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The Scaffolding of God Within Us
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| 12/30/2007 |
Like me, many of you were probably here a scant few days ago, for Christmas Eve or Christmas morning. And you saw the church as we’re used to seeing it – gussied up a bit, to be sure, with our gorgeous Christmas poinsettias and greenery. But still, if you were here, you came into the place you know and love, you walked down the familiar aisle, everything was in its place, and you enjoyed, probably for the first time in awhile, sunlight or starlight streaming in, unhindered by scaffolding.
And then … this morning you came in again – and it probably felt like walking with two left feet. Because all our usual patterns were totally thrown off – all of them, there’s nothing we can just do the way we used to do it. Where we walk, the way the light is, the way the sound bounces off the walls, whom we sit near. Even if you know it’s the same place, and even if you’ve sat in these side-aisle seats before, where we are today, there’s no question that with the scaffolding that’s now going up smack-dab in the middle of the space we know and love so well – our entire experience is redefined.
Now we move differently in it, we are aware of the height and breadth in a new way, we probably sense each other physically in a new way, let alone any tasks we have here, all because what had been simply air and space in the middle of the room now has structure and relationship that it didn’t have before.
Which makes us feel totally different in relation to it and to each other.
And that’s what I think the reading today from the Gospel of John is all about.
You see, John was writing around 100 AD, more or less, the last of the Gospels to be written. And by then people were struggling with these new ideas about Jesus – how he was human, and how close he was to God. And that was confusing precisely because people already had a familiar ‘space’ for God, a ‘structure.’ I don’t mean a physical one, I mean an idea that they dwelled in. Yahweh, the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Sarah. Of Moses, of Elijah. A God who brought them through plagues and the Red Sea and the desert and Mt. Sinai and King David. Tablets of stone, burning bushes, columns of fire. That’s the ‘space’ people thought of as God. And that’s what they were used to moving around in, doing their worship in.
And then …. what we call Christmas happened. The babe conceived out of marriage to a teenage girl, born in a place where animals eat. A whole new thing, a whole new idea of God.
Which is huge enough, except that John comes along and says, “With all of the arguments going on, we have to be really clear.”
This baby in a manger was not a whole new thing.
It was a new understanding of God.
But it was not a new God.
Sort of - “Just because you didn’t know it was there – doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.” Which was a really snapping things into perspective at the time. John wasn’t the only one who was saying it, but he was putting it in a whole new way.
The other Gospel writers were trying to get at this new understanding of God, too: Matthew linked Jesus with Jewish tradition, Luke made an eloquent narrative, Mark called us urgently to jagged uncertainty and choices. But John – by the time we get around to John, he knows he has to get even bigger than any of those things.
So John takes all the ideas about Jesus that people were wrestling with, about Jesus in relation to God, and the kind of criticism people were going through for trying to follow Jesus, and he doesn’t try to fit into any of it. It’s like the beginning of a movie where you leave your life behind and enter a whole new world – John doesn’t fool with genealogy, or a birth narrative, or John the Baptist. Instead, he puts his fist right through the whole glass, shatters all of it, and as those pieces fly apart, John reveals a new and huge picture behind it all. Big big picture, bringing the lens all the way back to infinity. That’s where he starts.
Time before time existed. Place before place existed. Being before being. The only two books of the Bible that start off with “In the beginning” are John … and Genesis. And the Hebrew in Genesis can just as easily be translated “In a beginning” – meaning, that wasn’t God’s only beginning.
And that’s John’s cosmic point. He knew about people struggling to be the church in a changing world, trying to be church when it just wasn’t clear what that meant, in a culture that was uncomfortable with belief in this Jesus Christ. And he knew that, for all these reasons, people were also probably struggling with their inner worlds. When we go through change, when we’re challenged by the things around us, that calls up our doubts and fears, especially if our faith feels tender.
So his words don’t try to make Jesus make sense, or stay in comfortable boundaries or internet chat. Instead what this introduction gives us is a wild new awareness – an awareness of something that’s been there all along, longer than time itself, but something that we have to understand over and over again as if it’s new.
And that is: that the Jesus who took on the humanity we just celebrated at the manger is the Jesus who was part of making that humanity in the beginning – and just because we may not have understood it, it’s no less true.
Augustine, the great 5th-century Christian writer, had a wonderful way of saying it – and this is something of a paraphrase of the Gospel passage we just heard:
“God so loved us that for our sakes he …. became younger … than many of his servants in the world” – a baby. “God, who made man, was made man; he was given existence by a mother whom he brought into existence; he was carried in hands which he formed; he was nursed at breasts which he filled; he cried like a baby in the manger in speechless infancy – this Word without which human eloquence is speechless.”
In other words, the powerless Jesus we worship at the manger is part of the all-powerful God who has been creating this stuff all along.
And that’s the scaffolding of God that John wants us inside of. Scaffolding that changes us, that makes us feel like we’re walking with two left feet and breaking out of our usual patterns. Scaffolding that makes us feel and relate differently, to God and to the person we’re squenched up next to.
Because John’s structure shows that the space of God has more measurement than we thought. It has more breadth, more depth, more span. God becomes more multi-dimensional.
And more beautiful. After all, scaffolding is the beauty of structure. Maybe not a prettiness, like a magazine cover. But the rawer beauty of the human skeletal frame, the beauty of the trees outside that, stripped of their leaves, reveal the structure of their gnarled arms. The raw and frightening beauty of the structure of God.
And that is so huge, that I don’t know what to tell you to do with that – except to beg you to stay inside of that structure. But maybe that’s the answer. Maybe the only thing to do today is be within this new structure together and marvel at how it changes us.
Sometimes Scripture calls us to make the changes, to social justice, to self-examination, to care for our church community, and all those things are central – just look through the back of your bulletin to see how vibrantly that is core to this community. But this Gospel reminds us that all of it happens inside of a structure of love and power that only invites us into deeper mystery. And we are called to stand within that structure today, not just with the babe in the manger, which was mysterious enough, but to stand with how the babe was part of a cosmic picture that blows our hair back, and blasts our ears more than any rock concert, a cosmic picture that could leave us as dust, only God cares too much about us to let that happen. So instead God whispers into our ears, through the words of the Gospel of John… “In the beginning was the Word.”
It’s a peephole into a glory that collapses time and space. And a peephole is probably all we can handle.
I wish I could give you something handy to take out of here today, a good ‘takeaway,’ as the sermon-talk calls it. And I usually try to. But I can’t this time. There’s nothing handy about this. All I can do is invite you to stand with me and each other in this scaffolding of God, not to worry about what you should do, or what you should believe, or how you should feel – that’ll come with time. Just let it knock you out, and let it take you to a new place. Don’t keep these words at a distance; they are meant to change you. Let them change you.
“In the beginning was the Word.” The Word Jesus, who later became flesh.
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