The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

This is one of the those years when there are two Sundays in the 12 Days of the Christmas season that span the time between December 25th and January 6th with the start of Epiphany.

So we get to linger a little longer today on the Christmas story, to savor a few more of the details before we turn our attention to the Magi and their journey and their gifts and the season of God’s revelation to the Gentile world.

And I want to call your attention to the different ways in which the Gospel writers seek to explain Jesus and his birth and his connection to our world.

Mark is the one with no birth story at all, he is all business as he leads off with John the Baptist and the baptism of the adult Jesus and he never looks back. Mark is the closest we have to a journalist as you read his gospel and there is an implicit sense that if the world is simply presented with the facts of Jesus life they will realize that worship and service are the only possible responses.

Matthew presents us with a genealogy, tracing Jesus family tree all the way back to Abraham, the first member of the Chosen People of God, the father of the Hebrew people. Matthew is staking out the territory that he will explore by telling us at the start that if you are going to understand the life and ministry of Jesus you need to understand that he is heir and successor to the leadership of God’s people and throughout Matthew’s gospel Jesus is constantly described in terms of the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Covenant.

Luke also begins with a genealogy but he goes all the way back beyond Abraham to Adam as he establishes Jesus place in the lives and hearts and families of all of humanity. As we read Luke we find the borders and barriers that we have established being stretched to include more and more people who would otherwise have been left out. Luke is the gospel for people like us, Gentiles now included in God’s family.

And none of these things negate the other, Jesus was the real person that Mark describes, coming and going, teaching and healing; he was the successor to Abraham as the founder of a new and eternal covenant, not a covenant of law and punishment but a covenant of grace and reconciliation; he was the one who continually pushed back the boundaries of nation and gender and class, spending time with Samaritans and women and tax collectors and prostitutes.

All of these understandings of who Jesus was are important to us in different ways and at different times in our lives, together and individually.

And all of these gospels, in at least a primitive form, were probably circulated and known when Saint John began to assemble his understanding of who and what Jesus was.

And it is his understanding that is most crucial to mature Christians who are attempting to live faithful lives in the 21st Century in this particular place in the world.

For John went beyond where anyone else had dared to go: beyond the contemporary – at that time – call of John the Baptist to repentance; beyond the nationalistic pride in Abraham; beyond even the universal sense of humanity’s connection to each other that we find in Adam, that we have witnessed again this week as hearts and wallets have opened to bring relief to our brothers and sisters whose lives are shattered by the Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster.

John intentionally echoed the opening words of the Old Testament in his attempt to explain Jesus: “In the beginning God created”, “In the beginning was the Word”.

You see, for John there was a clear linkage between Genesis and the Gospel, between creation and Christmas.

I think we miss that in most of our conversations and teachings in December, and I know that I have missed that in most of my preaching every December, and as I turned it over and around in my mind this week I began to see implications that I have never seen before, and I’m going to need some time to work through them, so some time over the next 4 or 5 years you may hear this again, but for today, on this final Christmas Sunday of this season, on this first Sunday of 2005 let me highlight the one central truth: if Genesis begins with God’s creation of the world then John is telling us of the new creation of a new kind of life that finds its meaning in the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the word made flesh.

You see, just because you and I haven’t always connected the dots between Creation and Christmas doesn’t mean that the clues haven’t been there for us. In fact I wonder if it is a subconscious acknowledgement of this connection that causes us to surround the Christmas story with so many animals.

Can you imagine a manger scene without cows and sheep and camels and elephants?

Have you ever wondered why they are there? Why clutter the story with a visit to the zoo? Why have cattle lowing, why not just stay focused on the babe sleeping?

I know that on one level they are only there because they were there, cattle were living in the stable, shepherds brought the sheep, wise men rode camels and so on and so on.

But more importantly I think they are there because Christian tradition understood what John was saying, that Christmas was the first day of a new creation and that when the word became flesh it lit a light that has no end and no limits and that the promised future is one where not only all of God’s children, but all of God’s creation will be filled with God’s glory and presence, when the initial glory of Eden will be restored, where Isaiah’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth will be fulfilled and children will not die and the elderly will be honored and we will each have our homes and our work and our lives and we will live in peace.

And doesn’t that change, dramatically, the way that we view our lives?

We are living in the light of God’s word and flesh and everything looks different.

We can no longer see ourselves as a poor, downtrodden band of helpless people confronted with a cruel and overwhelmingly evil world – and frankly that is how too many Christians in general and clergy in particular would describe the situation. Nor can we as a congregation hide from our obligations by saying “we’re just a poor little country church.”

We are living in the light of word – the things which we have learned - and flesh – the things which we have experienced - and so we can see that we are living in a world that God created and loved enough to recreate with new rules of engagement: For God so loved the world – by the way did you ever notice that John didn’t say “for God so loved me or my kind of people” or even “God so loved humanity” but God so loved the world, which I would imagine would include the animals.

And because we live in that light we can see the final destination, we can see that the new creation is being formed by God first in the life of Jesus and the in the life of his Church, we know how the story is going to end and who will be waiting for us at the end of the story.

We may not know, we cannot know, all of the twists and turns along the way, but we don’t need to, we are better off not knowing, but we can go through our journeys and struggles with serenity, we can do battle with confidence, we can face the darkest of nights with courage because we have the light of word and flesh that gives us the strength of the creator God who is, even now, recreating us.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

I have said before that the only person who really understood what was going on at Christmas was Herod. Somehow he knew that what was starting that day was not going to be able to be put away on a shelf in a box, the way that we will begin putting Christmas away soon. He knew that the manger was a direct threat to his way of living and so he did the only thing that made any sense to him – he took the sword and tried to stop it.

And of course he failed, just as we fail.

Oh not that we try to kill Christmas with a sword, no we do it by smothering it with sentimentality that lacks conviction, we do it by being upset that store clerks don’t say Merry Christmas while ignoring our governments passion for turning plowshares into spears and spreading death through warfare, we do it by turning Christmas into a child’s holiday so that we ignore the demands that Christ makes upon our hearts and calendars and wallets, we do it by constantly confusing the survival of the institutional Church with the mission of the Body of Christ.

And we will fail.

Because the eternal creative Word, by whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made, that word has become flesh and the light of that life continues to blaze in our lives, enlightening not only us, not only the Christians of the world but everyone.

And that light is turning the whole world into the instrument for God’s re-creative activities.

And in that work you and I are privileged to play our little part.

So we will give some money to help those whose lives have been shattered by the rising and receding waters of the Indian Ocean, not because our gifts will make today’s tragedies go away, but because they will make tomorrow less horrible.

And we will build a house this year in Lambertville for a family that today doesn’t even know that we exist, and we will do it not because we will solve the problems of affordable housing in nation, but because we will help solve the problems of affordable housing for that one family.

And we teach our children that God loves them, not because we have any magical formula that will keep them from being confronted with the temptations and failures of life but because we want them to have that one essential piece of knowledge to cling to when the temptations and failures come to visit them.

And together, with each other and with God, we will get ourselves through all of the surprises and changes and challenges that 2005 will bring, we will fight the diseases and disasters of our bodies as we age, we will dry each others tears at funerals and weddings and baptisms and graduations, we will hold each other up with prayer and companionship and we will enrich each other with our shared joys.

That’s what we – as individuals and as a Church – have been created to be.

And as long as we are doing and being all of that, we will spread that light that comes when word and flesh, dream and deed, come together.

That’s the Christmas promise that can never be killed and will never fail us and that light will never be overcome.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.