“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” [John 1:1-2].

The Bible has a lot to say about what was happening at the beginning of things. And it also has a lot to say about what will happen at the end times. To understand how the stories of our faith history are relevant today we have to dig a little deeper and we have to remember that the stories of The Old and New Testaments were written down in antiquity for people in a very different time and place than the context in which we find our own selves. It’s hard for us in the 21^st century to translate the meaning of Jesus’ life, ministry, execution and resurrection unless we look to Jesus himself for guidance. So yes, we look to the scriptures to learn what we can through the filters of storytellers, writers, early followers and the architects of the church, then and now. But the most important tools we have to understand how to walk in the footsteps of Jesus in the here and now are direct relationships with God and with one another.

The gospel of John begins with a mystery: he refers to Jesus as “the word,” or “logos” in Greek, and this reference explains something important about the nature of Jesus. It’s a clue about how to approach him directly. John says that the word, or Jesus, existed at the very beginning, both with God and as God. That means that Jesus exists in eternity—outside of human space and time. Jesus is not a symbol for God, but the very same God. At the beginning of time and at the end of time, and in our time, because Jesus exists in eternity, and when we go directly to him to know him, we go to God, who is timeless, and therefore as relevant now as at the start of the universe in the Big Bang.

John’s mystery is that Jesus is not to be known by the stories or words that people used to talk about him, but by direct relationship with him! Jesus is God’s own story: true God from true God, and as the primordial Word, he speaks for himself!

In other words, although John does tell the story of Jesus, he gives us the solution to the riddle of how to get directly to God without going through the filters of someone else’s relationship with God. There is not to be a gatekeeper. No priest is necessary to intervene in the relationship between an individual and God. This was a very different message to tell in the culture and time in which John’s gospel emerged, which scholars believe was around 60 or 70 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. When John says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, he is giving us the secret to understanding the relevance of Jesus to our lives today. We are invited to touch eternity—the God that lives outside of time, so Jesus was and is and will be, and it’s our life’s work to discover what that relationship teaches us about our place in community and our community’s place in the world. Because a living word—an utterance, is a vibration like a pitch in music. When we pray, we are tuning ourselves to the fundamental tone—the tuning fork, or for you singers—the pitch pipe of God. When we are in harmony with that Living Word, we are like little radios or amplifiers broadcasting “Jesus notes” to people who have a hard time to still themselves and go directly to God—that is why we live in community—to help each other hear God!

Words, like pictures are symbols. If I write down the word “tree,” you’ll know what I’m talking about, even though the word is not the same thing as the actual tree. So when I pick up my Bible and look at the name Jesus, I only have a sense of who he is based upon the stories that his apostles told that were written down in Greek, translated into Latin, then into English, and retranslated again and again until you got the version you heard today. Those are just words—they may be our canon but they are inspired words that tell the story of our faith. The Logos—THE word, is not a symbol John tells us that the word was with God and is God—the real thing

So what does that baby born a little more than two thousand years ago have to do with our lives today? That baby was and is the Logos—the word that is God and exists in eternity. Logos has a special meaning in Greek—not just the Word, but it’s something hard to translate like “first cause” or “cosmic reason.” The Jewish philosopher Philo said that Logos was very like the Hebrew concept of Wisdom.

Jesus, the one who lives in eternity is the wisdom of God, audible to us as a living word, to which we can tune ourselves. Timeless and as relevant today as he was when he lived on Earth. By all means read the stories in the Holy Bible, but if the language of an ancient and agricultural society makes it hard to grasp why anyone would care in 2018, go directly to the source—the Living Word. Then go write your own stories. God is not done speaking to us.

We’ve spent a month preparing ourselves to rediscover the mystery of a God who would come so near to us that the very essence of God’s love could appear in human form. We’ve tasted Hope in the first Sunday of Advent, Peace on the second, and on Rose Sunday, we thought about rejoicing and how joy might get us to peace and hope. The fourth Sunday in Advent is special. Any other year, it would be today—the Sunday where we focus on love. And this year, today is also Christmas Eve, so it’s a “both/and” Sunday. It’s both the day we focus on love AND it’s the day that, Isaiah puts it, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” [Isaiah 9:2].

