A sermon on Ephesians 1:3-14 & John 1:1-18 by Nathan Nettleton, 3 January 1999

One of the signs that the Christmas which the people of God celebrate and the Christmas which the people of the dollar celebrate are two entirely different things is that they barely overlap. The church celebrates Christmas as a twelve day season starting on December 25th and ending the day after tomorrow. The rest of our society celebrates a festival of the same name for about five weeks starting in mid November and, as you’ll have noticed, the decorations mostly came down on Boxing Day. I think this year I’ve been converted to the view that we should shift our Christmas so that it doesn’t overlap at all and then we could avoid the charade of pretending that they’re somehow one and the same!

However, one of the fortunate coincidences of celebrating Christmas where we do now is that while we are celebrating God being born in a new way among us, right in the middle of the festival comes New Year, and thus we are invited to think and make resolutions about what God’s new way will mean for us in the new year. If the birth of Jesus is worth celebrating year after year for two millennia, then it must be because it is one of those things that defines who we are, what we are about and how we live. So this morning, both in our worship and in our meeting afterwards, we are asking ourselves, “if the Word has become flesh, how is our response to become flesh in this coming year?”

We spoke last week, while looking at Matthew’s account of the Christmas story, of how Matthew’s gospel views things in terms of a conflict between the old order and the new order and how he sets out that conflict in stark uncompromising terms right from the birth stories on. We’ll spend a lot of time with Matthew’s gospel this year, but not today. Today we’ve heard from John and from Paul. Neither passage used the image of the clash of kingdoms like Matthew does, but both contain the idea of there being two very different worlds and in both employ a similar metaphor to illustrate where we stand in relation to them. Both speak of us being adopted as God’s children, and our adoption is based on what God has done for us in Christ and how we respond to it.

Think for a moment of the program of international adoptions of children orphaned in war zones. We seen programs for children from the former Yugoslavia, from Cambodia, and from some African nations. Usually these children are stuck in an overcrowded orphanage somewhere until their name comes up and someone adopts them into their family. The possibilities that open up at that moment would have been previously unimaginable. You can see then why Paul ties this idea of adoption to the idea of redemption. We are adopted as God’s children. We are redeemed. Our release is secure. Our past no longer counts against us.

John speaks of us becoming children of God by being born of God, and a couple of chapters later he tells us of Jesus putting it in terms of being born again. You start out belonging to one family or group or society, but then you are born again or adopted into a completely different community. And unimaginable possibilities open up before you through the richness of God’s grace.

This adoption or rebirth is made possible because God has become flesh among us. If you were to just see those orphans on TV or something there is not much you can do for them without becoming flesh and blood to them. You could send a donation to help improve the orphanage, but those kids don’t really need a better orphanage. What they need is release from the orphanage and adoption into a new family. That needs someone to become flesh and blood to them. That needs a new hand in hand relationship.

The Word became flesh to redeem us. Jesus Christ came to us, flesh and blood like us, and chose us for adoption as God’s children. God’s word to us became flesh. Now how is our response to become flesh?

You see, we can speak rather glibly about the wonders of having been born again and having been adopted from our pasts into the family of God, but unless that fleshes out in some concrete ways, then it’s probably just words. And God’s Word is never just words. The Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth. Our response to God’s Word begins with words, but it too must become flesh or it will become nothing. But before you panic or start feeling guilty, it’s not your responsibility on your own. We are adopted as a people, and it is as a people that we are to flesh out a response. WE are the body of Christ, God’s word made flesh. Individually we are only members of that body with our roles to play, but our roles are played in concert with others so that together we become the response made flesh. The answering word to God’s Word made flesh.

The response to God which we are to flesh out has two main dimensions. One is oriented towards God, the other is oriented towards others. Paul speaks in the reading we heard of living for the praise of God’s glory, and indeed the whole reading was a song of praise to God. John spoke of Jesus making God’s heart known to us. Our response begins with a growing intimacy with God, with prayer and praise. With entering into the mystery of God’s will, as Paul put it. We do this together and individually. We make time. We create oases of silence. We give ourselves the opportunity to tune in to the whisperings of the Spirit deep within our hearts. We give voice to our yearnings for closeness to the creative Spirit of the Universe. We are drawn into mystical communion with the One who is Love.

But how are we to flesh that response out in this new year? The words are nice, but the reality is not easy is it? All of us sense the hunger but find ourselves repeatedly falling short of what we wish for. Am I right??

