I am Here, and Here I Stand

Christmas Day, Year A

John 1:1-14

Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born this day of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

My father, who worked for NASA, used to show me wonderful pictures of the earth that had been taken from space. The amazing thing about these pictures is that you can really see night divided from day: Darkness reigns over certain slivers of the earth, while in the same picture, daylight covers other parts. In the daylight, most of the continents look alike, with the exception of places where huge brown deserts or tall, snow-capped mountains catch your eye. But strangely enough, even in the darkness of night, human history and society have marked the earth. You can see the prosperous, crowded metropolitan areas as they blaze forth in thousands of tiny points of light. In other areas, poverty or harsh topography leave large swaths of the earth in darkness. The east coast of the United States shines and sparkles from Boston down to Washington DC, for example, but Africa and the heart of the Australian continent disappear into the night. In a glance, these pictures from space show us a living, panoramic view of life on earth, as day turns to night and night to day, and as human civilization, for better and for worse, blinks forth its powerful presence to the stars. You can’t look at these pictures without wanting to find your hometown, to find yourself in the broad scheme of things, in the patterns of light and darkness that crisscross the globe. You are compelled to murmur with amazement, “I am here, in this tiny dot, surrounded by all of this vastness, this darkness and this light. I am here.”

          The Prologue to John’s Gospel that we read this morning is kind of like these NASA photos. It is a huge panorama--a beautiful, awe-inspiring, sweeping vision, filled with darkness and light, with powers seen and unseen. Yet instead of showing geography, instead of telling the story merely of the land and seas and their inhabitants, John’s prologue is a sweeping panorama of salvation history. Instead of a space shuttle snapping photographs from its orbit around the globe, St. John the eagle swoops over time itself, from Creation to the present, creating a poetic image filled with God and God’s relationship to humankind.

John begins, like Genesis, with creation. Clearly echoing Genesis, John shows us the creation of light and life through God’s Word. God speaks all things into being, and even the darkness of sin isn’t able to overcome the goodness of God’s light in creation. As John Calvin puts it, just as human words written on the page are the engraved marks of our thoughts, God’s Word in Christ is also that by which God declares Himself, creating and making Himself known to us.

After establishing the active role of Christ in creation, John describes what happened when Christ came down into the world. Like the Holy God who accompanied the people of Israel in a tent throughout their wanderings in the desert, God has again “pitched his tent” in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to dwell with his people. Why does God choose to dwell among us, when we don’t even recognize him? Because of his enduring love, says John. God is so filled with love, filled to overflowing with that special saving mixture of grace and truth, that this love rains abundantly down upon us, as gift. In the humanity of Jesus, God and the world are reconciled in an embrace.

The beautiful panorama is thus spread before us. Patterns of light and darkness, love and separation, abound, as time is unfurled before our eyes. It is John’s hope that, as we picture the images that he shows us with his words, we too will want to find ourselves in this huge panorama.

 “But to all those who did accept him he empowered to become God’s children,” John writes at the very center of his poem, “That is, those who believe in his name.”

“It’s time to find your hometown on the map,” John says here. “Where do you stand? Are you a child of God? Or do you stand in darkness? Will you believe?” For John, “to believe” in Christ isn’t for us to assent passively to certain doctrines about him and then to continue to live our life as we always have. Since the unthinkable has happened—the eternal God has been made flesh and entered into history—there has been an eruption of something radically new into the world, something totally foreign to our human reality. In order to take part in this new reality, in order to join in this new, eternal life, we must open our arms to the Word that is given to us. It is available to everyone who believes, a gift spread out clearly before us all like a satellite photo. We have been given a map of the Incarnation, and we are invited to decide where we stand in response to what we see.

In our daily lives, are we that tiny dot of light, shining in the darkness, reflecting upwards and outwards the Love that God pours out upon creation? Or do we hide under a dark, protective shield, blocking the rays of God’s love and casting shadows across the landscape? Can the poetic words that we hear today become an invitation as compelling as a map from the space shuttle? An invitation to do more than just to watch history swirling around us. An invitation to search, to be astonished, and to cast aside everything that blocks the grace-filled Light of Christ, born in us this day.