And that light is love. In spite of the contemporary use of the slogan “God is love,” and supporting theology that states God really IS love, not all people think of or talk about God that way. And no wonder, because through history, the language we use in the Bible to speak of God includes words like “almighty,” “wrathful,” etc. The stories of our faith history include phrases like “fear and trembling” or “power and might.” Because the way humans think of power is usually in terms of dominance. In spite of anecdotes about the power of love, few of us really recognize love as more powerful than anger. Few of us see pacifists as powerful, and when we’re threatened, we often lash out, wanting to harm those who threaten us. Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but love is subversive, strong, and sustainable in ways that dominance and brute strength cannot be.

God IS love, and there is unfathomable power in that love, even though the two concepts, love and power seem opposite from each other. It’s really hard to understand truth without using what is known as “non-dual” or “both/and” thinking. That’s a perspective that recognizes that most things in the universe are not purely one thing or another. We have to view reality without thinking of everything as oppositional. Both/and thinking allows for two things that might seem incompatible to be true at the same time. There are no winners or losers in both/and thinking, and with your heart in “both/and” discovery mode you can look at love itself a little differently. Love is both strong and vulnerable.

When Jesus offered himself, completely vulnerable, it also made him infinitely powerful. The both/and nature of God’s love is that when we turn to God in weakness, we are made strong in God’s love. Love requires a certain vulnerability and open-ness to experience its power. It can’t be forced!

The almighty God that IS love came to us, and experienced all of human vulnerability as both God and a helpless baby—power and helplessness, love and strength. The mystery of that immanence or nearness of God is that a relationship with God is required in order to feel God’s presence. Because a God of love is a God of relationship, assuring us that where two or more of us are gathered together, there God will be. Our God tells us that the power of one resides in the love between the many, like a stout rope of multiple strands. Hence we have a God that can only be understood as pure and holy relationship: the mystery of the one that is three, yet indivisible.

The most powerful energy in the universe does not reside in physical strength or powerful weaponry but in the transformative power of love. Mary’s love for God transformed her into a resolute young woman, ready and willing to give birth to and nurture the hope of her people, Jesus– Emmanuel– God with us.

God came to US. He didn’t say, “come to the temple and I’ll set you up with an appointment.” The whole point of Christmas is that God came to us in the life of Jesus so that we would know that true love seeks US out. It does not demand proof of worthiness before showing up to us. And we’re not forced to say yes to it. That’s a choice. Love can be everywhere around you, but you might not be able to see it if your heart is closed. And closing off one’s heart seems to be an instinctive response to hurt and disappointment. Instead of becoming more vulnerable to love and moving closer to it, we retreat into what we think is safety, and that can be mighty isolating. Love is risky because it has to be experienced in vulnerability. You might get your heart broken.

Sometimes I think about how many times Jesus’ heart was broken over his all too brief life. Yet he kept manifesting God’s love through it all—right up until the end, when that same baby, all grown up, was being tortured on a cross. He continued to bring the love, even asking God to forgive the people who had him crucified before he drew his last breath.

What an amazing God who goes more than halfway to meet us in love. This is a God who is willing to follow us when we stray into unfriendly territory, returning us again to safe pasture, but leaving the gate open. We can stay or go. God who keeps reaching out to us, first in the most vulnerable state as a baby, later as a teacher, then in the most miserable of states from the cross, and ultimately as the risen Christ. He keeps coming toward us in love and the power of that love has lasted through the last 2000 years.

