Nativity of Our Lord
If the Christmas (I and II) gospels from Luke are all about the invisible God made visible in the flesh of the baby of Bethlehem, the Christmas (III) gospel from John is about the cosmic Christ who was present before the birth of the whole world.
The prologue to the Gospel of John is creed. It is faith claims. It is poetry, really, and it moves us into that space of belief, beyond what we can see. It is a set of beliefs that are absolutely theological in their composition, beyond history and fact-checking. It is the opposite of those shows cropping up on the History Channel that offer hour-long investigations of whether or not there was a star in the sky, as scripture reports, in the year of Jesus’ birth; or whether or not there is any record of Herod’s slaughter of the holy innocents; or what Jesus’ face would have looked like.
The gospel moves from faith claims about the preexisting Word that undergird our creeds to a story located in history beginning, not with Jesus, but with John the Baptist. It moves from the creation of the world to the re-creation of the human being that takes place in baptism. Ultimately, John’s prologue makes faith claims not only about God, about Jesus as the preexisting logos, but about us as well. The beginning of the story is not just Jesus born in the stable in Bethlehem, it is us reborn as children of God at baptism. This is why we retell the story of our faith using the words of the creed each time an infant or an adult is brought to the font, because we believe that on Christmas something happened for us, and for our salvation.
Christ is born this day in you, in us, in the church. We have seen it, in ourselves, in one another, in the world. The God who has existed since before the story of time began has entered into history again this morning to remake us all, to give us new life, light for all people that cannot be overcome.
