Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

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Preached by Ree Hale on Oct. 12, 2008
John 1: 1-14

Incarnation: my dictionary says; incarnate is to embody, especially in human flesh and gives three examples.
• He is greed incarnate; what we might think about the head of a financial company who received millions and millions of dollars as his company went bankrupt.
• She is the incarnation of patience; perhaps you think of your mother or a teacher who had great patience with you.
We don’t believe the CEO is GREED, but his actions make us recognize what greed really is. We don’t mean the teacher or our mother IS Patience, but how she lives teaches us patience.
• He is God incarnate; his actions and way of life have made us recognize he lives the way we understand God calls us to live. Or we learned about what God is like from how he lived his life.

The Gospel called John, written around 90 to 100 CE, 60-70 years after Jesus no longer walked the earth,
begins with these 14 verses, a very different beginning than the other three gospels.
At the time of this writing there were no longer people living who were from Jesus generation.
Christianity had spread from Jerusalem, in Israel, to other parts of the known world. It was a small but rapidly growing faith group. Several of Paul’s letters had been written. The other gospels, Mark, Matthew & Luke, were already written. Books were not as available then as they are now. We cannot be certain what writings a group of practicing Christians would have had.

The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed in the year 70. Jews were scattered and living in fear of the Roman government. The synagogues were now the places they came together to worship and study the law that held them together. Conflict was growing between traditional Jews and these Jewish Christians who claimed Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. In fact, a benediction (as it was called) against the Jewish Christians had been proclaimed, no longer allowing them to participate in the synagogues.
John’s group of Jewish Christians wrote what they had come to understand and believe about Jesus as the Messiah to the Jewish people.

The first words of the gospel of John, In the beginning, which may have come from a hymn familiar to the
community, repeats the first words of Genesis, sacred literature of the Jews, tying John’s writing to God’s revelation to the Jews. John identifies the WORD or LOGOS (in Greek, the language in which John was writing), to have been present from before the world began. The LOGOS was with God and was God.
The writing introduces John, whom we call the Baptist, who was the witness of Jesus coming – Jesus who would LIVE as the LIGHT of this WORD so that those who heard what he said and lived as he taught would be children of God.

Just as John’s gospel was the understanding of his day, 100CE; with quite different circumstances from the time of Jesus: So today, very committed Christians, study, pray and write of their understanding of these ancient writings for our time.

Marcus Borg in Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time, writes, “the opening verses of the gospel using WORD or LOGOS (meaning wisdom) are not referring to Jesus of Nazareth. John is not saying, ‘In the beginning was Jesus,’ rather that which became incarnate in Jesus –namely, the logos-wisdom – was present at creation. It is the wisdom that was with God and was God. And word/logos/wisdom became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus was the incarnation of WISDOM.

“Jesus teaches wisdom language, alternative wisdom from that of the religious leaders of his day. The use of wisdom language to speak about Jesus goes back to the earliest development of the Christian tradition.”
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul all record that which was present in Jesus was the wisdom of God.
“Many images spoke of Jesus’ relationship to God (word, logos, son to name a few), these were metaphors – not to be taken literally.

Borg continues, “Jesus relationship to God was so intimate and deep he could be spoken of as the son of Abba … we do not know whether these images were present in Jesus’ own consciousness.”

In Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, John Shelby Spong says, “In the face of the Jewish Christians’ rejection and excommunication from the synagogues, John portrayed Jesus as part of the very Jewish definition of God. Jesus was to be understood as part of the great ‘I Am’ of God …No other gospel records these sayings of Jesus. Spong states, “Jesus of history did not say them”. Are the sayings then not true? Spong continues, “They were and are true to the experience of Christ in the hearts of believers. Christ has been and is bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, caring for the alienated….Truth is so much deeper than literal truth. … “To be called into the life of this Christ is to be called into the very being of God. In John, Jesus was inviting the world to allow the very essence of God to be born in them! …to be the self God created each of us to be!”

Kathleen Norris in the preface to Amazing Grace, speaks about needing to rebuild her religious vocabulary after 20 years away from church. Incarnation, for her, “is the place where hope contends with fear….as a wonderful tension between the WORD of God and human words. In her own life she says, “When a place or time seems touched by God, it is an overshadowing, a sudden eclipsing of my priorities and plans. But even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God (God is present), I find light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically. I know that holiness is near.”

All of these writers; The Gospel of John, Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong and Kathleen Norris, tell us Jesus brought us the WAS to God, and we are invited.
Only we, ourselves, can respond for our own life.
Our questions to reflect on today in the quiet ask us to look deeply within.
Am I where I want to be in my relationship with God?
What is my own understanding of God & Jesus in my life? How has it changed or perhaps deepened through the years?
How am I called to be an “incarnation to new life”, in the words Bruce has written for us to sing?