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Sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas Day – December 30, 2007
It’s the end of December, a time to prepare for parties, hangovers, bowl games; time for resolutions we are unlikely to sustain – next year for sure we’re going to eat better, exercise more, spend less time worrying about everything that doesn’t really matter – which, when you come to think about it, is a fair amount. It’s the end of December; a time when political pundits, cultural observers and assorted critics summarize the preceding twelve months by issuing a top – or in some cases – bottom ten list of the preceding year.
Every film reviewer, it seems, is contractually obligated to put forth their own list of the best and worst offering of the year, and every year, it seems, I have seen fewer and fewer of them. Anybody here bought a ticket to “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 Days,” about the ordeal of trying to obtain an abortion under communism? No? It’s “The latest evidence of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema,” says the New York Times, which called it the greatest of the 519 movies released in 2007, adding: “What makes this a great movie is the mighty combination of (the director’s) ruthless, formal discipline, the unaffected naturalism of the performances and a moral honesty that goes far beyond what we usually think of as realism.” Sounds like the perfect date movie.
And that quote sounds like something a Woody Allen character would say to impress his date after seeing the movie at an Upper West Side art house. It has an articulate, concise sound to it but, honestly, I’ve read it several times and I’m still not sure exactly what the expression “ruthless, formal discipline” means in this context.
Perhaps other critics know, and often that’s who other critics write for.
When it comes to language,the context and the audience are important. Every profession has its own lexicon, often impenetrable to outsiders. I listen to computer people discuss their products and systems and I swear they’re talking in tongues. Doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, generals, athletes - even clergy - all have their own expressions and definitions– terms familiar to them but outside the ken of an outsider.
Sometimes these words find their way into common usage and are celebrated as if they were clever new discoveries. “Bilat,” apparently is such a term. According to Grant Barrett, a lexicographer – that is, someone who defines words – “Bilat” is short for “bilateral,” “a workaday term to diplomats and journalists when they’re referring to a meeting of two sides, but it’s unusual to outsiders.”
What is an everyday word for one person, then, is a novelty to someone who has never heard it. Perhaps some of the words, from Mr. Barrett’s own list of the most notable coined in 2007 will find their way into common usage. After all, who knew what “IPod” meant before October 23, 2001, when the product was first unveiled by Apple? (Not only do I know what it means, I got one for Christmas and have been “ripping,” that is, copying, CDs onto it like crazy. For my kids, though, that accomplishment – and the fact that I actually know what “ripping” means - is the equivalent of switching from a horse and buggy to an automobile.)
It’s difficult to keep up. Everyone knows what “spam” is in a computer context, but how about bacn? It’s on Mr. Barrett’s list, defined as “Impersonal e-mail messagesthat are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.” (I get so much of this I’m likely to develop hardening of the arteries.)
So much that I may have to declare e-mail bankruptcy, another newterm popularized by a Stanford University law professor, referring to “what you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.”
The list goes on and on and it’s likely that in 400 some years these words will be as obscure to the people who come across them as much of Shakespeare’s language is to us today. Language changes over time, as do definitions of familiar words. The Collect for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer begins: “Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us…” Looking up “prevent” in my dictionary, I find this definition under “archaic:” “to come before, to precede.”
New definitions appear, old ones fall away; new words appear, old ones fall away. The end of the year is the perfect time to look back on the old and look ahead to the new; the perfect time to proclaim what, in the midst of change, has always been there: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Prose with the soul of poetry, some call this opening of the Gospel of John, words heard every year on the First Sunday after Christmas. Like great poetry – Shakespeare, for example – it packs layers of meaning in a single word or phrase while at the same time summarizing the author’s view of Jesus Christ: The Word, which was with God from the very beginning, came into the world and became flesh so that the grace of God might be perfectly disclosed. The rest, as they say, is commentary; nothing more than an expansion of this theme.
In this theme, in these words, we hear echoes of not only the earliest hymns in our tradition but also some of the best known and earliest writings in our Scripture, notably, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…” The first five books of the Bible, the Torah, are known by their first words, the same way we know hymns by their first lines. “In the beginning” is another title for Genesis; it could very well be another title for this Gospel.
