Vicar’s sermon. First Communion of Christmas. John 1.1-14

“‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
Now there’s a good beginning to a book. You might be surprised to know that the book isn’t a thriller, rather, it’s the children’s book ‘Charlotte’s web’. Books need good first paragraphs. When you start a book you want to get right into it. Too slow and you may be tempted to give up too early. Good first paragraphs: ideally, good first sentences.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’. You recognise that one: Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice. I have no idea whether Michael, Ana’s fiancé is in possession of a good fortune, but he has certainly found himself a wife (who, by the way) is wearing the dalmatic that I will be wearing at their wedding – a nod to Ana’s Russian Orthodox background and Michael being brought up within the Roman Catholic church. I’ll do my best not to outshine the bride on the day!
‘Marley was dead: to begin with: easy. A Christmas Carol
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” That’s JK isn’t it? JK Rowling. Harry Potter
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Clocks don’t usually strike 13, so Orwell’s first sentence lets us know that the world of 1984 is out of synch with our own.
For centuries, ‘In the beginning’ had signalled one book and one book only. The beginning of the Torah, the Jewish scriptures. The opening words of the Book of Genesis. ‘In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep’. But towards the end of the first century after the birth we celebrate this night, not so many years after the man Jesus had been crucified, dead and buried another author, in another language (Greek not Hebrew) took those iconic opening words and sent them spinning off in another direction.
Not for the evangelist John a description of God’s creative word calling the universe into being – he mentions this (‘All things came into being through Him and without Him not one thing came into being’) but it’s not his focus. No. For John, his opening lines direct us to a second creation, a new creation coming into being. How? through the presence of God’s Word on earth.
The Word who was with God and who is God comes to the world. In Genesis God had said ‘Let there be light’ but the light of which John writes is not the same as the light of the moon and the sun (which are created later in the Genesis story). The light of the gospel grants an awareness of God’s presence, it reveals His purposes and will. Jesus will take to Himself the title ‘the Light of the world’ later in John’s Gospel and he will call Himself ‘the resurrection and the Life’.
From a cosmic beginning that echoes the story of the beginning of creation, John quickly narrows down his gaze to humanity. Firstly, he mentions John the Baptist: a man sent from God. We are in a particular time and place here: from high level philosophy we are now in first century Palestine. A known figure. Someone for whom there is historical evidence of their existence. But, setting John the Baptist aside, our evangelist sets up a tension that will run right through his book: the presence of God’s light on earth and the failure of his own people to recognise Him. And then…then, we appear on the page, John’s words reach down 2000 years and embrace us. ‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.’
John writes from a position of both faith and experience. He is writing from within one of the earliest Christian communities: communities of ordinary people whose lives had been reconfigured around the person of the Word, the Light of God, and whose lived experience was that they believed and felt themselves to be in a relationship with God, the creator of all. More than this: the relationship they claimed was one of family and inheritance – children of God, not slaves or minions, but children of a loving heavenly Father.
And only now does John give us the name we have been waiting for. Something new has happened through, with and in the person of Jesus Christ. Something that has transcended the Jewish Law. Something that has revealed to us the nature of the invisible God. God who, in scripture, could not be looked upon, has been made visible to us in the person of Jesus. So that, if we want to know what God is like, then we need look no further than look at him – at the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. We have seen His glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Grace is a beautiful word, a word we would do well to hold onto. Wrapped up in this word is forgiveness, acceptance, loving kindness, faithfulness, mercy – all these things, seen in Jesus’ life. Grace points us to a God who understands, a God who cares, who loves and loves some more, who makes room for us, suffers our rejection and who graciously comes back…and back…and back again to win our love for such is His nature.
Full of grace and Truth: a truth that can be hard to grasp, so different is it from our understanding of the world. Truth that sees value in the small rather than the great, that elevates service above being served, that counts a widow’s mite to be greater than a rich man’s excess. Truth that can cut through the stories we tell about ourselves to unmask our illusions of greatness, of somehow being better than everyone else. Truth that uncovers the secrets of our hearst. A Truth that must be grasped before we can ever enter the new creation like newborn babes, before we can become children of God.
It’s one heck of a beginning to a book that perhaps you just might read through in these 12 days of Christmas. If you do so why not spot the great themes from these first paragraphs – light, life, darkness, rejection. Christ’s promises to dwell (to abide with us), truth and deception.
It’s a heck of a beginning and it’s a huge claim that Christians make: that the author of all things has become part of His story, He has written himself into the pages of life. A huge claim made within just a few years of Jesus’ life on earth: that this life was somehow so different that it revealed God. And yet, ‘to those who believed in his name…’ Here we still are, children of God, staying up late to marvel at the new thing that happened all those years ago. The birth that changed the direction of history and still has power to shape the lives of all who believe …if they accept, if they acknowledge Him.
May the act of receiving communion this evening mark once more our acceptance of the Word of life into our lives. And may the light that enlightens all people find a ready home in our lives in the darkness of an uncertain world as we enter 2025.