{"id":1614,"date":"2024-12-29T13:33:55","date_gmt":"2024-12-29T18:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1614"},"modified":"2024-12-29T13:33:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-29T18:33:58","slug":"the-unsung-carol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2024\/12\/29\/the-unsung-carol\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unsung Carol"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/The-Unsung-Carol-122924-1.27\u202fPM.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a9 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">First Sunday in Christmas \u2022 December 29, 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=602497089\">John 1:1-14<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Christmas continues today. We left here Christmas Eve in darkness lit by candles that symbolized celebration of God\u2019s embrace by coming to us in the person of an infant. It was Christmas Eve, though; Christmas came later. But where did it begin? When did you hear the first Christmas carol this year? When did you see the first decorations? We decorated here right after Thanksgiving and entered the season of Advent, anticipating Christmas coming.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Christmas Begins<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Where does Christmas begin in the Bible? I suppose some would say when Mary and Joseph begin the journey to Bethlehem. Luke suggests it begins with Gabriel telling Zechariah he would have a son, who would become John the Baptist. But hundreds of years before this, Isaiah had said,\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a child has been born for us,<br \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0a son given to us;<br \/>authority rests upon his shoulders;<br \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and he is named<br \/>Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,<br \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace [Isaiah 9:6]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mary connects the beginning to Abraham and Sarah: \u201c[God] has helped his servant Israel&nbsp;in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever\u201d [Luke 1:54f] Matthew seems to agree; he begins the story of Jesus by showing how he is connected to Abraham in a long genealogy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But it\u2019s the Gospel of John that has the longest view. He says, \u201cIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.\u201d [John 1:1] and goes on with some of the most abstract language in all the gospels. Many years ago when I was in seminary, when I was a lot smarter or thought I was, I could quote this part of John in Greek from memory. But just being able to quote something doesn\u2019t mean we know it. We have a little dog named Ellie. When she was a puppy, we put a push button bell by the door to the backyard. The theory was that when Ellie needed to potty, she would go step on the button that rings the bell, and we\u2019d let her out. And she learned to ring the bell. She didn\u2019t do it the way we intended to, however; she just rings it whenever she wants to go chase squirrels. But what\u2019s kind of funny to see is that Ellie thinks the bell operates the door. So if she rings it, and we don\u2019t let her out, she just rings it again\u2014and again and again and again. Bible memories can be like that: we recite them over and over but if we don\u2019t know the meaning, nothing happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">In the Beginning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So let\u2019s break this down a and see if we can figure out what it means. Let\u2019s start with \u201cthe beginning\u201d. What is that? What is your beginning? Perhaps you have a \u201cfirst memory\u201d, usually from when you\u2019re about three or four. But that\u2019s not your beginning. We might say your beginning was when you were born, or when you were conceived. Sometimes there are stories about these. My family legend is that I was born while my dad took his final exams in college. Of course, the Bible begins with creation: in the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1 says.\u00a0 \u201cWhat happened before that?\u201d I remember asking a Sunday School teacher once; she told me not to ask such questions, but the truth is she didn\u2019t know and neither do I. There is no before when there is no time and in Genesis the first thing God does is to create day and night, that is to say, time itself. So John is saying, that in the beginning\u2014when there was no before\u2014the Word was with God and the Word was God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Word: what is that? We know something about words. If you\u2019re a parent, maybe you remember the first word your child spoke. Is there anymore eagerly awaited sound than that first \u201cMama\u201d or \u201cDada\u201d? Just like Ellie learned to ring the bell to get us to open the back door, babies learn to make a sound we call a word to summon us. That word defines relationships: \u201cMom\u201d also means \u201cFeed me! Change me! Cuddle me!\u201d It\u2019s the first step to controlling the world. Now, I have to do something I hate doing; I have to teach you something about Greek, the language in which the whole New Testament is written and the language in which many early Christians read the Old Testament too. In Greek, what we translate, \u201cWord\u201d is \u2018Logos\u2019. Logos means more than just words, it stands for the whole business of putting things in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Putting Things In Order<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We know something about putting things in order. Jacquelyn and I share a big walk in closet. I\u2019m messy, and the closet has gotten chaotic over the last month or so. Shoes all over the floor, summer and fall and winter clothes mixed, luggage out of place. So this week when she had some time off, Jacquelyn took on the job of organizing the closet and she succeeded brilliantly. Now you walk in there, the shoes are on racks, matched, my shirts are grouped by color and they all face the same way. I have to say, until Jacquelyn brought her sense of closet order to my life, I\u2019d never thought about whether the shirts were grouped or faced the same way but there they are. Genesis describes creation the same way: God puts things away, night gets separated from day, land from water, plants, animals, everything right down to you and I. And the term for this in Greek is Logos, and it\u2019s translation for us is Word. \u201cIn the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,\u201d means putting things in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now we all live with orders for things, places for them. Some of us do better than others but we do as well as we can. In our house, one cooks, another cleans up. The pots and pans go in one cabinet, the bowls go in another. There is a time for work, a time for sleep. There are other orders too. There is the way that atoms and molecules are bound and structured, the way that heavenly bodies and gravity keep the solar system spinning, the way that chemicals bond and become blood and move the oxygen and nutrients we all need around our bodies. I have no idea how this all works, honestly. I almost flunked chemistry. But I know there is an order to it all, and because of that order, we live and without that order our lives would be impossible.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">God is in the Order<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what John is saying is that right from the beginning, \u201cin the beginning\u201d, God was in the ordering of everything, that just like Jacquelyn matching up the shoes, God is in the order of the very tiniest and the greatest things.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But what does this have to do with Christmas? Remember what he goes on to say: \u201cAnd the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father\u2019s only son, full of grace and truth.[John 1:14] Christmas is this order, this Word, becoming a child, a person, one of us, living among us. Think what Jesus does: he heals people, which is to say he sets them right, he casts our demons, he sets people back in order, he offers glimpses of how things should be in his teaching. How should we treat one another? \u201cLove one another as I have loved you,\u201d he says. He embodies the love of God which is the Word of God, the order of God and that is the glory John means when he says, \u201cWe have seen his glory.\u201d Christmas is the Word becoming flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Real Christmas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is the real Christmas carol and it\u2019s often unsung. It\u2019s easy to miss the real Christmas for the wrapping and bows. The real Christmas is God putting us right, ordering us, reminding us to live as children of God, seeing the image of God in others. It\u2019s easy to go through life like Ellie, ringing a bell without knowing how the door really opens. Christmas means to teach us to open the door to love in our lives. It means living that love every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Christmas continues today\u2014if that love lives in our hearts, if that light, shines in us. The most important question for our church isn\u2019t \u201cHow can we keep going?\u201d; it\u2019s how can we shine the light of Christmas here? What do you think? What can we do together, to make sure it\u2019s clear that Christmas continues with us?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>God is in the order or everything and Christmas is living with that order. The love of Christ is God&#8217;s order in our world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[347,3,13,2,32],"tags":[295,188,380,379],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-scripture","category-sermon","category-theology","category-worship","category-year-c","tag-christmas","tag-john","tag-john-1","tag-order"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1616,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions\/1616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}