Constituted by the Word; A Postmodern Insight? Really?

1 Christmas   C    December 30,2012

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link 

  We know that the Gospels of Mark and John do not have the Christmas story in them.

  Mark’s Gospel begins at the baptism of Jesus and in this Gospel, Jesus appears to be adopted as God’s Son at his baptism when the heavenly voice says, “You are my beloved Son.”

  The Gospel of John, the last Gospel written of the four, does not seem to care that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  The writer of John is much more philosophical. The writer understands that Jesus had an existence pre-existing his earthly life.  For the writer of John, he was the eternal Word of God who was with God from the Beginning.  When God spoke a creative word and said, “Let there be light,” the writer of John’s Gospel believes that Jesus as the Word was present at the time of creation.  And in the same paragraph the Word is called the light of humanity.   And that is a long time before Bethlehem.  Such a Word needed no star because the Word was Light.

  How does the Gospel of John summarize the Bethlehem event?  And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.  This is where we get the notion of Incarnation.  Word becoming flesh.

  I am fascinated with this ancient notion and how it expresses an insight that is just a relevant and mysterious today as it was then.

  The human ability to use words is what creates and organizes our world.  Word ability is what separates humanity from the other animals and from plants.  To achieve word ability is to leave infancy and childhood and come into the fullness of person hood.

  We take on our word ability without knowing it.  We use the words that we are given in our cultural settings.  Our world is in a certain way created by the words that we are taught to use.

  We speak words and we learn to write words.  When we see our world, we see it through invisible grids that names and categorizes everything that we are looking at.  Our bodies move with a body language because they express the purposes that are directed by word.

  Everything that we do is someway mediated and flavored by our use of language.  Even if we say we have pre-linguistic or non-language events, we use language to say it, and that disproves any pretense to having a life without word and language.  As babies we do not have active language but we are passive recipients of all of the active coding of our existence by our parents and their society.

  I think that the biggest elephant in the room for anything that we do is Word and Language.  We assume it in everything that we do, while we ignore its presence and significance.

  Today, I would like us to consider how our Word has been made flesh in our lives?

  What are the languages or words that our bodies are speaking?  What are our moral and our ethics?  Our behavior is the language that our bodies speak…our behavior is the result of our Word having been made flesh.  And it behooves us to ask ourselves what the scripts are that are directing the behavior of our lives?

   Are any of these scripts losing scripts for us?  Do we find our selves in patterns of repetition that represent bad habits or addictive behaviors?

  If we can get at the Word of our lives, we can begin to do some serious interdiction into the behaviors of our lives that we want to change, that we want to recreate.

  The reason we recommend education and reading of uplifting books and literature is so that we can saturate the language field of our lives so that we can orient ourselves to be able to act and behave in ways that show that we have faith, and love God and our neighbors as ourselves.

  We are and we become how we have been taught to use words.  And if we have some bad patterns, then we have to re-train ourselves at the very deep level of how our word is made flesh in our lives.

  One of things that I would encourage each person to do is to get in touch with one’s own language.  What are the passive habits of mind, body and speech that you have taken on because your particular experience in your family and culture?  Since we have not be raised in completely perfect environments;  since we have not been disciplined enough to expose ourselves to the highest forms of the use of words, we have taken on some habits that are in need of reform.  We are in need of some re-creation in our lives.

  What sort of re-creation do you and I need in our lives now?  And how can we undertake such re-creation?

  First, possess your words.  Most people are merely passive users of language, they are spectators of language.  Take up journaling and learn to possess the language that you have as an active user.  When you struggle for complete expression, you will begin to discover the kinds of words that already control your mind and your behavior.  And if you can get them into text or expression, you can begin understand in a conscious way the script that is guiding your lives.

  If Christ is the eternal Word, then it is suggested that the way in which we can change the scripts and word patterns that dictate the behaviors of our lives is by choosing the very best model for our word life.  Certainly Jesus Christ as the Word of God is the highest model that we can choose and in adopting Christ as our model, we can begin to change the deep infrastructure of our word life so that it begins to show up in how we actually behave.

  If Jesus is the Word of God, we can look to him and to God’s Spirit to begin to influence the words that organize and shape our lives.   Let us be hopeful about the Word of God and how it can influence and recreate our lives.    Let us not be lazy in our devotion to the Word of God and let us not be just passive users of words; let us begin to activate our life of word and expose ourselves to ourselves so that with honesty, we can seek the areas of re-creation that we need to pursue in the quest for excellence.

  Remember the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.  And the task of our life is to let the Word of God be made flesh in our flesh and direct the behavior of our lives in the path of faith.  May the Word of God dwell richly in our lives today.  Amen.