POWER TO BECOME CHILDREN OF GOD

Text: John 1: (1-9) 10-18

We’ve just experienced the Christmas season, and in various services I’ve had the privilege of speaking to a number of people who don’t come to church at any other time of the year. Why do they come at Christmas? Because their dear old mother wants them to, or their wife or husband insists on it for the kids’ sake, or it seems like a good thing to do on Christmas Eve, when everything else is closed. There is magic in the candlelight and in the excitement in the children’s faces. And there is nostalgia in the familiar old songs; it reminds us all of Christmases in the past, when life was simpler and happier. And all these things are OK - it’s OK to please one’s mother or spouse; it’s OK to think about the children and find a little magic on Christmas Eve; it’s OK to revive fond memories of the good old days. But unfortunately, one of my strongest impressions of these occasional churchgoers is that their eyes glaze over as they sit through the service. The actual message of Christmas doesn’t mean a great deal to them.

There is far more joy in speaking to those for whom the words and the music and the meaning of Christmas have deep, personal roots. Isn’t it strange that those who have heard the Christmas message most often still find it to be the most meaningful and important? When I was a kid going to church, I got to know a lot of hymns by heart. There’s a great deal of meaning in hymns, as you will know, having sung hymns all your lives. Certain lines always stood out for me. One of them is the line that says, “I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.” As a child I used to wonder why is that…that people who know the story best want more than anyone else to hear it again? Because it’s a very important story - the most important story we know. And it’s a sad thing that many people, even people who have some contact with the church, don’t value it, don’t consider it important, don’t experience its deep meaning for them.

And I conducted a wedding this past week. Weddings are not favourite events for ministers - because the understanding of marriage in our society is mostly secular, just as the focus on Christmas is mostly secular. Again, when the pastor talks about what marriage means for serious adults and for Christian believers, many of those who attend weddings sit there with glazed eyes, looking at their watches and wondering when it will be over so they can get on with the more enjoyable part of the occasion - the hugging and kissing, the laughter, the eating and drinking and celebrating. Not to put down any of this good stuff - we all need times of celebration. But we also need to hear real and serious messages of faith and commitment and love which comes from God - only from God. If there is no faith and commitment and love which comes from God, we don’t have much to celebrate.

The church is a strange place. In the last 50 years or so, the years during which we have grown up and experienced the Christian faith, there has been a popular movement to make Christianity more palatable, easier to take, easier to practice, less demanding, less intrusive on our everyday lives. The language of the church is weird - it comes from times in the past, very far in the past, and from cultures very far away. The requirements of the church - the sacraments and other religious practices - are really different from the requirements of our domestic and working lives. Those requirements expect us to believe in things we can’t see, can’t understand, can’t control. But there is still something that attracts and sometimes fascinates people. People who hardly ever come to church still want their children baptized. People who hardly ever come to church still want to be married in the church. People who hardly ever come to church still want to receive Communion. And that’s a good thing; it indicates that they retain some concept of the importance of Christian faith. Maybe they can’t put it into words, but they don’t have to. They just need to be here, to put up with the pastor’s wedding homily which describes what Christian marriage is about, to submit their child to the ritual of baptism, to put out their hands, receive, eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus Christ, to listen to the Christmas story and believe it as they believed it in childhood.

So today, on the second Sunday in the Christmas season - yes, we’re still in the Christmas season…it lasts from Christmas Eve midnight until Epiphany on January 6th - we hear again the timeless words from John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word….The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world….to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We would all be hard-put to explain what that means. But nevertheless, having heard these words many, many times, and particularly in all the Christmas seasons of our lives, we do know what they mean. Perhaps we don’t know in our conscious minds, but we do know in our bones - in our inmost hearts, in our souls and in our spirits. The Word, who is God’s Son Jesus, touches a place within us where nothing else touches us. I think that having heard it so many times, we are better able to absorb it and respond to it. We don’t have to explain it; we just know it’s important - so important that it determines who we are and how we live. And that suggests that one of the best things we can do as parents and grandparents is to be sure that the children in our families are exposed to God’s Word - that they hear God’s Word read out loud, at home and at church, that they hear the name of God the Father, Jesus the Son and God the Holy Spirit spoken with reverence and faith, that they experience the love of Christ in the church community. This is really important. A young woman I know in another town, when she was describing what she knew about the church said that her grandmother told her, “Some of the nastiest people I ever knew were in the church.” You can imagine the influence hearing that would have on a young person, or a person of any age. To be positive, this same young person said that when she’s in this area sometime soon, she’d like to come to our church. She’s willing to give it a chance…which is more than I would have expected.

So I continue to think it’s a privilege to give the message about the love of God to those around us, even if it seems irrelevant to them. I suspect it’s not entirely irrelevant to them - just not familiar enough and important enough at this time in their lives for them to commit themselves to it. They hang around the edges of the church, wondering what it’s all about but nevertheless drawn to it. I suspect they’d really like to know what is so important about the Gospel message. How will they come to understand? By watching those of us who have made the commitment and who dare to make the Gospel the centre of our lives. We don’t need to be apologetic or embarrassed about believing this fairy tale, this story which only the pure in heart can truly believe. We don’t need to be morally perfect or theologically educated to have the right to speak of our faith: we just need to have faith.

And what does that look like? In the Ephesians reading today, we have a passionate description - more like a hymn than anything…one of those old hymns that educate our minds and hearts more than any sermon we might hear or book we might read. The writer of Ephesians says that we have received “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”, we were “chose[n] in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before [God] in love.” We are “destined for adoption as [God’s] children.” God has bestowed upon us “his glorious grace.” Because of Jesus Christ, we have “redemption”, “forgiveness” and all the “riches of [God’s] grace.” Through God’s wisdom and insight we understand the “mystery of [God’s] will”. We have “an inheritance” so that we might “live for the praise of his glory”. In Christ we have heard “the word of truth, the gospel of [our] salvation…and were marked with the seal of the…Holy Spirit….”

Can any of us explain what all this means? I doubt it. We don’t have to. We are not asked to explain. We are simply asked to believe it. And the wonder is that, in hearing it, receiving it as God’s truth, accepting it and absorbing it, it shapes our minds and hearts and becomes the basis of who we are. One of my confirmation students a couple of years ago used to say her grandmother is the “holiest” person she knows. I have met that grandmother a few times, and she is a woman who has been a churchgoer all her life. She has absorbed the Word of God which she has heard spoken and the Spirit of Christ which she has seen and felt and that has become the texture of her life. We can be sure that that grandmother has been a deep and positive influence on her granddaughter. I can’t think of anything it would be more important to do.