If you want to receive a surprise insight about the love of Jesus, go see the film, “The Last Jedi.” A meek, yet stubborn resistance fighter named Rose has an epiphany while fighting against the bad guys. She says of the fight against evil, “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.” God’s gift to us, Jesus the Christ, did not come to fight evil. God came to Earth as a baby to save us with love. And God will keep coming to us as love no matter what we do. All we have to do is open our hearts to that love, and God will come the rest of the way. May the force—the love of God– be with you this day, and all your days.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” Luke says Mary sang out with joy while she was visiting with her pregnant cousin Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was also the recipient of a divine miracle—she was an older woman who had not previously had a child, but by God’s will and the power of the Holy Spirit, she conceived a son who grew up to become John the Baptizer—the one who came to prepare the people for the ministry of Jesus. Anyway, the older woman’s baby moved inside her womb at Mary’s arrival, and Elizabeth recognized this as a Holy sign, so she praised and honored Mary’s faith.

This is a remarkable story for a couple of reasons. First, as you know, Mary was not yet married. For her to become pregnant created a dire situation in a culture where women would not only have been rejected as marriageable material, but also probably stoned for such immodesty as to become pregnant before marriage. But Elizabeth, instead of censuring Mary, immediately recognized the hand of God upon her younger cousin and said, “Blessed are you among women…” Not cursed, but blessed! By the way, those words are referenced in the Catholic prayer known as the “Hail Mary.” The second reason this story is awesome is the same reason that Mary herself is awesome. Luke does not say she felt guilty, or afraid. Instead, Mary is all about rejoicing in what God has done. She says her very soul, “proclaims the greatness of the Lord, [her] spirit rejoices in God her Savior.” There is no feeling sorry for herself, calling out for friends and family to defend her against the accusatory stares of the community. Mary sees the bigger picture—she sees the magnificence of God, the driving power behind all of life, her whole world, and realms beyond her imagination. She got it that there was something bigger than her own self, and she was honored to be invited to play a part in God’s plans for humanity. She rejoiced in God, and that rejoicing took her outside of her own self, her own world, which probably represented a whole heap of trouble.

You see, there’s something to be said for the curative power of rejoicing. It’s not that we rejoice in bad things when they happen to us or to those we love. And it’s not that we rejoice in the chaos and messiness of life. It’s not that we should just “snap out of it” somehow in the midst of crippling depression. We don’t take joy in the things that hurt us more than we ever knew that we could hurt. What we CAN do is grab onto that joy like a life preserver, and allow that joy to pull us out of the deep water when we can’t do it for our own selves. That is a viable approach to surviving the difficult things that life throws at us, but it probably seems like something that is far easier said than it is done.

Whether or not we can find joy in our own selves, we can still find it in God. I’ve got to think that Paul knew that when he told the Thessalonians “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” There’s a reason why we are told to rejoice. It’s because it’s cleansing for our souls. Rejoicing is the cure for hopelessness. So you see, it’s not so much that we are urged to ignore bad circumstances or that we should not worry and just be happy. It’s not that we are bad people if we are not happy. In fact, it’s not about happiness at all! Rejoicing is the treatment for whatever ails us.

If God is the ultimate source of joy, then we are off the hook for trying to find something in which to take joy when we just don’t like we can see any joy in world. If you are still having trouble believing that there is anything in which to rejoice, take another look at the song of Mary. Young, pregnant and unmarried, Mary says, “the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.”

Because her spirit rejoices in God, her savior, Mary’s soul proclaims the greatness of God. It’s cause and effect. If you want to feel joy, you have to rejoice. Take it where you can find it, God is an endless and renewable resource of joy. Not a God of judgment—a God of joy. If you are struggling to find the joy in your own life—rejoice in God. And that’s how you become a person whose soul proclaims the greatness of God.

What does your soul proclaim?

On a daily basis I am bombarded with a steady diet of bad news, fake news, old news, videos of cute baby animals, pictures of what my nephew had for lunch and suggestions for how to treat the illnesses I am presumed to already have given my advanced age. All courtesy of this: my auxiliary brain! Even now when I’m only living out one career rather than simultaneously juggling three, all of this information can get a bit overwhelming. In fact, one of the things that I’m just now learning to do is to avoid looking at it just before bed. Because if I don’t turn off the information spigot, I can’t sleep. My brain thinks it’s supposed to be solving problems instead of drifting off into the comfort of restful peace.

