December 29 2024, First Sunday after Christmas

Susan Swann

First Sunday after Christmas – 12-29-24 St. John the Baptist

“I make a prayer for words. Let me say my heart.”

Susan Swann

 

I bring you all greetings and love from the Rev. Fresia Saborio and the community of St. Georges de Granby in Granby, Quebec, my other home church in the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, where I’m the certified lay preacher and cantor. We’re a small community – Christmas service last Sunday drew 25 people, which is about twice a usual Sunday – but there’s something about the heart of the community that just feels like home. Our services are trilingual, in English, French and Spanish – we have parishioners from Colombia and Ecuador, and Rev. Fresia herself is from Costa Rica.

So we have a great many words in our services, some of which I understand a lot better than others. Which is not unlike our Gospel text for today!

It’s interesting how we’ve just spent a whole Advent deep in the reality of the Incarnation. A pregnant woman’s long trek to Bethlehem, a makeshift shelter, scratchy straw and cows that are trying to figure out where their manger went and a baby with fingers and toes his parents undoubtedly counted, with a soft spot on the top of his head and milk breath and, yes, diapers.  That’s about as real as it gets.

And the Church takes us straight from baby Emmanuel, God With Us, to today’s Gospel. Which is about as far from middle-of-the-night feedings and drummer boys playing solos while Mom’s desperately trying to get the kid to sleep as it gets.

“And the Word became flesh, and dwelled among us.”

How does one get a grip on that? No baby wrapped in his mom’s spare clothes (that’s what “swaddling” means, when you’re traveling and don’t have luggage and you swaddle yourself in everything you’re going to need for the whole trip), no manger. Not even a heavenly choir. Just “the Word made flesh.”

Well, what is this Word? We know it’s the Christ, but how does a person, or an entity, become the “Word of God”? Not representing the Word, not being like the Word, or like a Word. Being the Word of God.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

Not necessarily helpful. For one thing, metaphor is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially if you’re neurodivergent or a trauma survivor.

And I think more and more of us are having our ability to think that way worn down. I’m not sure why that is, other than lately it seems it’s all we can do to keep up with the challenges of the world as it really is. Maybe we’ll get around to poetry as a doorway to a deep understanding of life when the day-to-day is a little less demanding.

But there’s something important here, in today’s text, something I think God really wants us all to understand about God the Word, wherever we are on the spectrum of metaphor.

What do we usually think of the Word of God as doing?  Just for fun, I looked on Bible Gateway, and found 42 uses of the term “the Word of God” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. I won’t make you sit through a recitation of all 42, but they tend to fall into a few basic groups. The Word of God commands, and God’s people obey. The Word of God comes upon the prophets, who speak it to the people. The Word of God governs the people. In Ephesians the Word of God is the “sword of the Spirit.”

But I have a different framework to propose. What if we saw the Word of God as a word of conversation? A word of connection? How would that change us, our lives, the world?

1. Scott Momaday was a Native author and poet, a member of the Kiowa people, the first Native winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, who passed away in January of this year. In his literary memoir, “A Man Made of Words,” which includes the prayer with which I began my sermon, his reverence for the creative and sacred and connecting power of the word, of the story, of the storyteller, makes space for a deep and powerful understanding of God and Creation – and the Word.

In discussing the Lakota oral tradition, which contains songs and prayers possibly going back to the last Ice Age, he says:

“We are not talking about generations but about millennia. We are talking about the life and the life span of words. We are talking about the deepest sustenance of the human race. We are talking; we are *talking*. If words are the intricate bonds of language, and if the spoken word is the first part of this ancient design, the construction that makes of us a family, a tribe, a civilization, we had better strive to understand how and why – and perhaps first of all, *that* — we exist in the element of language.”

I’d like to let you sit with that a minute. The word, which today’s Gospel tells us is spoken from the heart of God, is what makes us a family… a tribe… a civilization… a kin-dom.

[pause]

A word carries a thought from one heart to another heart. Jesus is that word, that word that is love, spoken from God’s heart to our hearts.

Jesus, the Christ, is the communication of love from the heart of God to the heart of Creation.

[short pause]

So what do we do with that word, once we’ve received it? I’d like you to consider the possibility that this isn’t a one-way communication. That because of the Word, we are in conversation with the love that is all there is.

Look at our Epistle for today. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our^[a] hearts, crying, “Abba!^[] Father!”

The word spoken into our hearts – into the heart of all Creation – is love. It loves – don’t forget, love is a thing, but it’s also a verb. The Word loves, and helps us give a voice – language, words – to our love, God’s love, for God and for all Creation.

Now, I’ll ask you again. How would it change us, our lives, the world, if we did our best to speak – to God, to one another, to the earth and all our relations there – to speak the Word? To speak love in all things, to all people?

If our words come from God’s word, then our words also carry the power of God’s love. If they don’t, well, we can turn to another author, Shakespeare… “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

What will the world be, when we all come to know the love that is the Word, and speak it at all times and in all places?

This is where the sermon I prepared ends. But I have just a little more I need to say.

I was up late last night reading a column called “Letters from an American,” by Heather Cox Richardson. She’s an amazing writer – every day she holds up the mirror of a historian to the headlines of the day.

And last night she reminded me that December 29 – today – is the 134^th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre. When over 250 Lakota men, women and children were gunned down by the automatic weapons of the U.S. Army in the snow of South Dakota.

Heather wrote a book on the Wounded Knee Massacre, 15 years ago, and she said that the massacre haunts her to this day.

She said “Earlier this year, an interviewer asked me why it is that I always seem to be writing as if I’m running out of time. And it hit me… no matter what I do, I can’t, couldn’t, stop the Wounded Knee Massacre. But maybe I can help stop the next one.”

My dear friends, my prayer for you – for all of us – is that we may open our hearts to receive and reverence the Christ, the Word of love spoken from the heart of God, and that we may speak that word of love back to God and to each other in everything we say and do… and may we, too, help stop the next one. Amen

10am Service