I was talking the other day to one of our members who was expressing this frustration and saying, “I just need to start. I know I just need to stop thinking about it and do it. But it doesn’t seem to happen.”

Well I reckon if we went round the room, nearly everyone of us would echo the same words. And so what we need to be asking is how we can, as a group, better support one another in just starting. How can we better be praying as a group and how can we be better enabling and encouraging one another to be praying individually. I know for me that I’m much more likely to be praying when I’m part of a group that have decided together to be praying and to be checking up on each other about it. Sure it doesn’t sound so noble, but it is what helps break me out of one habit pattern and establish a new positive habit pattern. How many people do you know who only managed to give up smoking when they got together with a couple of others and decided to do it together. The desire not to be the only one who fails can be what makes the difference. Why do you think AA is the only thing that works for many alcoholics? Well in my experience, prayerlessness is a difficult addiction to break too. And so one of the main questions we need to address in our meeting this afternoon is what can we be doing to support one another in that quest. How can we facilitate our adoption from one world into another? How can we make our word become flesh?

The other dimension to our response is towards one another, towards our fellow creatures. Paul speaks of reconciliation, of gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. It is the coming together, the communion of all things, into a community in which all are valued and cared for and Christ is head.

The society we find ourselves in is one that more and more tears us apart. We are taught to think individually rather than communally, to look only to the meeting of our own needs – in fact we are told that doing that more will make the economy work better and be good for all of us. Even if it does make us rich it will destroy the fabric of common relationships that make life worth living. But it is difficult to avoid these forces and they directly affect us as a group here.

As I listen to the stories of people here in this church I hear over and over stories of great need and difficulty about which we are virtually unable to make any meaningful group response. There are people here desperately searching for alternative housing to get away from unhealthy situations. There are people here desperately needing more support with their child rearing. There are people here desperately seeking to earn enough money to buy a house because they can see themselves passing through middle age with far more responsibilities but no more security than they had when they came out of their teens. There are people here for whom their work has been their major creative contribution to the world and now they can’t get work that matches their skills and interests. And I hear people struggling under these burdens saying they’re sick of being in a church where they only exist for a couple of hours on Sunday.

These are real problems. Real dangers. Flesh and blood issues. The forces that threaten to destroy us have become flesh. At Christmas the Word of God who would give us life has become flesh. How are we to respond in a way that becomes flesh?

I don’t know what all the answers are for us, because there is no one set of answers and what’s right for us will only emerge as we commit ourselves to prayerfully seeking the will of God together. But what I do know is that the problems are real and big, but the possible solutions are a lot bigger and wider than we’re used to dreaming and maybe we need to allow our prayerful imaginations wander a lot more widely than they have to date. An example to whet your appetite or scare you to death. There are only four people left in this congregation other than me who walk to church. If we pooled some resources and sold this property, we would probably have enough money to buy about half a dozen houses and build a new chapel just across the river in Richmond. That could enable us as a church to form a cooperative housing project that would give our people housing security that they could not otherwise attain without working sixty hour weeks or moving out to Cranbourne. It would also enable us to be close enough together to know when each other needed some practical support or a couple of hours child care or whatever and actually be close enough to provide it.

Now I don’t know whether that’s the way for us to go. What I do know is that thinking that widely is more likely to enable us to sense the leading of God than just discussing whether to meet on Sunday afternoons or Wednesday nights. But we’re not at that stage yet. We have to first decide how and when to get together and pray and seek God and build one another up. Because it’s only as we get ourselves going on doing that much that we will have any chance of discerning God’s call into new ways of being church. What God is calling us to is responses that take flesh, responses that are meaningful in the face of the real flesh and blood dilemmas and complications of the lives of our real flesh and blood people. Don’t let anyone tell you that all Christ’s church can ever offer is some nice spiritual resources to make you feel better and help you cope better with the flesh and blood issues of the world. The Word became flesh. The response is to become flesh.

Paul said in Christ we have redemption – our release is secured. It’s the frequent biblical image of setting prisoners free. It’s not a prisoner’s aid program to help us cope better with our imprisonment. This is a redemption that takes flesh. Our release is secured. That’s what we are reminded of at Christmas, and that’s what Christmas means for the whole of the new year we are now entering and for the new millennium that before we know it we will be entering. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, that God’s Word might continue to take flesh in us and empower us to live life in new ways full of grace and truth.