As we navigate our way through life, we often look for comfort and we seek it in all sorts of ways: some of it temporary, some of it lasting. It’s an instinct to seek comfort, whether it’s in the form of mac and cheese, a sappy Christmas movie on TV or as a hug from a loved one.

Even when everything is going well, we still seek comfort—cookies, a snuggly blanket and the like. It’s an instinct, and it calms us down so we can process information. It’s the consequence of being gifted with the most complex of all computers—the human mind.

As long as there have been people, there has been the instinct to seek comfort, and it’s not always been clear where or how to find it.

Our faith ancestors were asking for it a thousand years ago—we see the evidence of that yearning for comfort when we read the psalms of David.

Prophets do more than speak truth to power; they’ve also spoken words of comfort to people who are suffering through times of trial. A true prophet is not an oracle predicting the future, but rather the mouthpiece of God. A servant willing to trust that God will provide the words if only they are willing to open their mouth on God’s behalf.

So when the prophet Isaiah opened his mouth somewhere around 600 years or so before Jesus was born, he did so to speak both a warning of the consequences to the Kingdom of Judah for her betrayal of the northern Kingdom of Israel, and also to speak comfort to God’s people living in exile. “Comfort, o comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid…”

“Comfort is coming,” says the prophet! Some times it takes a little while to get that set up. And if you’re expecting the comfort to taste like mac and cheese or other comfort food when you don’t feel at your best and instead you get a big old dose of medicine– it’s pretty disappointing! You may not even notice the comfort when it comes five or six days later, after the treatment starts to work. That’s why we have to keep alert, so we can know the medicine worked and go for it quickly if we get sick again.

Isaiah said “Comfort, o comfort my people,” and went on to foretell of John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness yelling, “People, get ready!” because the glory of the Lord was about to be revealed. Seven generations had already passed between Isaiah’s prophecy and the appearance of John the Baptist and the messiah—Jesus. So John had to yell, “Wake up, everybody! It’s time! Wake up and see what God has done, and you will never believe what your comfort looks like!”

That’s why “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” [Mark 1:1-8] starts with Isaiah’s prophecy about a voice crying out, alerting us to the most awesome news ever to come to humankind: comfort is here, comfort and joy! He was reminding people of the comfort Isaiah had promised. By the time John the Baptist began his ministry waking people up to the good news, Jesus was already a grown man. I’m guessing that the people didn’t expect the good news of comfort and joy to come out of the mouth of a crazy-looking guy eating bugs and wild honey, any more than they expected it to come out of Isaiah 600 years earlier, but there you have it. Here it was again: “…the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Where is that good news today? Is it so obvious that it no longer needs telling? If that’s the case why are so many of us still hurting? Why are we still craving comfort food or something stronger to numb the pain? Have we forgotten that in a world of pain there still is still true comfort to be had? Who is it that speaks peace in our town? Who brings comfort and joy and peace and hope? Jesus told his first followers that the good news was now their responsibility to bring to the ends of the earth. We are the spiritual descendants of those apostles, and now that good news of comfort and joy is ours to tell. As the hands and feet of Christ on Earth, we are the bearers of that good news, but we are more than just the field reporters speaking live from a time of trial. It’s more than the telling; we ARE that good news because when we love, when we offer ourselves in relationship to others, that’s where God emerges. It only takes two people together for God to be made visible—one to say, “I love you,” and another to hear it and be comforted.

There’s not a one of us who doesn’t possess a beautiful and amazing heart with nearly unlimited potential to be the comfort for someone else in a troubled world. How we speak to one another is a choice. Choose tenderness. Choose words of peace over words of conflict. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.”

So the season of ordinary time has ended and the new liturgical year begins…today. And like every milestone that marks the conclusion of one season of our lives and the beginning of a new one, it can be bittersweet, exciting, and maybe even a little scary as we anticipate what is about to unfold.

