The God of New Beginnings

Pastor Kyle Clark

Gospel Lesson: John 1: 1-5, 9-18

Sunday January 4, 2009

Second Sunday of Christmas

“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.”

This is the way John begins his Gospel. It’s John’s birth narrative, if you will. It is very different from Matthew’s and Luke’s baby Jesus birth stories, and it is different from Mark who doesn’t even have a baby Jesus story. Yet these words have a familiar ring to them don’t they? At least they should. The very first words of the Bible begin “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…God said, “Let there be…” and there was.

John takes us back to the beginning of creation, actually before the beginning of creation, when nothing existed but God, when God speaks a word, whole worlds come into being. And John calls Jesus the Word. It’s as if John is claiming that in Jesus, God is creating a new heaven and a new earth. On the Sunday when we normally expect to hear the story of the wise men, this year anyway we read instead a creation story.

We don’t normally think about the first chapter of John as a Christmas story. Yet in the fading afterglow of Christmas this is an especially good time to dig more deeply into the incarnation (God becoming one of us). You see, no matter how much we love the Christmas story of the baby in the manger, no room at the inn, the angles, the shepherds and the wise men, that story of the incarnation is not complete. The incarnation is so much more than these bare facts of Jesus birth. The incarnation is about God doing something that has never been done before, something totally new. Just as God spoke a word, “let there be light” when the world was created, so John reminds us Jesus, the “Word,” is light in our darkness. God never stops being the Creator. God never stops creating.

Many of us make resolutions this time of year – resolutions that we have every intention of keeping. We tell our selves we will do better, try harder, make changes. But here’s the thing – even though it may be a new year, we are still the same old people. We carry the same old habits with us into each new year. Winston Churchill said something about this. “Sometimes we learn from history, but most of the time we just pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and go right on as we had before.”

It’s difficult to change. It’s tough to be new, especially on our own. Yet, we live in a world where we have been told over and over that we are the masters of our own fate, the captains of our souls. We have been told that the future is whatever we make of it, that a new world, if there is to be a new world, is entirely up to us. Scientists like geneticist H.J. Muller contend that, ”…the future of [humankind] is one of [our] own making,” and archeologist Gordon Childe insists that, “Man makes himself.” Even our great politicians declare that human beings are the source and standard of life’s meaning. John F. Kennedy boldly asserted in his inaugural address, “All man’s problems were created by man and can be solved by man.” We continue to act as if we give life meaning by the act of our will; we continue to think that it remains for each of us to create our own meaning for the world by imposing it in our own lives as an act of some sort of self-creation.

Yet our faith tells us something very different. All throughout scripture we are reminded that the future is not something we create rather the future is God’s creation. Whether it is God calling all creation into being from nothing just by speaking a word; or creating a nation from the offspring of an old barren nomadic couple, making Abram and Sarai’s descendents as numerous as the stars and a blessing to all nations; or delivering an enslaved and oppressed people from the brutal hands of the most powerful empire in the world by sending a reluctant, untalented leader and untrained speaker like Moses to say to Pharaoh, “Let my people go,”; or calling a poor teenage girl from an obscure village in a conquered country to be the mother of the one who will redeem an reconcile all things to God, the one who will make all things new and bring salvation to the world, we see that God is and always has been in the creation business. That’s the way God works, creating worlds where there were no worlds, creating people out of nobodies, creating free nations out of women and men who were slaves, creating life out of death. God keeps on creating new worlds and opening new doors, giving new possibilities.

Jeremiah spoke of day when God would make a new covenant. Our Gospel today speaks of a world in which Jesus changes things, makes a new relationship between God and humankind possible.

On this first Sunday of the new year, I don’t know what old baggage you are carrying from the year past. I don’t know what new birth, or new life, or new world you need. Maybe you’re in a situation where your world is falling apart. Maybe things are chaotic and out of control. Maybe things just don’t make any sense. Maybe you feel alone in the darkness. Maybe you suspect that there is something more you just aren’t sure what. If that is where you find yourself, I don’t have any words of self-help wisdom for you. What I do have is this – the God who first spoke a world into being is the same God who comes to us in Jesus the Christ and is the same God that Jesus promised to send to us in the form of the Holy Spirit. This is the God who created and it is the same God who continues to create. God’s creativity knows no bounds! In Jesus we are given new life. We can start over. By God’s grace through Jesus Christ things can be new, a new world, a new you, and a new me. That will always be the good news.

In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and continues to live with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.