The Word Became Flesh

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” John 1:14

 A week ago Friday evening we gathered here to sing and worship.  One person shook my hand and said, "Thank you for a beautiful evening of worship." We told the story about the baby born to save the world from sin; a baby whose birth was greeted by angels; whose birth meant tidings of joy for all people everywhere.  We sang familiar songs.  A positive and warm spirit was in the air. God was worshipped, the gospel proclaimed and all was well with the world - or so it seemed. 

But all was not well with the world.  An indescribable pressure was building up deep beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean between two great tectonic plates of the earth's crust.  We sang on, oblivious; worshipped on, unaware; extended Christmas greetings, without knowledge.   We sang, “Joy to the world” and “All is calm, all is bright”  “Sleep in heavenly peace.”

Then, without warning those plates suddenly slipped along a 500 mile section generating incomprehensible energy causing a massive wave of devastation: tearing babies out of people’s arms; sucking beds out through hotel windows with people still in them; turning peaceful beachside villages into churning cauldrons of angry water. We’ve all seen the haunting photos of the horror it left behind: tens of thousands of corpses: old, young, men, women, and children strewn everywhere – 130,000 and still counting in 12 countries.

”What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?”
What child is this who laid to rest in the mud and devastation of Sri Lanka?  Indonesia? India? Thailand? Malaysia? Bangladesh? and others.  The magnitude of this event is unprecedented.

Who wants to sing of cute babies now?  Who wants to stand up and talk of baby Jesus when there is decaying flesh strewn upon the beaches and streets?

What do the songs mean now?  Do the angels’ tidings of great joy mean anything in the face of this?  Can we stand with the victims in the mud and devastation and even speak of the one who is called Emmanuel - God with us?  Or would it sound almost profane? 

 If the Christmas gospel has nothing meaningful to say in the destroyed villages, then it doesn’t really have anything meaningful to say anywhere ever.  Someone once said, “Any theology that cannot be preached in the presence of parents grieving over their dead children isn’t worth preaching anywhere.” 

If we are honest, we know that deep inside our souls lurks a frightful question that we do not want to ask.  We are not entirely sure that God is not to blame.

What did John say in our gospel reading?  “All things came into being through him and without him, not one thing came into being.”   Does that include the tsunami?

Those who shake their fists at heaven and say there is no God or that God is a callous tyrant have powerful evidence to support their case this week.  Even if God didn’t directly make the tsunami doesn’t God have to accept responsibility for creating the things that created the tsunami?  Or is God exempt from manufacturer’s liability questions?

Let us not speak too hastily in defense of God or we will be guilty of simply trying to prop up our own shaky faith and silence the questions that loiter within all of us.  Let us allow God to speak for himself.

I cannot speak to you as one who has the answers – because I don’t.  But I must speak as one called to speak God’s word.  So what does God have to say? 

I believe just this. ”The Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14)  Jesus is called the Word because Jesus is what God has to say.   What God has to say is made flesh in the life Jesus.   What God has to say in the face of unspeakable suffering is expressed in Jesus.

Sometimes it seems there are way too many other words spoken about God.   Everyone has an opinion.  Some will say that God is absent, dead or doesn’t care.  Others will say that God is all-powerful and that nothing happens except at God’s say-so.  Some will even say that the tsunami is God’s judgment.  Words! Words! Words! There is no end of words about God.  But what does God have to say? 

”God, do you care?”  ”The Word became flesh.” “God, did you make the tsunami?”  ”The Word became flesh.” “God, where are you?”  ”The Word became flesh.”   The only place to look and listen and go at a time like this is to “the Word made flesh.”   - Jesus!

God spoke a powerful Word in the life of Jesus, and it made the world shake and shudder.  “The Word became flesh” and the world reared up as a great tidal wave of hostility, selfishness, hatred and bitterness rose up against Him.  A tidal wave rose up against the Word and in an attempt to destroy Him.  Even the children around Bethlehem were included and murdered, as we read last week in Matthew 2, when Herod slaughtered so many children in an attempt to eliminate Jesus.  Finally the tidal wave of hateful rage stalked him, caught up with him, overwhelmed him, and nailed him to a cross.

We might ask, “Where was God as that wave hit?”   Wasn’t God right there bearing the brunt of it?   Wasn’t God right there clinging to his beloved child only to be overwhelmed by the wave and have His very own child ripped from his arms and torn away on that surging flood?    “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” cried the child from His cross. 

