God, author
and creator of the ‘real’, cause our minds to open, our hearts to soften and
our ears to hear this day. We thank you
for all that is pure and good and holy.
Amen
If you are somewhere in my
generation or one after or one before you probably make an instant connection
to the phrase “It’s the real thing”. We
could all hum a few bars of that commercial where, yes, you guessed it, coca cola,
brought singers from all over the world to a hilltop in Italy and had them
singing “I’d like to buy the world a coke”.
It’s on you-tube if you’d like a trip down memory lane and I definitely
did. There they were—nice young people
from the United States and England; one bonny red-haired, freckled lass from
Ireland; numerous people of color, some with native dress; people from India,
and Asia, all over the world. The
message was simple—if we all would just drink coke, the world would be a
wonderful place to live and it seems that we bought it—that ad generating
hundreds and thousands of revenue for coca cola. It’s an interesting use of the phrase—the
real thing—of course, and indicates that, in the world of soft drinks, only
coke is real, the rest are poor substitutes.
This, of course, my mind running
amuck as it is wont to do, got me to thinking about other ways we use the word
‘real’. If it is before dinnertime, and
I’m in a restaurant and the server asks me which kind of coffee I want, I could
respond “give me the real thing” and everyone would know that I wanted coffee
with caffeine; decaf, of course, not being ‘real’. We throw the word ‘real’ around a lot. If I’m walking down the streets of New York
City and a guy on the street offers me a Rolex watch for the unbelievable price
of 50 bucks—my first question ought to be, “Is it real?” Real—genuine, authentic, factual, true,
original, bonafide, sincere, honest, heartfelt, unaffected—all these words can
be summed up in the word ‘real’. Today,
our passage from John’s gospel tells us that Jesus—this Life-Light—is the real
thing. And, just as importantly, his
interaction with people, when they believe, enables them to find the ‘real’
thing in themselves—John describes this as, “their true
selves, their child-of-God selves.”
On Wednesday nights, we have been
“Living the Questions” with each other—a small group of you who want to explore
the questions that we ask and live out every day. One of the sessions we participated in recently
had to do with the question of ‘why did Jesus come to earth?’ In that session we talked about how the
notion that God piled all the worlds’ peoples’ sins on Jesus and caused him to
be killed for us just doesn’t match up with the loving, compassionate, creative
God we know in our lives. But this is a
scary place to be because the church has told us for over two thousand years
that Jesus, child of God, died for our sins and the sins of everyone in the
world. Scary or not, we bring that
question with us to our scripture today.
Advent is a time of preparation, a time of waiting, and even a time of
questioning.
John, of course, in the beginning of
his Gospel story, does not support this theory either. No, John tells us that Jesus came to earth as
this Life-Light to show us what it looks like to be just that—a Life-Light ourselves—a child-of-God. Those who ‘got it’ and still ‘get it’ would
live into their true nature of their ‘child-of-God’ selves. There are glimpses of this long before Jesus
arrives on the scene. Prophets tried to
get the people to understand. David,
Shepherd, King, and Poet, wrote many psalms with hints about being this
child-of-God self, but the people couldn’t understand. So, God, the source of Divine Love, did the
divinely loving thing. God sent us an
example so that we might have a concrete, flesh and blood, model of a
child-of-God. In sending Jesus, God
said, “all these other attempts have been mere forerunners of Jesus. Jesus is the ‘real thing’—the real
child-of-God. Watch him, learn of him,
model your lives after his, allow him to show and teach you what it means to be
my child. That’s it—that’s all. All of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection
makes sense in this one ‘real’ thing—that we understand what it looks like, and
feels like, and hurts like, and loves like, when we are truly one with God.
How does it feel to be a
child-of-God? This is not a rhetorical
question. It is the question where we
find ourselves in the midst of here, right smack dab in the middle of
Advent. The parties have begun, the
presents are on the dining room table awaiting their wrapping and distribution,
and we are coming closer and closer to the night, when we remember the baby in
a manger; the night when our eyes mist over as sing Silent Night in the light
of a small candle; closer and closer to the night when God reveals to us yet
again, what it looks and feels and acts like to be the child of the Source of
all love. Can we say, with the
shepherds, “let us go, now, even to Bethlehem”?
John tells us that not all will want what Jesus is—there will be those
who reject this Life-Light; and, sadly, we know all too well that this is
true. But what of those of us who do not
reject our calling as Children-of-God.
What does this season say to us—those of us who, by default or choice,
find ourselves understanding the nature of God through the lens of the life and
love of Jesus? I believe that it calls
us to first understand that we are birthed from God, just as Jesus was; that we
are loved by God, just as Jesus was; and we are sent by God to share the
Life-Light just as Jesus was.
John is clear that being a child of God is not about
physical things—he says, ‘not blood-begotten, not flesh-begotten, not
sex-begotten”. This child of God thing is
not about flesh and blood or procreation, according to John it is about Jesus
himself as God incarnate bringing us into the knowledge of what we already
are—children of God. The Gospel is this
and this only that God loved humankind—that same humankind who kept straying
and failing—God loved humankind so much that in the midst of all the chaos of
the world, God, Incarnate, came in the form of a baby who would grow up to be
the walking, living, and dying description of God’s love—the same love we
embody when we allow this “real thing”, God’s love, to be expressed in and through
our lives. The focus of this passage is
not eternal life as some of John’s later passages are. In these, primary, first, before the rest of
the story, verses, John is longing for us to ‘get it’—to open to and become
aware of this ‘real thing’ in our own lives.
And what if, during this Advent Season, we did? The first thing we would notice, I believe,
is that we would become quiet. When we
allow the awe of wonder at the knowledge that we and God are one, there are no
words—there are no words necessary and there are no words to use anyway. It is at this point, that we begin to notice
changes in how we are in the world. We
become more present—noticing all the times that God shows us the love, courage,
and strength that is available to us as children of God. Being present means we are alive to the
beauty of the world and the season. We
become more present to and listen for the voice of God in other people as
well. We begin to see God in all there
is and we look for the Sacred Spirit suddenly springing up everywhere.
What, then, do we know as we walk in the
ever-present knowledge that we are God’s children now and long after this
Christmastide? First and foremost we
know that it is God’s will for us—you and me—to believe and understand this. Why else would God have become one of us,
become a baby like one of us, struggled through growing up and establishing his
place in the world if God had not wanted us to know this one thing. God came to earth, God incarnate, Emmanuel,
for one reason only—to introduce us to our God-selves—to introduce us to who we
already were—God-selves living in God-abundance. This is the gift of Christmastime—that we
live, and move, and have our being in God—that we and God are one—one peace,
one hope, one love. Amen and amen.
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