Sermon: A New Beginning

Texts:

Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18

Date:   January 1, 2006

By:   Stephen Soderland

“In the beginning …”   In what sense is New Year’s Day a beginning?   Of course, it’s the first day of the rest of our life, but why single out this day of the year as a beginning?   It’s the darkest time of the year, the days are shortest, and we can look forward to three months of cold and storms.   What an odd time to choose as the beginning of the year.   If I were in charge of the calendar, the year would begin when the first crocuses were poking up out of the ground, or better yet, when the first trilliums were blooming.   But, you know, the calendar makers might have been on to something.   They decided to begin the new year just when everything is at its absolute darkest, a time when the light is slowly beginning to increase.   The lengthening of the days has already started, even though we don’t notice it yet.

When the writer of the Gospel of John wants to explain the significance of Jesus, he speaks in terms of beginnings and of a new light that has come into the darkness.   Today’s reading from John is an attempt by the early church to understand who Jesus is, and what his coming means to the world, written about 50 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry.   Jesus the itinerant preacher and healer did not spend much time explaining who he was.   Jesus spoke more about the Kingdom of God than about himself, and spoke about a reality that was too mysterious to be neatly explained and could only be hinted at through parables.  

John is trying to fit Jesus and his ministry into the Greek and Jewish philosophy of his day.   Even this is too big for tidy explanations and John uses metaphors of light and darkness and something called “the Word”.   In Greek this is “logos”, which has a meaning that goes beyond Word in the sense of speaking.   Logos is the root of our English words “prolog” and “dialog”, but is also the root of the words “logic”, “biology”, “geology”, and so forth.   We could translate logos as reason or wisdom.   So the opening line of John could be paraphrased “In the beginning was the Wisdom of God, and the Wisdom was with God and the Wisdom was God.”   The later line about the Word becoming flesh and living among us can be taken to mean “Jesus embodies the Wisdom of God in our daily life.”   We can’t pin any of this down to a single meaning.   When someone asked Jesus what the Kingdom of God is like, he would start to speak about mustard seeds, lost coins, forgiving fathers, or camels passing through the eye of a needle.   It’s something too big to explain except through poetry and story.

When John speaks about “the beginning”, he probably has the beginning of creation in mind.   In our modern scientific myth, we speak about a big bang, as if that explained anything.   So, John could be further paraphrased as “At the big bang, the Wisdom of God was present”.   I don’t think the Supreme Court would object to me teaching about Intelligent Design as long as I do it in a church.   There is another kind of beginning that John speaks of, a new birth in Christ that can happen this very moment.   “To all who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God, who are born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, but of God.”   The Wisdom of God that is in Christ is present in this fresh beginning, as much as the power of God is present at the beginning of creation.   All we need to do is to receive it.   There is a power in the world that is beyond the physical, beyond flesh and blood.   We have the choice of looking beyond what the world sees, and receiving the light of God into our lives.  

John compares this new beginning to a light that has come into the darkness.   “What has come into being in him is life, and the life is the light of all people.   The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”   Jeremiah also knew about times of darkness and the power of declaring hope and light in dark times.   The time when Jeremiah wrote was about has dark as it could be.   Judah had just been brutally conquered by the Babylonians, Jerusalem had fallen, and the temple was destroyed. King Nebuchadnezzar had captured a large portion of the population, including all the prominent citizens, and taken them off as prisoners to exile in Babylon .   Things were about as bad as they could get.  

The first half of the book of Jeremiah, like the first half of Isaiah, is filled with warnings about impending destruction. Jeremiah calls on the nation to repent or it would be destroyed.   Jeremiah delivered fiery sermons that spelled out in great detail what the people of Israel and Judah were doing to make God angry.   The people were turning to false gods, and worshipping Canaanite idols alongside their worship of the God of Israel.   Jeremiah denounced the rich and powerful for lining their own pockets and not upholding justice for the poor and defenseless.   He denounced the rulers for relying on foreign treaties instead of trusting in the Lord for their security.   Jeremiah got in trouble with the authorities who wanted to reassure the people that everything was going to be all right.   He was put under house arrest at one point for his unpatriotic attitude.   It would be interesting to speculating on how much of all this applies to modern nations, our own included.   Interesting to see how much hot water I could get myself into. But that’s another sermon.

Today’s reading from Jeremiah has a totally different tone.   This was written after the destruction he had been warning about for forty years had come about.   He could have written, “Hear the word of the Lord: I told you so.”   Instead, he preaches words of hope and comfort.   “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd does a flock.   For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.   They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion , and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord… their life shall become like a watered garden.”   He reassures the people that they will return to their homeland, even the weakest and most vulnerable, that God will turn their mourning into joy and will comfort them.

Which Jeremiah do we need to hear, the one that warns us to change our ways or else, or the one that gives us hope and courage to face dark times?   Each of us needs some of both.   To quote something that I first heard from Don Mayer and later from other pastors, the role of a preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.    We are all a mixture of afflicted and comfortable; we sometimes need to be consoled and sometimes brought up short.

