Sermon for January 5, 2025
2nd Sunday of Christmas
John 1:1-18
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
I’ve been to Utah once, and I’d like to go back. The one time I was there, it was to go camping and hiking at Bryce Canyon National Park. You can stand on the rim of the canyon and look down over all the “hoodoos” (as they’re called)—tall spires of rock, carved over time by water and wind and the freeze/thaw cycle into whimsical shapes, in colors of red, rust, copper, and white. Some of the hoodoos have names that describe what they kind of look like: Thor’s Hammer, Queen Victoria, The Poodle, and the Three Wise Men, to name a few. You can also hike down into the canyon and wander among them. They appear mysterious, and the word “hoodoo” actually comes from a (Native American) Southern Paiute word meaning “something that inspires fear.” As mysterious as they are, however, the hoodoos remain a mystery that you can see.
There were even more mysterious things lurking during my visit to Bryce Canyon, mysteries we couldn’t see—at least not at first. That’s because we happened to be there during the annual “Astronomy Festival”. Bryce Canyon has no light pollution, so the stars shine brilliantly bright. The Milky Way appears, looking quite literally like someone spilled a glass of milk across a black tablecloth, way up in the sky. And then there were the hundreds of amateur astronomers from all over the country, who set up their telescopes and trained them on specific places in the night sky. Even with so many thousands of stars visible, stars we would never see here in Milwaukee because of our light pollution, there were even more celestial bodies among them—things no one would ever see with the naked eye. My favorite was a “ring nebula”. It looked like a bluish-white cheerio just hanging out in outer space. That ring nebula was just one of thousands of mysterious phenomena that are always there, but that we don’t get to see. Yet because of the special telescopes shared among curious people on this special occasion, we could see them. The invisible became visible.
Stargazing at the Bryce Canyon Astronomy Festival is kind of like the way the Gospel of John tells the Christmas story; John is helping to make the invisible become visible, and in a way that’s totally different from the Gospels of Luke or Matthew. John doesn’t tell us about Mary and Joseph, or Nazareth and Bethlehem; he doesn’t tell us about the difficulties the Holy Family had to go through to bring Jesus into the world. The angels, shepherds, manger, and Magi get no mention. Instead, John turns to poetry—mystical poetry, at that. He does not describe the birth of Christ, and he does not tell a story that is filled with details that we can practically see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.
No, instead John decides to go straight to poetry because it’s what people usually turn to when trying to describe the indescribable. Poetry, such as the first chapter of John’s gospel, is meant to move you; to move us beyond our normal ways of seeing the world and of experiencing life. And by being “moved”, maybe we sense in a new way the core truth of what’s happening. Poetry can become a window; a window for looking into worlds that we can’t look into in any other way. And so the Gospel of John, chapter 1, is a window into the mystery of God’s own self.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Kind of like that “ring nebula” that I could only see by looking through a telescope, through his poetry, John is helping us look at a “hidden world”; something that is always there, but that is often invisible, unless we have the right kind of “telescope” to see it. And Christ is that telescope!
We look through Jesus Christ to see God. We look through Christ, like a telescope, to see the “hidden world” of God’s kingdom, which is actually already breaking into the world and is all around us—but that is so often invisible because of the pollution created by the sin of the world, which we ourselves too often take part in. We look through Christ, like a telescope, to see God’s light shining in the darkness. And because Jesus was born into the world on Christmas, God gives us power to become “children of God” right along with Jesus. Through faith, we get to become part of that great, cosmic, mystical poetry that is the life of God.
In the climax of this poem, John writes: “And the Word become flesh and lived among us… 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.” Even though we can never fully understand God; and even though there is so much in the universe that we cannot see even though it’s always there; in Christ the invisible becomes visible. And by looking through Christ, as if looking through a telescope, we get to look right into God, where we get to be filled by God with grace and forgiveness, with life and light and truth. By looking through Christ, we get to look right into the mystery of God’s own heart! Amen.