Not One Thing
Texts: John 1: 1-18, Psalm 148
Every year as a church, we are re-visited by those opening words from John’s Gospel … whether on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning or the Sunday after Christmas. It’s from this passage that we’re given language to proclaim some of the essence of the Christian Tradition … “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” … “the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.”
But as this passage comes around this year, it’s another phrase altogether that has struck me … a phrase of just 3 words: “Not one thing.”
In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. All things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being.
On Friday morning I went for a walk along Lochside trail. It’s often where I go to think and pray, to listen and reconnect. I read the passage from John’s Gospel before I left home, thinking it might be something I would ponder as I walked. Well I wasn’t long onto the trail when those three words surfaced … and I found myself quietly repeating them over and over again … Not one thing. Not one thing. Not one thing. Well then I noticed a cluster of deep red berries hanging over the path on the end of a branch of a Hawthorn tree.
I stopped.
“Not one thing!” I said again, now looking at just one of those berries.
All things came into being through the Word … not one thing came into being without the Word. There is something of God’s creative life right here within this berry! and within this one and that one!
The same thing occurs to me as l notice the frosted blades of grass beneath the tree. A few steps further, these three tiny little birds flutter down onto the path ahead … each one bearing something of God’s creative life. By now I’m welling up with wow! … the young cedar tree, the stream flowing into the forest, the towering big leaf maple … not one thing came into being without the Word … I’m immersed, completely surrounded by all this God-infused life. You are here … you are here … you are here! There is no escaping you!
The whole creation holds something of God … is a revelation of God … of God with us. It’s no wonder that people claim to experience God in nature.
As I ventured further along the trail I keep hearing myself say “not one thing.” And then I realize “that would include me” … which leads me to think of others … and before long I’m realizing “others” include all others … absolutely every other. Not one thing has come into being without the Word.
Every last one of us holds something of God -- is a revelation of God. Not just the ones I think of as good and faithful people -- godly people, but that person, those people, who irritate the life out of me; even those who do the worst we humans are capable of.
Not one thing has come into being without the Word.
We human creatures are not so good at appreciating the sacredness of every life. That’s what this passage in John’s Gospel also confesses: “The Word was in the world, yet the world did not know the Word, did not receive the Word.” But that’s not where the story ends … God wasn’t content to leave it there. For out of a growing desire to be known more deeply, to be heard more clearly, received more fully, that the world may be healed, the Word became flesh, embodied in Jesus, to live among us as one of us.
That’s what we have in Jesus … that powerful creative Word speaking again into our world, “every life is sacred … every life is sacred.” He doesn’t just say it so we can hear it. He lives it so we can see it. But it’s even more than that, isn’t it? He brings us into it. That’s the thing about Jesus … he is forever giving us to each other … forever bringing us into relationship with each other … forever resisting and confronting our inclination to exclude or separate ourselves from each other.
Filled to overflowing with God’s life-giving love, Jesus is forever bringing us into the flow. He is forever calling us to “come and see, follow me” into a new way of being human together, marked by mercy, by forgiveness, by justice and joy. He is forever calling us to join the revelation of God with us.
Standing at the threshold of this new year … who of us isn’t wondering what on earth this year will bring … Trump and all.
If this isn’t the time to heed Jesus summons to care for the stranger in the land, to love with our whole heart, with all our mind, our strength, our soul -- not just our neighbour but our enemy -- if this is not the time, then when is? If this isn’t the time to repay no evil for evil, but to pray for those who persecute you, then when is?
"Of course it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But faith is faith, not common sense, not even pious common sense. Jesus calls us into this way that demand a kind of surrender … a way that bestows a mysterious courage. By this peculiar grace alone, we stumble and anguish, pray and persist, hope and wonder our way toward healing, toward a new humanity, an impossible love, a someday resurrection!" [1]
Today we gather around the font for our ritual of welcoming new members into this particular expression of the body of Christ, this embodiment of God with us. We gather around the font so that we might remember -- not just the 4 who step forward, but all of us together -- that we might remember again that amidst all the possible ways that we might choose to live out our life, we are choosing the way of Jesus … we are orienting our life by his life …that we might find ourselves gathered up in God’s inexhaustible love, which, as it turns out, chooses us all, for not one thing has come into being without the Word.
[1] with thanks to Mary Luti's Still Speaking Daily Devotional "Anniversary" posted on September 11, 2015, www.ucc.org/daily_devotional