Our faith history shows us that one of the paradoxes of living at the threshold of something new is that anticipating it doesn’t create the change. God’s people asked for Judges to help them settle disputes. That did not end the seemingly endless cycles of oppression and liberation amongst the twelve tribes, so they asked God for kings to rule them justly and keep order. But many of those kings were corrupt and not only ruled unjustly, but also sometimes created new manifestations of oppression. And then Israel asked for a messiah—that special person who would deliver them once and for all from oppression and unjust exploitation. Every time that our spiritual ancestors (or we) have asked God to do something for us, we have waited for the end of the era we are in, and the beginning of the new one which will surely be better. We cry out to God saying, “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved,” (Psalm 80:3). You see, anticipation can be a lament: “When will this pain ever end?” or perhaps “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence…” (Isaiah 64:1).

Anticipation can also be something else: the impatient looking forward to something that you know is coming, like waiting to be sixteen so you can get your driver’s license, or for Christmas, or for the return of your beloved when they’ve been away from you. Anticipation can feel really great, or really terrible and when we look back at our own lives and the lives of our ancestors, sometimes we can pick out the rhythm of the changing seasons of life. We can begin to look at the seasons when we were swept along in an unfriendly riptide, or running on the water opportunistically making good time with the wind at our backs.

Can you relate to either of those two scenarios? There’s something missing there. And that missing piece is the punch line for the first Sunday in Advent: “…keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake,” (Mark 13:35-37). Ours is not a faith of waiting passively. Ours is a faith of BE-ing—doing. We are not to sleep, we are to act. The incarnation of God in a baby who grew strong in his faith and in his mission, who was willing to keep speaking truth to power until he was killed for it, who turned around and told us that we are now his body: that incarnation is raw, creative, transformative and yes, awesome, power! It is the power to imagine and then do amazing things!

As we learn from St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: we “are not lacking in any spiritual gift as [we] wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ,” (1 Cor. 1:7). The revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ is not just in the birth of the infant, he is revealed in us by our love for one another. He is revealed by our willingness to do life a wholly different way, not by dividing the world up into winners and losers, conquerors and the fallen, but by seizing the transformative power of working as One Body, as we follow him one step at a time. The revelation of God’s amazing love through covenant with Moses was not enough for us to be faithful. So the God of Love, came even closer, dwelling among us in human flesh so that we might know to seek that same God in the eyes of our brothers and sisters: God with us and God in us. So if you can imagine that the God of love is always showing that love to us, can you go a step further and imagine that God is also showing that love through us? This is the God that always does something new, because God is alive, and new thing is done with us for us and through us. That is what the church is for.

Jesus did not say, “In those days there will be suffering, the sun will be darkened” and so forth, but rather Jesus said “In those days, after that suffering…” You see? We build the Kindom of Heaven to get past the suffering! Mark’s account of Jesus prophecy continues, “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven,” (Mark 13:24-27). How do we know that the Son of Man coming in clouds, isn’t made visible by us getting on a plane and going the side of someone in crisis? How does any one of us know that we are not an angel that is helping to gather God’s elect? And because Mark uses the words “from the four winds from the ends of the earth,” the implication is that Jesus is saying his elect are everywhere and they/we are meant to gather everyone in to the Body of Christ!

The rhythms of life for individuals, or families, churches, or an entire people are the signatures of life—these rhythms are the hallmark of evolution—of change over time. The way the people begged God to intervene in antiquity is not so different from the ways in which we often beg God to do so now. And God responded then with Jesus, just as God responds now with Jesus. But in our time WE are the Body of Christ, just as the infant Jesus was over two thousand years ago. So when we lit that Advent candle and said, “Come Lord Jesus,” remember: we are inviting our own selves, the Body of Christ to answer that call.

On this day, the first day of Advent, we remember the prophet Isaiah, who proclaimed and rejoiced that the Lord will deliver his people with Emanuel, God with us. Emmanuel: you, the Body of Christ.