word becoming flesh, we physical humans receive “grace,” God’s love for us. John shows how that works. He shows how the catalyst of Jesus resolves this tension of opposites: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” There is the creative force that changes everything. There is Jesus, whom one scholar calls “God’s infinite reconciliation entering into time and space.”
The Gospel is not just about words and ideas, but also most centrally about a way of living your life. The question I ask myself is, how do I make this choice real in my life? What does Love look like? We first must do our utmost to face Darkness in ourselves. We also must act in Love. The story of Christmas is not simply that a child was born in Bethlehem, but “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
John presents grand and opposing ideas – darkness and light, time and eternity, humanity and God—and the task for us as we celebrate Christmas is to take a powerful idea—the triumph of Light over Darkness, the birth of God on earth—and make it real in our lives, so real that even in the bitterest cold, we are made warm by its heat.
Blue Leaf Yoga 