John 1:1-14

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

Sermon preached at Heath Street Baptist Church on 4 February 2024

Good morning, I bring with me greetings from the community at All Saints’ in Child’s Hill, just down the hill where the Hendon way meets the Finchley Road and Cricklewood Lane. We are what some would describe as a moderately High Anglican or Church of England Church. Smells and Bells as some would put it at our weekly service of Holy Communion. But I would also describe as unfussy and down to earth. Ewan, having been with us last week, might disagree. These things tend to be relative.

One of the highlights of my week is on Monday mornings we have a stay-and-play for babies, toddlers and their parents or carers. It is a joy, as an observer, to watch the children play and see them as they explore the space. It always amazes me how an inanimate toy or even simply an object can be transformed, through the attention of a child, into a living, breathing, sentient creature.

Before I studied theology I was an aerospace Engineer. Which means among my studies I was introduced the the laws of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of the flow or relations between heat, work, temperature and energy. It is essential for designing everything from power plants to heating systems. I remember a lecturer saying as we set out learning the laws of thermodynamics that the first time you learn the laws you are overwhelmed by it all and can’t see how you will ever understand it. The second time you learn the laws of thermodynamics you think you understand how this works, and then the third time you learn the laws of Thermodynamics you realise you have no idea how the work but you accept that you will never understand it but that you can still use them. The mystery becomes the accepted, even desired outcome.

The prologue of John, this great poem of the incarnation which we heard this morning and which you may well have heard at least once over Christmas made me reflect on the use of language: We often think of language as being too limited in what it is able to describe, we say ‘I don’t have the words’ or  ‘there aren’t words enough’, and yet language can become more than the sum of its parts – as it does in this bit of John’s Gospel.

Mark Oakley, Poet and Dean of Southwark Cathedral, has written and spoken extensively about poetry and its relation to our faith – in his book, ‘The Splash of Words’ he writes:  ‘I have come to understand language as sacramental. This means that for people of Christian faith the placing of our spaces, the metaphors, rhythms, cadence and chosen vocabulary is as vital to the transforming of the flat world of first impressions into the interconnectivity of the kingdom of God as the placing of bread and wine on the table and pouring of water into the font.’

There is something here which is fundamental to what we call the sacraments – things like Baptism and Holy Communion, but also marriage and anointing of the sick, ordination, confirmation and holy unction. In the Church of England you may be told there are 2 sacraments, you may be told there are 7 depending on who you are speaking to. But whether you focus on two or more, whether you want to label them as sacraments or sacramentals. Each of them take something ordinary, something unremarkable. And through the prayers of the faithful they become a sign of something more profound, an embodiment of God’s presence with us and a blessing upon the faithful. In the words of Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer, which for three centuries was the only book of prayers the Church of England used, a sacrament is an outward visible sign of an inward grace. It is understood to be made through both form and matter. Form being the words – the prayers used, and matter – that ordinary something which is transformed to be an outward sign by the grace which is being received.

When I was at Theological college we held an experimental communion service. We did these several times a year, they helped us to work through what was important in our liturgy and particularly in the sacraments. One of them which I was involved in organising was a silent service of holy communion, while the service was conducted silently, images and instructions were projected onto a wall behind the altar. But debate ensued among the organisers – surely if form was important – if the words were necessary for there to be an effective sacrament we needed to say something.  So our tutor felt it important something be said out loud, but which words did we need to include? There was much healthy and interesting debate, Would it be to include the invocation of the Holy Spirit: ‘Come Holy Spirit’ or the words that Jesus used, the words of institution, when he tells the disciples that this bread and wine are his body and his blood.

But the most memorable view of it all was from one of my more catholic colleagues, who argued that, given this was God’s own work, and as promised to us by Jesus, how could anything we did nor did not do ‘mess it up’. Which was a surprise as usually the higher they were the more of the words of the mass they demanded be said.

The reality is at the heart of our understanding we accept a certain healthy level of mystery. Not because we must suspend belief, but because, in the end, our words are unable to fully describe what God is doing. Like the students of thermodynamics, we as Christians might have set out originally thinking we were going to be able to fully explain every aspect of our faith when asked, but each time we come back to the explanation we find that though some bits are clearer, others remain stubbornly in the domain of mystery.

John’s description of the Word at the opening of his telling of the Good News of Jesus is that:
it was there at the beginning,
it is with God and it is God,
through the Word all things came into being,
It gave life and is light.
The relationship between this Word and the Wisdom described in Proverbs is undeniable as is the clear pointing back to the story of creation in Genesis, both in language and the form of the words in verse. John is making clear that this isn’t Good News about something new and unfamiliar. Some new character – but that in Jesus the invisible becomes visible as the eternal Son of the Triune Godhead becomes flesh and in his actions shows us the Father.

I always think it is worth saying, because I’ve come across it more times than I would like to remember. When we talk about scriptures as being ‘The word of God’ with a lowercase ‘w’ we are not talking about the same thing as we are when we talk about ‘The Word becoming flesh’ as in this Gospel. For the scripture are OUR words inspired by God, but often describing human experience of the world, they are full of failure and war and violence. They show the many different understandings or interpretations of what has happened, the multiple and varying eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ own life, for example. Yet that imperfect, incomplete human record is made holy and blessed like the water at Baptism or the bread and wine at Holy Communion by God’s being revealed in the scripture. Where as the Word which becomes flesh is the Word which is uttered at creation – the Word that only God truly understands but which in becoming flesh blesses us and makes us holy. This Word which was creating at the beginning and it is through this Word being revealed in flesh like us that we are made holy and blessed.

For all those who received him, who believed in his name he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God. All that we have we received from God. No matter what we have done with it, no matter how messy how undesirable we might think it has become. In Christ all things are bound together and we can all be transformed ever more into the image of God in whose image we were originally made.

The Reverend Robin Sims-Williams