Sermon: "Christmas is Just the Beginning," January 3, 2021

Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: John 1:10-18

Well, here we are. January 3rd. New Year’s is over, and Christmas is in the rear-view mirror. A minister friend of mine likes to call this time of year the “holiday hangover.” The weeks leading to Christmas build up and up and up, we hit the day, ring the bell, exchange the presents, eat the dinner, and then life gradually slips back to normal. Whatever normal is for us right now.

And yet, according to the church calendar we’re still in Christmas. For us Christmas is 12 whole days. It seems like one day can’t quite contain the mystery of the incarnation, of God’s coming to us as one of us in Jesus Christ.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why John’s gospel spends little time on Jesus’ birth.

Luke’s and Matthew both spend good chunks of a couple chapters on baby Jesus. Luke with his angels and shepherds and manger, and Matthew with his flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of children, and the visit of the visit of the wise men.

In contrast, Jesus’ birth and childhood get no direct mention in John. No inn, no Joseph, no Mary, nor star of wonder. No indication about how or by whom. The Word just became flesh and dwelt among us. I like to think Mary might have preferred this gospel because she gets to skip the pregnancy.

All kidding aside, John doesn’t spend as much time on Mary and Joseph’s delivery for a few reasons. The first is a pretty practical one. John’s was written the latest of the four gospels, likely two decades after the earliest gospel—Mark. John likely assumed that everyone had already heard the Christmas story.  No need to repeat it again.

Another John spends little time on it, though, is because John is focused on the implications of Jesus’ birth. What the birth meant. What Christmas means.

“He was in the world,” John says. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

Here John shifts almost immediately from Jesus entering into the world, to how people received him when he came. It says the world didn’t know him. The world didn’t recognize its own Creator when it came face to face with him. God’s people—Israel—the people who believed in God, who worshipped God, built their lives around this special relationship they had with God, even they didn’t recognize him when he showed up. Even the people who had been given eyes to see, even the people who should have known better didn’t receive him. Both groups—secular and sacred, Jew and Gentile, church and state—not only did they not recognize or receive him when he arrived. They conspired to kill him.

John doesn’t spend much time on the nativity because Christmas was more than just a day. It was the beginning of a whole life, a much large story. And part of that story is denial—humanity’s ignorance and rejection of its Maker. Not just with Jesus, either. The whole Bible tells the story of God creating humanity out of love, and humanity over and over choosing to reject God’s original peaceful and loving purpose for it. And not just non-believers, either. John says—the world did not know him, and his own people did not receive him—But believers and non-believers alike are caught in the web of death, a seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence, self-centredness and self-destruction. It’s really the Bible’s explanation for why the world is broken the way it is—the mysterious, hidden power of sin and evil at work in the world and the human heart. Sin runs so deep, says John, that when God herself took on flesh and came to us, when God was born—same old same old.

John doesn’t spend time on Christmas Day because Christmas isn’t just a day. The birth of Jesus is the first day in the life of Jesus, and the first day in the story of the world. A story marked by ignorance of the One who knit us together in the womb. And the rejection of the God who made us possible in the first place.

Jesus, like so many other prophets before him, was met with ignorance and rejection. Same old, same old. And it would be yet another story of human brokenness if that’s how it ended. But it’s not. According to John, it’s at this point that the special birth of God brings about a totally different outcome.

Many would reject him, John says, “But to all who received him. But to all who received him, and who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. The power to be born (note that little word), the power to be born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

Jesus was rejected. Rebuffed, refused, and denied. Brutally, in the end. But that end, for Jesus, wasn’t truly the end. Because Jesus was raised. And because Jesus was raised, John says that this denial did nothing to cancel the gift he came to give the world in his birth. The life-transforming gift of grace. God’s radical gift of one-way, unconditional, unmerited love for sinners. A gift that brings with it the power to become children of God. To be born again. Not literally, of course. There ain’t no womb big enough for me as far as I know. But to be spiritually reborn, to be re-booted, reconfigured as the divine children we were created to be.

Liberal Christians, United-Church-y people, of course, we tend to get a little freaked out by this language. Unfortunately, American Christianity has made “born again” have to do more with human sexuality and Supreme Court Justices than true spirituality. But it’s more than just politics.

A few years ago the American pastor John Buchanan wrote this lovely piece about the twelve days of Christmas. In it he talked about how in North American culture Christmas fades about as quickly as it comes. But the twelve days that stretch beyond offer us a reminder of its true power:

“The birth [of Jesus],” he wrote, “the birth of Jesus is a sign, for people of faith, that God is alive and at work in the world. Christ comes again, is born again, when lives are transformed by his love, when forgiven and restored men and women begin to live new lives in a world that is suddenly new because he was born into it. The culture may drop Christmas like a hot potato, but for faith it is a beginning, not an end.”[1]

John doesn’t spend much time on the birth of Jesus because it’s only the beginning. Jesus was born to grow us again like babies, to reverse the curse of sin, Benjamin Button style. “To save us from Satan’s power, as we had gone astray” in the words of the first hymn we sang.[2] To totally remake us in his image, into the way God intends us to be, the way we’re destined to be. Free of hatred, self-loathing, and self-interest. Free of greed, and anxiety, fear and deceit. Forgiven, and freed to love our God with everything we’ve got, and love our neighbor as ourselves. There’s a lot of baggage around “born again.” But there’s also no better way to describe what Jesus came to do at Christmas.

Christmas is a promise of hope and transformation. One that comes to us again and again. The birth of Jesus is absolutely crucial, but crucial only as the foundation, the first step in the radical re-birth of humanity as we know it, as God intended. Christmas was only the beginning, not the end of the true festivities.

Now, I know that Christmas Day is behind us. I know that New Years day’s been left in the dust, too. The great season of celebration went as quickly as it came, yet again. Combine it with the COVID lockdown and we have ourselves a real let-down. But the promise of Christmas isn’t just the yearly shopping cycle that builds up and then sputters out. This new birth, this gift of new life is ours, it’s given to us each and every day of the year. And it’s given to us John says, simply if we’re willing to receive it. If we’re willing to believe that it’s true—that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,[3] that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[4] that God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it through him.[5] If we’re willing to believe in Jesus’ name, and we’re willing to trust our lives to him day after day after day. Then we, too, will be reborn. We, too, will be given the power to become children of God.

It may not feel like it, but Christmas isn’t over, yet. Because Christmas was just the beginning. As the great English poet, W.H. Auden once put into the mouths of the shepherds at Christ’s birth: “Tonight for the first time the prison gates have opened. / Music and sudden light / Have interrupted our routine tonight / And swept the filth of habit from our hearts. / O here and now the endless journey starts.”[6]

Amen.

[1] John Buchanan, “Christmastide,” in The Christian Century, December 24, 2007. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/christmastide

[2] ”God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” traditional English Carol. https://hymnary.org/text/god_rest_ye_merry_gentlemen

[3] 2 Corinthians 5:19.

[4] John 3:16

[5] John 3:17.

[6] W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: a Christmas Oratorio (Princeton: University Press), 42.