As a father I’ve tried to imagine myself trying to protect and save my child as the wave hit, desperately clinging to him with every ounce of strength, only to feel him ripped from my arms.  I’ve tried to imagine hunting for him in the chaos and ruins, checking body after body desperately hoping that none of them are him, that somehow he will have been washed to safety, but then in the end finding him crumpled and lifeless. 

Do I have any idea what it really would be like?   No, it is bad enough just imagining it.  I don’t know how I’d cope. I know I certainly would not want to hear any comfortable clichés, like all things work together for good, or they’ve gone to a better place, or there’s a reason for everything.

”The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  I cannot conceive of what it would feel like, but I do believe God does, because when we cry out for answers, explanations, and deliverance – God speaks a word, “the Word that became flesh.”   Not even God’s child was exempt from horror and death as He was torn from His Father’s arms by a ruthless wave of hate, and the waters of death closed over him just as it has over the thousands and millions of unnamed innocent victims down through the ages.

I believe God knows, and I believe that God is not afraid to be identified as flesh; fragile flesh; brutalized flesh; limp and lifeless flesh.

The message of Christmas is not that the Word only became cute baby flesh, but also that the Word became flesh and lived among us as hunted flesh; despised flesh; tortured flesh; dead and buried flesh.

In the book of Revelation we see a vision of the risen Jesus on the throne, but he still looks like one mortally wounded. (Rev 5) The risen one is still the crucified one.  The risen one is still being-crucified; the risen Christ is still the suffering and dying Christ.  The risen Christ is the one who told us that the one sure place he could be found on this earth is in those who are considered the least and last. “Just as you do it to one of the least of these, you do it to me.” (Matthew 25)  I presume that includes the suffering people of South Asia.  The Word still becomes flesh.

I pray that when we, in  a few minutes, hold out our empty hands to receive the bread and wine, His broken body, His shed blood, we will recognize our solidarity with desperate and hungry people who are also this day holding out their empty hands for the food and medicine the world is trying to muster.  Perhaps when we see the photo of a Father holding the limp body of his dead child, it might also remind us of the Father of the “Word who became flesh” who also grieved as the world destroyed His only Son’s flesh. 

The Christmas story will never be quite the same for me ever again.  I cannot consider it without seeing with greater clarity that in Jesus, the Word made flesh, God is totally vulnerable to the horror, tragedy and evil of the world.  God’s solidarity with the world is complete in Jesus, the “Word who became flesh.”

 Christmas is the story of God speaking a divine Word which becomes human flesh; who falls victim to the full force of the waves of horror that assail the earth and its inhabitants.  It’s a Word that continues to take flesh in all the suffering and grief and desperation of life.

 But it’s Word that also brings hope.  About that Word John also said, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” 

 An understandable result in the face of horror and tragedy is that we can become bitter, cynical, or worse yet, indifferent.  However, I look at the life of Jesus taking into himself a tidal wave of horror and hatred and then I see him being faithful to His mission of love to the very end.  As he succumbed to that tidal wave, He forgave to the end; he commended himself to God His father at the end.  Three days later he was raised to new life and is still present in the world in the least and last, in the grieving and suffering; in the hungry and sick; in the lost and lonely.  The Word still becomes flesh.

 God’s presence is not found separated from the world, or removed from the world, but rather in all the places of unspeakable fear, death and anguish of the world.  It’s from those places He calls out to you and me.  I pray that we might have the courage and compassion to heed His call, to do what we can to minister to His needs; to follow where the Word calls us. 

 I believe the “Word made flesh” is present in the desperate faces of South Asia.  “The light is shining in the darkness.”  Every one of us who call ourselves by His name must respond in solidarity. As love and hope burned brightly in His life and the darkness could not put it out, love and hope can burn in this present darkness as well; in the lives of the desperate victims; in your life and mine as we do everything we can to become a part of a new tsunami of overwhelming mercy and compassionate aid.

 “This is the body of Christ broken for you.”  “This is the blood of Christ shed for you.”

 “The Word becomes flesh and lives among us.”

This sermon was inspired by a sermon by Nathan Nettleton entitled "A Christmas Tsunami" -  Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources, South Yarra Community Baptist Church, Melbourne, Australia. I used and adapted some parts of his sermon.