Text: John 1:1-14
Speaker: Joel Miller
About 100 years ago, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble published a paper that changed the way we think. Using what was then the world’s largest telescope, combined with a theoretical model developed by fellow American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Hubble argued that the universe was larger than the Milky Way. Not only were there other galaxies, but these galaxies were moving away from each other. We live, he proposed, in an expanding universe.
Seventy years before that paper, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. Rather than cosmology and physics, Darwin’s interest was biology. He focused on life and its unfolding on this singular planet. Darwin presented a sweeping theory that life on earth descended from a common ancestry, through a process called natural selection, with adaptations to different environments across time producing the vast diversity of species past and present.
None of these ideas were brand new. It took a bit for them to be widely accepted within the academy. They have since been largely affirmed, and refined. As our best current models about where we, and everything we can see, touch, and measure, come from, they present a remarkable picture.
Like – A common ancestry – not just on the tree of life, but all the way back to an unimaginably hot and dense point, which explodes – not into space, but as space and time, still expanding.
Like – The gifts of stars, drawing the most basic particles into themselves, fusing the simplest atoms of hydrogen and helium into oxygen and carbon, physics giving birth to chemistry. Lighting up the dark universe like a Christmas tree on a winter night. And in their death, creating the higher elements through supernovae explosions and mergers of leftover cores. Stars’ spectacular sacrifice seeding the universe with new possibilities.
Remarkable, Like, Life – chemistry giving birth to biology, molecules metabolizing into self-sustaining wholes, remembering itself, replicating itself, combining with an other to make yet another other, learning to catch the light of the nearest star to create its own food, sensing, adapting, collaborating, composting and resurrecting, swimming and flying through liquid and gas, crawling and walking on solid ground, in conversation with all around it in endless give and receive. Biology a vessel of consciousness. Creation creating. Scattered star parts gathered back together as body, breath and brain. Consciousness reflecting back on itself with startled wonder and confusion. Who are we? And what are doing here?
It might seem odd to bring this up the Sunday before Christmas. The nativity scene sometimes includes a star, but I’m yet to see a periodic table hanging on the stable wall, angels singing the glory of the DNA double helix, or a wise one delivering the calculations behind Hubble’s constant. That would be cool, but the traditional nativity scene has none of this.
And John’s gospel, our text for this morning, has no nativity scene. Instead, John paints a Christmas greeting card like no other. Rather than locating the birth of Christ in the 1st century Roman world – Bethlehem in Judea – John is more interested in locating the birth of the world, the whole world, in Christ.
And so John begins, with his theory of everything: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
And John continues: “And the Word became flesh, and lived among us” (v. 14).
Sing VT Planets Humming as They Wander, v. 1
Only Matthew and Luke give us any details about Jesus’s birth. There’s Mary and Joseph, the angels, shepherds and wise ones, songs and gifts. There’s an emperor counting heads for tax collection – Caesar Augustus. And a jealous provincial king willing to murder to stay in power – Herod. This is the picture these two writers paint of the events surrounding the birth of Christ. But all the gospels situate Jesus in a story that began long before that scene in Bethlehem.
Mark traces Jesus’ origins as far back as the Hebrew prophets. Christ, we are told, is the fulfillment of prophetic longing. Matthew goes further back. His genealogy of Jesus begins with the first Jew, Abraham. For Matthew, Christ is the sublime thought of Judaism. Luke stretches even further. Luke gives a genealogy that draws a direct line from Jesus backwards, to the very first human being, Adam. In this, Jesus is a brother to all humanity.
And you’d think that’s as far back as you can go. If you’re telling about where Jesus came from, if you’re weaving a story about Jesus’ life interweaving with other lives, you can’t go further back than Adam. Except that’s exactly what John does. It’s as if John is still trying to find his footing within the seismic shifts brought about by having known Jesus. John gazes as deep as he is able into the meaning of What Just Happened, and concludes: “the whole universe is in there.”
