I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's as part of our exploration of the book of John. The text is John 1:3a-4; read it here.
If you were to travel all the way to the Upper West Side, and ring my buzzer, and come into my apartment, you would learn quite a bit about me.
You would learn, for instance, that I like to keep things looking nice and neat on the outside, but that the closets and drawers are a complete jumble on the inside. A quick nose through my book shelves would tell you a great deal about me and my various interests and pursuits. And if you asked, you might discover that a great many of the objects that I own have a history. Almost everything in my apartment used to belong to someone else, often someone who meant a great deal to me.
On my desk, there’s a pencil sharpener that used to belong to my mother. It’s a bright shade of blue, round, and short and squat, and as a child, I remember fitting it into the palm of my hand, and delighting in screwing the top off to empty out all the shavings.
The dishes I use are painted with pink raspberries. They once stood in a wooden cabinet in my Grandmother Dorothy’s breakfast nook. They evoke a memory of sleepy mornings at her house in Memphis. Before the rest of the house had quite woken up, I would find a moment of solitude as I hunched over my breakfast cereal, shoveling it into my mouth, as I devoured a chapter book.
I keep my jewelry in an old, wooden cigar box that belonged to my grandfather. The inside is lined with faded, peeling paper and smells slightly of wood shavings. Lifting the lid, I think suddenly of his basement in Memphis, which was filled with all sorts of things that were appealing yet forbidden to a curious eight-year-old.
In this way, the objects in my apartment are symbols.
Symbols of the people and the time they once belonged to,
each spring-loaded with memory and association.
Perhaps there are objects like this in your life.
Objects that mean more than their purpose.
Objects that you’ve carried with you,
packing them carefully each time you move.
Their significance is much deeper than might first be apparent.
John’s gospel is not much different.
Where the other three Gospel texts are full of stories,
John’s gospel is full of symbols.
Like my apartment with all the things in it,
John is filled to the brim with words that are filled with meaning:
that mean much more than might be first apparent.
As we read the Gospel in the coming months, we’ll set each symbol out on this table, one by one.
Light.
Darkness.
Blindness and Sight.
Bread of life.
Living water.
Each one seems ordinary enough, until we begin to explore it, uncovering the depths of its meaning. Discover our own connotations, and those of John’s audience. Set them out and begin to see how the interact with one another, how they are juxtaposed, or in relationship.
In this way, John’s gospel begins to build upon itself as the reader explores it. One commentator writes of the prologue that you can’t begin to understand the beginning of John’s gospel until you’ve read the whole thing. We can’t understand these first five lines until we have all our symbols lined up on the table, until we know them intimately.
But we have to begin somewhere.
So tonight we place one symbol on the table.
One word that is central to what John’s doing in these first five verses,
and the key to unlocking the rest of the book.
The word is logos.
In Greek, it means “word.”
In the beginning, was the word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
It was in the beginning with God.
If we were Jews living in the second century, this second verse would remind us of something in our own sacred texts: a passage from Proverbs, written in the voice of Wisdom, a feminine presence who tells us she was with God at the creation of the earth.
When God established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always.
Proverbs 8:22-30
The writer of John is building on a preexisting Jewish understanding of the word logos. In the Hebrew scriptures, scholar Brian Blount tells us, “‘logos,’ is the personification of God’s Wisdom, who is both God and yet other than God. As God’s word, Wisdom, or “logos,” expressed God, just as our words express our thoughts.”
And this wisdom,
this presence with God at the beginning of creation,
this word of God,
this voice of God,
John tells us,
is Christ.
“This wisdom, this word, takes on flesh and engages us in the world,” Blount writes.
It is God’s way of dwelling with us.
**
The writer of John has a very different goal in mind than the writers of the other three Gospels. Where they hope to create a record of Jesus’ life and ministry, John makes no such claim. His goal in writing is not to get the story “right,” but to get the story “true.”
He doesn’t care for details or accuracy.
He doesn’t care about the order these stories were originally written in.
He mixes them up and changes them around
so that the symbols his working with
might speak strongly and boldly.
He writes so that we might believe.
He sets his symbols out on the table,
hoping that we might see them,
ordinary things like bread and water, light and darkess,
and stop for a moment…
and look.
Discover the meaning hidden in plain sight:
that God made the world with Christ at her side,
and like thought into breath into word,
erupted into the world to pitch her tent among us,
to live in our midst.
We’ll learn later in the Gospel that seeing is not understanding.
That despite God’s presence among us,
we seem so often to look straight at God, and yet not see.
The hope of this Gospel
is to lay the symbols on the table,
and coax us into exploring a world of meaning and significance,
that points us not toward reality,
but toward the truth.
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