1 Christmas, Yr A (2025) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
1 Christmas, Year A (2025) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
John 1:1-18 St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
In the name of the one, holy, and loving God:
who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.
Our God is a God of speaking.
Our God is a God who wants desperately to have a conversation with us.
In the beginning God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence. . .
plants yielding seeds and fruit trees of every kind . . .
the sun and the stars . . .
swarms of living creatures and winged birds of every kind . . .
and God saw that it was good.
There we were in the Garden.
God set us up with a nice life . . .
we could do what we wanted and eat what we wanted –
with one exception.
Yet it was this “exception” that we couldn’t quite resist.
We wanted to be like God.
What power and control we could have if we were like God!
So, we were banished,
ushered from the garden by two angels with flaming swords.
Our ears were plugged.
______________________________
God spoke again.
This time God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham
and with Abraham’s offspring to be their God.
Later when the Israelites were moaning and groaning and complaining in the wilderness,
God remembered this covenant.
God spoke through Moses:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God,
the Lord alone.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your might.
“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.
Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home
and when you are away,
when you lie down
and when you rise.”
Moses told us,
but we didn’t listen.
Our spirits
were broken.
_______________________________
Again and again God spoke to us.
God gave us judges and kings and prophets.
And again and again we called God absent.
We didn’t hear.
Our ears were plugged.
_______________________________
And now we are here at St. Andrew’s…
we have just spent the weeks of Advent waiting…
preparing God’s arrival…
…remembering the brokenness of our own lives and the world around us,
listening for God,
waiting . . .
for redemption.
Once again God has spoken.
We are a tough crowd . . .
hard of hearing.
This time God has taken the ultimate step and has come to us.
God has become one of us --
God enfleshed,
God incarnate.
Luke’s Gospel story gave us the picture of God becoming human as a baby. . .
a fragile baby…
dependent upon humans,
dependent upon Mary and Joseph to provide for him….
a vulnerable God.
Today our picture is different…
This God is large,
preexistent,
eternal,
the Word that existed even in the silence of the beginning.
We are so hard of hearing that God decided to come and walk among us.
Perhaps then we would see and hear the Word --
the Word enfleshed.
“…Yet the world did not know him….
“He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him.”
Instead,
we nailed him to a tree.
Try as we might,
the Word was not silenced.
Our God keeps speaking.
There is Easter.
There is resurrection.
There is ascension.
“No one has ever seen God. . .
It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart,
who has made him known.”
To all who receive him,
to all who are willing to listen,
to all who believe in his name,
we may become children of God.
“Hear, O people,
The Lord is our God,
the Lord alone.
“We shall love the Lord our God with all our heart,
and with all our soul,
and with all our might.”
The Word has spoken to us:
Go. Proclaim. Teach. Baptize.
And remember:
God is with us always,
even to the end of the age,
pursuing us,
wooing us,
becoming one of us --
and all so that we may know the depths of God’s love
and share it with the world.
AMEN.
