The Reverend Deborah Fae Swift
Fellowship of Faith @ St. John’s Meadows
December 24, 2022
Reflection #1
“Birth of Light”
The Peanut’s character, Linus … standing there with his security blanket … center stage in A Charlie Brown Christmas … reciting the words we just heard. And then he ends with, “That’s what it’s all about, Charlie Brown …” and walks off stage.
It’s all very dramatic … but that IS what it’s all about.
It’s what our FAITH is about … the birth of this baby … this innocent child born in a war-torn country … to ordinary people like you and me.
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By itself … it would just be a nice little narrative … maybe for a Hallmark movie or something.
But when you put it together with JOHN’s Gospel … John’s Gospel which doesn’t have a birth narrative as we know it …
There are a lot of names for Jesus … Prince of Peace … Mighty Counselor … In John’s writing, Jesus was the logos … the Word (with a capital “W”) was the universal, divine reason of the mind … the POWER that made JESUS the Christ … the Christ Spirit or Energy in the world.
And John tells us that that POWER … that unique divine PRINCIPLE that made Jesus SPECIAL … the “Word” … was born at the moment of CREATION.
IN THE BEGINNING
there was the Word – that special SOMETHING that we call the Christ Spirit …
the Word was in God
and the Word WAS God.
The Word was PRESENT to God
from the beginning.
Through that Christ presence,
all things came into being,
and apart from it —
NOTHING came into being that has come into being.
In that special force was life,
and that life was humanity’s light—
a Light that shines in the darkness,
a Light that the darkness has never overtaken.
The Inclusive Bible (pp. 2278-2279). Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.
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JOHN’s birth narrative is about the birth of the LIGHT … the birth of the Christ Spirit who would become one with Jesus.
So in that very real sense … tonight we celebrate not just the birth of a baby …
Not just the birth of one who would come to save the world and bring that perfect WHOLENESS … the perfect SHALOM into being …
But the one who was The birth of Love.
The birth of Righteousness.
The birth of HOPE and COMPASSION.
The Birth of the Light in Human Form.
That Light SHINES in the darkness – and the darkness will NEVER overtake it.
Jesus – the Light of the World. Amen.
Reflection #2
“I AM the Light of the World”
It was way back before Jesus was born … about 600 YEARS before Jesus was born, as a matter of fact … that the chroniclers of the book of Exodus told us the story of Moses and the Burning Bush.
You’ll remember that Moses was tending sheep when God appeared to him in the form of a burning bush … a bush that was on fire but was never consumed.
Out of that burning bush, God spoke to Moses and told him to return to Egypt and lead his people to safety … to freedom. Moses was going to have to deal with the Pharaoh –who, remember, had RAISED Moses as his own SON! And he knew that Pharaoh and the others would want to know the NAME of the God who was commanding that these people be set free.
“Tell them the I AM sent you.” And the Hebrew word … the name for God, if you will … is spelled with the Hebrew letters yod-hay-vav-hay and is often transliterated as Yahweh … which later became Jehovah.
But the MEANING of God’s name is COMPLICATED … it can mean “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be,” but it’s a VERB … a verb that means it is in the process of BECOMING.
The name of God “has something to do with existence and beingness, and that existence and beingness is not something over and done with, but exists ‘now’ and presumably existed ‘before now’ and also is going to exist ‘after now’.” (Pamela Zohar writing in https://www.quora.com/If-the-Hebrew-name-YHWH-means-I-AM-THAT-I-AM-in-English-which-among-the-four-Hebrew-letters-mean-I-AM)
In other words … God is a VERB … an ACTION that has to do with existence and BEING-ness – NOT something completed or done with.
And JESUS … well – again, back to John’s gospel – Jesus gives us 7 statements about who he is. It’s in John’s Gospel that we get all of the I AM statements by him:
- I am the bread of life. 6:35, 48, 51.
- I am the door of the sheep. 10:7, 9.
- I am the good shepherd. 10:11, 14.
- I am the resurrection and the life. 11:25.
- I am the way, the truth, and the life. 14:6.
- I am the true vine. And
- I am the light of the world. 8:12; 9:5.
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I would offer to you that Jesus was NOT necessarily saying that HE was any or all of these things … but rather was AFFIRMING that the Great I AM … GOD! … was / IS the Bread of Life (that which sustains us) …
The door of the sheep (the way to become part of the flock) …
GOD is the Good Shepherd (always protecting and guiding us) …
It’s our faith in GOD that gives us the resurrection and the life …
Jesus is saying that GOD … the great I AM is the way, the truth and the life … and also is the true vine from where all life flows.
It is the great I AM who is the Light of the World … and when we recognize that Jesus and God are one … and HAVE been since the beginning of time … since the moment of creation … then we recognize that Jesus came to show us how to CARRY that Light INTO the world … how to carry GOD into the world.
The Light of the World is WITH us … GOD with us … Emmanuel.
Born this night.
Amen.
Reflection #3
“God with us – JesUS”
There are some TV commercials running now. You may have seen one or more. They’re produced by Christian Broadcasting Network, I think.
In each one, today’s world is depicted in some way … and it always comes around to saying that no matter what we’re going through … no matter who we are or what we’re like … Jesus GETS us.
He’s relevant.
He’s HERE.
He’s HOPEFUL.
He is EMMANUEL … God WITH us … or God with US … he is JES-us.
And because he’s here … because he understands and has lived as ONE of us … GOD understands us.
(By the way, you can find those on YouTube just by searching for He Gets Us.)
Some people talk about God as an abstract and distant entity …
Hopefully we have moved away from thinking of God is a white male sitting in the clouds somewhere.
God is HUGE.
God is also infinitesimally SMALL living between subatomic particles and holding everything together.
God is the great I AM … ACTIVE … still creating … still INVOLVED. Still the great LIGHT to dispel the darkness and overcome all powers that would stand in the way of Love and Light.
Tonight is the Birth of Light … of Jesus who brings all of God’s presence into being when he says, “I AM the Light of the world” …
The birth of Emmanuel – God WITH us …
Not far away but right here … right now.
Emmanuel – God with us – the birth of JES-us.
Let us celebrate what a silent and holy time it is to be witnessing … that birth … in our own hearts … right now.
Amen.
Christmas Prayer
We kneel at your manger, O Jesus … we kneel where seeing you changed the lives of shepherds and children … we kneel when the sight and sound of angel wings drown out the cries of despair and the guns of war.
We kneel with others who have been turned away and pushed out into the cold …
With those who have had no place to lay their heads – no place to call home.
In the Bethlehem of our hearts, O God, we kneel as we pay homage to the teenage mother and the carpenter father who said YES to this crazy … yet sacred Plan … for you to come to earth as a BABY … to become one of US … to LIVE and GROW … as US …
To make us a BETTER us … a more COMPASSIONATE us … to remove the term “them” from our vocabulary and unite all of US as your children …
To BE… JES-us to each and every person.
We kneel …
We pray …
We stare in wonder and awe …
We worship you …
And we give you thanks.
On this Christmas Eve.
Amen.
Benediction (slowly)
How silently, how silently,
the wondrous gift is given;
so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him,
still the dear Christ enters in.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in US today.
We hear the Christmas angels …
their great glad tidings tell; …
o come to us, … abide with us,
our Lord Emmanuel! – God with us … Jes-us.
Let us go with Christmas peace.
Merry Christmas!
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