Standing in the Doorway of a New Year

A Sermon Preached on January 2, 2011

John 1:1-18; Ephesians 1:3-14

Here we are, standing in the doorway of a new year.  There’s always been something compelling about this second Sunday after Christmas Day for me ... it’s a warm and promising vantage point which attracts precious little attention after all ... the day before life returns to normal.  We’re still well within the 12 Days of Christmas actually, those days set aside by the early church to create a little space between Luke’s birth story of shepherds and stable which we hear on Christmas Eve, and Matthew’s telling of wise men and gifts, called Epiphany still to come on January 6.  It’s still Christmas, though many of the trappings are already packed away.  At the same time, we’ve just stepped across the threshold between 2010 and 2011, but just barely.  We’re not so far into a new year that we’ve lost interest in what all has happened personally and to our congregation, in this neighbourhood and our city, to our country and world in 2010.  It’s always good to look back and reflect on life’s passages in the year gone by ... but at the same time we stand here with a clean slate, a brand new calendar to be filled and lived.  It’s a warm, promising day in worship, and I’m pleased you chose to share it with me.

                These two readings assigned for today help create that hopeful sense of possibility at this time of year.  For John, even though Jesus’ birth appears unimportant, Christ’s incarnation is (important).  Incarnation is one of those Christian words which we assume everyone knows ... it means that God enters this world in human flesh and blood through Jesus.  And why?  To complete what God set in motion in the first place ... the restoration of right relationships first born in Creation.  For John, Christ the Word was present from the beginning, until in Jesus God’s grace was born to live fully as a human among humans.  “And the Word 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.”

                I’m appreciative of the “Feasting on the Word” commentary which reminded me again of an alternate translation of this verse 14 in John’s first chapter.  In The Message, Eugene Peterson writes, “The Word was made flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood ...  generous inside and out, true from start to finish ... like father like son.”  What I’m struck with in this phrasing is the very intimate feel of it ... I hear, the Word was made flesh and blood and moved into OUR neighbourhood ... and lives right here in Orleans as a next door neighbour, generous and true.  What I hear is that we who are the followers of Christ the Word here at 1111 Orleans Blvd. are invited to imagine anew what living as a next door neighbour, generous and true, might actually be like.

                And this is where the benediction hymn in Ephesians 1 can be helpful, because it’s here that we realize what our true inheritance is ... through the Word made flesh, all human beings are adopted, restored in relationship with God, with each other, with all creation ... and even more, we are invited “as God’s children to participate in the great ingathering (in the grace-filled restoration), to make known by word and example the forgiving, healing and unifying love that is ours in Christ to all the world”* beginning with the folks next door ... to become the kind of neighbours ourselves through whom Christ’s warm and compassionate heart is known. 

                John concludes his prologue by affirming, “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.”  And likewise as inheritors of Christ’s legacy, we are the church, Christ’s living body, Christ’s 21^st Century incarnation in our neighbourhood.

Yesterday morning Lynn and I were relaxing in our family room, reading, with the Rose Bowl Parade on the TV in the background, volume turned low.  I had just critiqued what a bizarre custom this has become, professional float builders spending a whole year creating elaborate contraptions out of vegetation and hydraulics for no greater purpose than to watch it drive by in a 2-hour celebration of a new year, when one of the overly scripted commentators began to describe a float dedicated to organ donors, including floral portraits of 12 people who died in 2010 and whose organs were shared with others.  As I turned up the volume, he went on to say that one of those donors was a 5-year-old girl whose heart was transplanted into a little boy.  When the donor’s mother met the boy, she gently pressed her ear on his chest, wanting to hear one more time her daughter’s heartbeat.  The mental image is overwhelming, isn’t it ... so simple and delicate the gesture ... so deep and profound the message.

Find your pulse ... can you feel it?  We who are the followers of Jesus stand in the doorway of this new year affirming that “the Word is made flesh and blood and has moved into our neighbourhood.”  The life, the light, the love of Christ is here and now through us who can feel the heartbeat of God’s grace in the fullness of time.

May it be so for you and us in 2011.  Yes, may it be so.

* Lisa G. Fischbeck in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, p.186.

Glen Stoudt

Orleans United Church

Ottawa, ON