Rev Darren’s Sermon on the Second Sunday of Christmas.
Darren begins with John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” He explains that John’s prologue is full of deep theological, biblical and philosophical meaning, centred on the Greek word logos, translated as “Word”. In the Jewish biblical tradition, God’s word is creative and life-giving, as in Genesis, Psalm 33 and Isaiah 55. In Greek philosophy, logos can also suggest reason, order and rationality. So when John says that Jesus is the Word made flesh, he is saying that Jesus is the incarnation, the “infleshment” of God – the human face of God, or “God’s body language”.
Darren then moves from abstract theology to everyday language through a story from The West Wing. A man falls into a deep hole and cannot escape. A doctor passes by and drops in a prescription; a priest passes by and drops in a prayer; but then a friend jumps into the hole with him, saying, “I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.” Darren uses this story as an allegory of the Christian faith and of the incarnation.
The heart of the sermon is that in Jesus, God has “jumped into the whole of our humanity” – both the fullness of human life and the holes in which we find ourselves trapped. God in Jesus has shared the predicaments, captivity and exile of human life, and will not abandon us there. The good news of Christianity is that the Word made flesh is God with us in the depths, leading us safely home.