Can I Get A Witness? by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Year A – Christmas Day
December 25, 2016
John 1:1-18
“Can I Get A Witness?”
The Prologue to the Gospel According to John, the passage which is the Gospel for Christmas morning, has always been a favorite of mine. Absent are the angels and the shepherds of Luke’s Gospel, and the mystery of the conception and virgin birth found in the Gospel of Matthew. Instead, it goes back to the beginning of everything, revealing the nature of God and of the world that God created.
It had particular power for me on one particular Christmas exactly 20 years ago. It was mid-December 1996. After a snowstorm, I had slipped on some ice, severely injuring my right thigh. I had to wait a few days to see an orthopedist, and by the time an examination revealed what I had done, I had to undergo what amounted to emergency surgery to reconnect a severed quadriceps tendon – the tendon that connects all of the thigh muscles to the knee – before it shrunk too much to reconnect.
I returned home 9 days before Christmas sporting a plaster cast from my hip to my right ankle. Debbie had arranged for a hospital bed and all the other equipment I would need for my 7-week stint in the cast, and I remember that our neighbor brought over decorations for the sides of the hospital bed.
And I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. You see, I had just found out that I would be admitted to be a postulant for ordination to the priesthood, and I had a certain image of what my vocation would look like. Truth to tell, I have realized years later, it was really a caricature of Bing Crosby as the famous Fr. O’Mally in that favorite Christmas movie, The Bells of St. Mary’s. – you know, the easy-going priest who deftly floats from encouraging a sickly nun to breaking up a schoolyard brawl to convincing an elderly tycoon to donate his commercial office building to house the parish school. Come to think of it, some of those things aren't so far from the mark.
All of that sounds a bit romantic but it only fed my feeling sorry for myself. I was expected to make a decent recovery, but what if I didn’t? What if I couldn’t run again? What if I walked with a limp or needed a cane to walk? How would my ministry be the same? It seems silly now, but at the time that's how I was feeling.
And then one night as I was lying awake listening to a Christmas CD from the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, I heard their musical version of the Prologue that we heard this morning. And I burst into tears as the profoundly deep meaning of this passage suddenly came to me in the beautiful simplicity of the song:
A lonely stable stood beneath a lonely star.
A rugged stable embraced God’s almighty heart.
He came into a world that would not understand
His only purpose was to save the fallen soul of man.
Beneath his father’s heaven hope was born one silent night.
Beneath his father’s heaven a baby brought the truth to light.
He came unto his own and they would not believe,
But poor and sinful ones gladly heard Him and believed.
The Word of God made flesh, full of truth and of grace,
The glory of the Father, shining bright upon his face.
Refrain
And I realized that while both secular culture and the church tend to ground the Christmas story in Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus; in the angels and the shepherds and the wise men, it is the opening words of John’s Gospel that bring home what it all means.
And what is that? First and foremost, it is a statement about the nature of the world in which we live as people of faith, the nature of the God who created it, and God’s intentions in creating it. That the very nature of God is light and life. It is not about our dreams, our wishes, our goals; the story is about God and God’s Word, and God’s love for the world God chooses to create.
Second and related to the first is that God chooses to enter the world God created as a vulnerable child who is not universally welcomed into that world. Jesus is described as “light” that is introduced to a darkness that tries, but does not succeed, in overcoming it. It is a reminder that in the midst of the chaos that so often is the world around us; in the midst of an imperfect world that includes war, prejudice, discrimination, illness, injury and doubt, Jesus alone is the light upon which we can depend, the light that signals God’s love for us not in response to human sinfulness, but because it is in the very nature of God to love.
Third and something important for us to remember is that God loves us as we are, as God made us. This morning’s passage doesn’t call us to be Christ – Jesus was already born once and that is enough. What Christmas means for us is to remind us that we called not to be Christ but to be John the Baptist. The true celebration of Christmas calls us to be witnesses to that love and that light which Christ brings into the world – to testify to that light through the things we say and the lives we lead. The ways in which we and the congregations we represent testify to the Light can either spread that light to the world or turn people away from it to embrace the darkness.
The meaning of Christmas is that in the birth of Jesus, heaven comes to earth, the eternal and the earthly are joined, and God becomes one of us. The Christmas story is our story. The birth of Jesus changed the course of history. Whenever people of good will share the Jesus story, we have the power to change the world, sometimes in big ways, sometimes one person at a time. Christmas calls us to be witnesses – not simply to assent to stories and ideas about Jesus, but to live our lives in testimony to His light in ways that demonstrate that this Jesus does make a difference. And so can we.
Beneath His Father’s heaven, a baby brought the truth to light.
Amen.