To paraphrase the opening verses of John: Whoever and whatever that was…has always been here. Always. From the beginning. Not only has it always been here, but nothing that is here – no person, no culture, no tree, no molecule or photon – would exist without it. Whatever/whoever that was, is so intimately tied up with life and existence itself, that without it, there wouldn’t be anything at all.
Speaking of seismic shifts, it’s no secret that Christians, broadly speaking, have not been early adopters of Darwin and Hubble’s conclusions. The relationship between science and religion is still a major fault line in the church. This, despite early Christian leaders like Origin and Augustine teaching that the Genesis creation stories were clearly intended to be figurative. This despite medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas teaching that God is not a being who set the world in motion then occasionally intervenes, but God is the source of being itself in every moment of existence. This, despite more contemporary process theologians building on evolutionary science and John’s idea that creation proceeds as a free response to the Divine Word. God takes the full range of possibilities within each new moment and invites the creation toward that which best serves the flourishing of life, the increase of diverse harmony and rich experience. However conscious or unconscious we may be in the moment, God meets us there, and in the next, and the next, and the next, with the same Divine lure toward Christ-like life.
When I was in high school I dabbled briefly in young earth creationism. I think it was less about the science and more the need for everything to somehow fit together, to make some kind of sense. The need for the world to be a place of meaning, and for my life to contribute in some small way to that meaning. I’ve since given up biblical literalism. I can’t say I’ve given up the need for meaning. In fact, I’m pretty committed to the idea that meaning and values are just as real as gravity and atoms. That we need love and connection for survival as much as we need food and oxygen.
Sing VT 175, v. 2
John the evangelist, the writer of the fourth gospel, was not a physicist or an evolutionary biologist. He was not a young earth apologist. And, as much as I’d like to claim him as one, he probably wasn’t even a process theologian.
In fact, like so many of the biblical characters, we know very little about who John was. A leading proposal is that he’s the character in his own gospel referred to multiple times as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” If so, this could be slightly self-serving, but we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe every disciple thought they were Jesus’ favorite, and maybe they were all right.
And if so, it says something about why John would begin his writing the way he does, about all things coming into being through the Word, through Christ.
In one scene half way into the gospel Jesus is reclining at table with his disciples. And it’s the disciple whom Jesus loved who’s right next to him, so close that when he moves in to ask Jesus a question, he leans on Jesus’ chest.
In another scene, when Jesus is dying on the cross, it’s Jesus’ mother who’s right there, along with other women, and the disciple whom Jesus loved. One of Jesus’ final acts is to offer the disciple whom Jesus loved to his mother in adoption. “Woman, here is your son.” And to offer his mother to the disciple whom he loved as an adopted parent. “Here is your mother.”
So how’s this for a theory? John didn’t start out to propose a theory of everything. Instead, through his closeness with Jesus, something world-shaping happened to him. John experienced a love and intimacy so profound that he could feel himself being created. As if Jesus, in offering his mother to John and John to his mother, had been the one giving birth. As if, in leaning on Jesus, John had heard the very heartbeat of God.
As if the entire universe had burst into existence for this purpose. As if this were the power fueling the stars, fusing the higher elements, seeding the universe the new possibilities. As if this were the lure that drew single cells into multicellular creatures, with ever expanding capacities for feeling and community, and love.
What if the Word becoming flesh in the life of Jesus wasn’t just a one time event? What if Jesus made it clearer than ever that this is how it always has been and how it always will be? What if we are Mary giving birth to Christ and Christ is God giving birth to the whole world?
In this evolutionary unfolding, the Divine offers itself to the material world in each moment. The Word is always becoming flesh – and oxygen, and supernovae, and breath, and life interweaving with life.
John’s Christmas nativity is as vast as the whole cosmos. Even we are in it. Incarnation is at the center of creation, and we are being born and reborn in Christ.
Sing VT 175, v. 3