Photo by Jason Hawke 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
A sermon on Sirach 24:1-12 and John 1:1-18
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff
Happy eleventh day of Christmas to you all. If you are listening to this sermon in real time and you have yet to receive your eleven pipers piping from your true love, don’t worry, there’s still time. Personally, I’m still waiting on mine.
Church seasons in general don’t do much to shape our daily life, but I do appreciate the opportunity we have today to dig into this whole Christmas notion of God – the infinite mystery of creation – and humanity converging in the life and body of Jesus. And where the synoptic gospels do that through a gritty cast of characters – Jesus’ family, shepherds, animals, etc. – the author of John’s gospel goes in a poetic direction. I’ll leave it up to you which is more confusing: a virgin birth or a word made flesh that is and is not God.
Will you pray with me? Infinite creator, holy wisdom, we give you praise and thanks this day. We ask for your presence and guidance as we glean what we can from the metaphors we hear in our sacred stories. Help us to hold them reverently but lightly, knowing that no words can ever fully circumscribe the infinity of your grace. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts together be ever acceptable in your sight, Holy One, our source, our comfort, our being. Amen.
It’s a dense text, this introduction to John’s gospel, this birth story of another sort. It begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” The Word is how many modern bibles choose to translate the Greek word logos. As theologian Catherine Keller explains, “The Logos of John’s prologue, not a concept in the Synoptic Gospels, is a complex Greek term, meaning wisdom, concept, pattern, reason, speech, and revelation.”[1] In an effort to understand wisdom and its place in the human experience, the Greeks gave it a feminine name, Sophia, and referred to her actions throughout history and in daily life. The author of today’s first text, Ben Sira, who wrote some 300 years before John, does the same, staying with the established metaphor and imagining wisdom as a woman, and describing her journey from the beginning of time to encamp with Israel.
But a funny thing happens in John’s prologue. For John, the Word, logos, wisdom, isn’t a she, it’s a he. “He was in the beginning with God.” The traditional reading is that John is referring to Jesus, as the one who fully embodied wisdom, but in the text, Jesus isn’t even named directly for a few paragraphs yet. What if we read this passage substituting wisdom or logos every time we read he or his instead of Jesus? “All things came into being through wisdom, and without wisdom not one thing came into being. What has come into being in wisdom was life. . . Wisdom was in the world, and the world came into being through wisdom, yet the world did not know wisdom. Wisdom came to what was wisdom’s own, and wisdom’s own people did not accept wisdom. But to all who received wisdom, who believed in wisdom’s name, wisdom gave power to become children of God.”
I’ll admit that one reason why this alternate reading appeals to me, the one that centers wisdom and not Jesus in John’s creation story, is that I’ve always been skeptical of the one-and-only-son-of-God-ness of Jesus in many branches of Christian belief. After all, isn’t the heart of the Christmas story that God is with us? Isn’t the heart of Jesus’ ministry – the ministry that he passed on to Peter and the disciples – the idea that God situates God-self near the powerless and vulnerable through human action? Doesn’t God’s relationship with Jesus reveal the new covenant: the healing potential that is possible when a person allows themselves to be that intimate with God?
Catherine Keller, whom I mentioned earlier, follows this same line of thought. She writes, “Within the Christian narrative, the incarnation in Jesus of that divine Logos, that world-creative Wisdom, is portrayed as a distinctive event. … But does this make the incarnation an exclusive revelation of God in the final or competitive sense usually meant by identifying Jesus as the ‘only Son of God’? To the contrary: the whole point of the unique incarnation is to open up a new intimacy with the infinite. The one Gospel that features the incarnation, the ‘becoming flesh,’ signifies this open process powerfully: ‘to all who receive him,’ writes John, ‘he gave power to become children of God’. In other words, to embrace this logos is to become a son or a daughter of God.” She concludes, “in this first chapter John is signifying how Jesus’ unprecedented intimacy with God makes it possible for any of us to become a son or daughter of God. This is not about exclusion, this is about a unique new strategy of inclusion.”[2]
In this era of leaders who seize power then take unilateral action, who try to tell us that we can’t trust our own eyes or our own neighbors, that we should trust authority before we trust ourselves, it is a perfect time to consider the potential implications of a faith tradition that holds that the Logos – the very sacred wisdom, concept, pattern, reason, speech, and revelation that binds our universe together – lived inside a human body, but not only that. The Logos can, it wants to live within any body that receives that wisdom, that believes that wisdom.
Those who seek to hoard power for personal gain, those who benefit from the status quo aren’t crazy about the idea that we all have access to God’s wisdom. But folks anxious about our climate future, wondering how to move into a next chapter of humanity less dependent upon extraction, colonization, domination, and dehumanization? For those folks, this is the good news of the Christian tradition: that the infinite looks at us through the eyes of every person open to receiving the wisdom as personified through Jesus and Israel’s prophets, of compassion, love, and nonviolence as the Way; that God’s commonwealth does not emerge through one life but through all our lives, that we can trust our own embodied wisdom and the wisdom of our neighbors. This year, let us lean into that trust, that sacred wisdom that resonates with both our sacred stories and our lived experience. Let us see the light shining in the Christmas manger, and let it guide us to the light that radiates from within each of us. May it be so. Amen.
[1] Catherine Keller, On the Mystery. (Fotress Press: Minneapolis, 2008). p. 151.
[2] Ibid, p. 151-152.
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