In what ways are we like the people that Jeremiah was addressing in this text?   Jeremiah preaches a return home to those that are in exile, does that include us?   In some sense, we are all exiles from our true home.   As the gospel song puts it, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.”   Some part of us longs for the promised land, the Kingdom of God that Jesus tells us about.   A land that is here with us, and yet is beyond what we experience in our day-to-day life.   Jesus gives us hints about this land, and all of his stories revolve around joy and celebration: a wedding feast, a banquet, a rich treasure that is found unexpectedly, a tiny seed that brings forth abundantly.  

Years ago I read a story by C.S. Lewis that gives a remarkable image of the contrast between heaven and earth.   In the story a man is allowed to briefly visit his loved one in heaven.   He gets aboard something like a bus and seems to travel a long distance until they arrive at a meadow.   At first he doesn’t see anything, but when he refocuses his eyes he sees his wife and the realm of heaven.   Heavenly things are more real and vivid than the earthly things.   He can still see every day objects, but he now realizes that they are vague and insubstantial.   Even his own body seems like a ghostly shadow compared to the reality of heaven.   When he gets back in the bus to travel back to earth, he now realizes that it is not really traveling, but shrinking in size.   It gets as small as a speck of dust and settles into a crack in the dirt.   Heaven is not only more powerfully real than our day-to-day experience, but makes our world seem insignificantly small in comparison.

If we are exiled from that rich, beautiful meadow and are living captive in a speck of dust in the dirt, our rescue from captivity would be a time of joy indeed.   But we go about our lives in that speck of dust not aware that the larger world is right here.   All we need to do is refocus our way of looking.

Jeremiah also preaches hope to those who mourn, does that include us?   We have lost several dear friends in this congregation in recent months: Peg Haley, Howard Mock, Dennis Harrington, Dorothy Fickle, and I still miss Iona Francis and Will Carncross.   Many of us have also lost a sister or brother, a cousin, a father or mother, husband or wife.   Jeremiah promises us that the Lord will turn our mourning into joy, the Lord will comfort us and give us gladness for sorrow.   Grieving is natural, even Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus.   In C.S. Lewis’s story, however, it was the wife, now it heaven, who had more cause to grieve for her husband, than he had to grieve for her.   He was the one who had not yet entered into the fullness of life that she experienced.   I had an Aunt Ada, who lived to be 100.   She was completely unafraid of death, even matter of fact about it.   When someone else died, she would always comment, “Now they know something we don’t know”.

Jeremiah also preaches about being ransomed from hands that are too strong for the captives, does that include us?   Many of the prayer requests that we hear each Sunday are about rescue from forces that are beyond our control: natural disasters around the world; wars and suicide bombings; those in our congregation waiting for the next heart attack or helplessly watching while a cancer silently grows and there are no treatments left that are likely to cure it.   Are we to trust in Jeremiah’s promise that the Lord has redeemed us from bondage to these powerful forces?   Can we hope for a new beginning?   This looks like foolishness as the world sees things.   As foolish as hearing reassurances from Jeremiah about homecoming and joy when the Babylonian army has just ravaged our country and is carrying us off as prisoners.  

Iona Francis has been an inspiration to me of how to find hope in a hopeless situation.   When told that she might have only a few months to live, what was Iona ’s response?   She forced her Christmas cactus to bloom in October, just in case she wouldn’t be around to see it in December, and wrapped and neatly labeled her Christmas presents two months early.   She never let her world shrink down to her own pain and fears.   She was more interested in how she could help others than in her own problems.

There's an old Chinese tale that Harold Kushner relates in   When Bad Things Happen to Good People about a woman whose only son died. In her grief, she went to a holy man and said, "What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?" Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, he told her, "Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow from your life." The woman set off in search of that magical mustard seed. She came to a huge mansion, knocked on the door and said, "I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me!" They told her, "You have certainly come to the wrong place" and began to describe all the sorrows they have experienced. The woman thought to herself, "Who is better able to help these unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?" She stayed to comfort them then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow.   But wherever she went, to hovels or to palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness and loss. Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people's grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had, in fact, helped her deal with the sorrow in her own life."   One of the ways to refocus our lives to see the Kingdom of God that is here with us, is to minister to others.  

Can this New Year’s Day be a new beginning for us?   John promises a new beginning, a new birth for all who receive the light of Christ into their life.   There are no restrictions – “To all who receive him, who belive in his name, he gives power to become children of God.”   It doesn’t require an effort of the will, like all those New Year’s resolutions about exercise and diet that we make this time of year.   Indeed, it is more like a relaxing of our will, letting go of burdens that are too heavy for us and trusting God to carry them for us.   Have you been living your life as a captive of forces too powerful for you, as an exile from the Kingdom of God ?   The Lord has proclaimed release of the captives and a return home for the exile.   All those who seek will find, all who ask shall receive.   The light has come into the world.   We have the power to receive this new life in Christ.   Amen.