1 Christmas December 28,2014
Is.61:10-62:3 Ps. 147:13-21
What is the biggest elephant in the room which we all take for granted
and because we do, we miss the most
obvious thing about human life as we know?
And what is the elephant? It is
Word or language. We are people
who have language and through language our human world is completely created.
And so you ask? A baby does not
yet have language and does a baby exist?
Indeed a baby has potential language ability but is a passive recipient
of the language of the parents. Parents impose language upon a baby's world and
Sigmund Freud tried to build a narrative around how parents treat certain
sensual areas of the body in the very formation of their personal narratives.
For the author of the Gospel John it was not enough that Jesus was born
in Bethlehem. One could infer that the
community where John's writer preached and wrote no longer used the Christmas
narratives for their main liturgy or their method of teaching spiritual
transformation.
The community of John were further away in time from the actual presence
of Jesus on earth. The Jesus of Nazareth, a very historical figure had given way to the corporate body of Christ.
The Jesus of Nazareth was gone, but the risen Christ had become an
omnipresence metaphor for the immediate and intimate awareness of God’s
presence known to people in a very engaging and personal way.
The physical birth of Jesus was not adequate to account for the Christ
of the resurrection who had returned in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Risen Christ was such an experience of
omnipresence of God's personal presence, the writer of John's Gospel could only
confess in very poetic terms that the Risen Christ was the very basis for human
life being aware of anything at all as the Word which is before all human
existence and which is within all human existence.
If something is known or it is experienced, awareness of something being
known or being experienced has to have passed through language or Word. So Word is what is omnipresent in organizing
and creating all of human life as we know it.
And this Word is pervasive and the confession of the Risen Christ as the Word accounts for our belief that we
live in a personal universe. The world
is totally Christianized by identifying the Risen Christ with the eternal Word,
who had a phase of fleshly existence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
You and I might think that we have unworded states of existence, or
pre-linguistic states of existence, but in thinking that we have already used
words to identify such states of existence.
Word is the like the nano-second time delay on every human experience consciously
articulated. Word products
exist passively in all of the products and actions of human civilization. And
if we did not have words, we would not even be aware that we had consciousness
or existed.
We are beings with language. This
is inescapable so don't try to escape it.
Language like music has rests, and silence is but a programmed features
of having language. By the time we learn
to speak and use language we have already been thoroughly pre-coded with many
meanings in our lives, and so we have already been passively formed by the
value words which our nurturing environments have provided for us.
In many ways, language uses us more than we use it because of this
unconscious cultural coding of every aspect of our lives.
One of the reason that the Word became Jesus Christ was because the
worded scripts of humanity were losing scripts.
People were living out scripts of alienation from God and from each
other.
There needed to be an intervention into the human community. And so the Word became flesh in the person
of Jesus of Nazareth and he became dynamic word in actions and in teaching.
Jesus of Nazareth came to show us that we don't have to be passive
slaves in the great play of life with fixed and rigid scripts.
Jesus of Nazareth was new playwright.
He came to show us that even though we have inherited some very losing
scripts, we in our lives can learn to write and live new outcomes, better
outcomes for our lives.
Even though we are always pre-coded with certain habits of thought and
actions, the very notion of repentance and education means that there is always
a great task before us to overcome our many ignorances.
If we understand that we are pre-constituted and coded by the word
paradigms within which we live, Jesus as the preacher was one who showed us
that we can receive progressive intervention in our Word lives so as to learn
new acts and new habits and ways of thinking which will change our lives and
the lives of our families and communities.
Even though we are highly determined by our pre-coding in our cultural
settings, Jesus was the Word of God made flesh to show us that we still have
lots of freedom to exercise in our word lives.
We are on the verge of a new year.
Where do you and I want some intervention today in the scripts of our
lives which we are living right now?
Where do we want to have the freedom to know and act differently in the New
Year?
Words are power. We know the
power of words in political and commercial propaganda which seeks to guide and
persuade the various behaviors of our lives.
Let us today link up the Risen Christ with the power of Words in our
lives and seek to find the words of power which can change our lives in the
direction of love and justice in our world.
Let the Risen Christ as the eternal Word of God be the power to write and
perform new scripts in our lives in the New Year.
So, you and I are not going to escape language and Word. We are going to be barraged by the words of
our culture, by all sorts of persuasive propaganda. The reason we gather here today is because we
confess the need to have resistance against harmful words and we need the
intervention of good and powerful words which can give us new and winning
scripts of love, joy, hope and justice in our future.
Let us submit today to the risen Christ whom we can know today as
persuasive and powerful words of change in our lives today. Happy New Year and God bless us as we find
new and better scripts for our lives in the coming year.
Amen
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