The parallels are intentional, meant to speak to a certain audience. Both books are accounts of creation at God’s word; both speak of light coming into the world at the word of God, penetrating and overcoming the darkness; both speak of the origins of life. In Genesis, God speaks and his word brings humanity to life. In John’s prologue, the Word of God brings eternal life to humanity.
John wanted his audience – which was much broader than any of the other Gospels - to understand the new context of these old words. For his Jewish listeners, he intended them to make the connection between Jesus as the Word of God and the One who declared “the word of the Lord”to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. No obscurity here.
But John was speaking to more than just an inside group with its own lexicon. He was expanding the message to the Gentiles, particularly the Greeks and those influenced by the Greeks. Those who knew nothing of Genesis, nothing of the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy; but they sure knew what “logos” was. And that’s exactly what John says: “In the beginning was the Logos.”
A brilliant choice of words, say biblical commentators, one which bridges the gap between the Jewish and Christian world, expanding definitions for both. In Greek philosophy, “logos” means much more than our translation as“word.” “Logos”is nothing less than the divine reason lying behind creation, bringing it order, rationality, giving it form and meaning. “Follow where the “logos” leads,” the Stoics in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. used to teach;resist the influence of the passions: love, hate, fear, pain, pleasure.”
By the first century A.D., a Greek, a Jewish philosopher named Philo of Alexandria taught that the “logos” was the intermediary between God and humankind, being both the agent of creation and the means by which we can understand creation, much as wisdom is portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, in Greek the feminine equivalent of “Logos” is “Sophia,” my great grand-mother’s name, meaning “wisdom.” (An apt name for her, by the way.)
John knew all these definitions; he understood all these particular contexts. To the Jews he said, “You believe in the creative, saving, prophetic word of God; Jesus is that word made flesh.” To the Greeks he said, “You believe in the Logos, the underlying principle which gives meaning to all of creation; Jesus is that Logos made flesh.”
He told the Jews, he told the Greeks, now he is telling us; using words that are familiar yet whose meanings may also change over time. Don’t forget, the one who was “in the beginning with God” is also the one who is “doing a new thing.” The Word may be eternal, but how it speaks to us – as a Church and as individuals – tends to vary as each New Year begins again; as each season in our lives comes and goes.
There are times when we look to the Word to sustain us, to guide us through the dark winter days of our souls. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path,” says the Psalmist. Then there are times when the Word seems to overwhelm us, causing us greatly to rejoice and exult in God. Again the Psalmist: “How sweet are your words to my taste; sweeter than honey to my mouth!” There are times when the word challenges us, practically shouting at us, calling us to God and to ourselves, and reminding us of who we are and what we have promised as the people of God. “Hear, O Israel,” says Deuteronomy, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home…”
Now there’s a New Year’s resolution, well suited to this time when we speak of words and beginnings. What would it look like to begin to let that Word find expression in us? Each year the child is born; each year the Word begotten of God’s love returns; each year we have a chance to hear it, to speak it, to give it a brand new meaning as we face another 365 days – and God knows how many new gadgets to master and new expressions to learn.
Reviewing assorted lists of the worst movies of the year, titles like “Saw IV” and “Captivity” make repeat appearances. Unseen by me, they are apparently examples of “gorno,” a blend of “gore” and “porno;” “a genre of movies that are gory almost to the point of being fetishistic,” says Mr. Barrett; popular with the young yet hardly an example of edifying or eternal truths. We can only hope that this form of visual language will vanish along with this particular word.
Today we focus on what will last; what is worthy of remembering from year to year; worthy of reciting to our children.
So, as the King said to Alice, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Good advice; today we begin with the Word that “became flesh and lived among us.” But since we have seen his glory, since we have beheld the child, there is really no stopping, there is really no end. Each day he is born among us; each day we can find brand new ways to articulate this eternal love which speaks in a language understood by everyone.