Tag Archives: Logos

Wordle and the Word: A Sermon for Christmas Day, 2023

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December 25, 2023

Do any of you know the New York Times word game “Wordle”? It became an internet sensation during the lockdown. The goal is to guess a five-letter word and you have 6 chances. It’s rather addictive, and for many months, everyone would post their results on social media. That’s become somewhat less common over the years, but yesterday, a former parishioner emailed me his results. On the third try, he got it “GRACE.” Over the course of the day, and night, yesterday, others mentioned it to me as well. 

Yes, I do it, but I’m rather embarrassed to admit that it took me 4 tries yesterday. On attempt 3, I went with “BRACE.” In case you’re curious,  I’m currently on a 239 day streak. And also, in case you’re wondering, I do them all: the crossword, the mini, spelling bee, and now connections. They’re all part of my morning ritual.

Words are fascinating things. That we play games with them like WORDLE is evidence of the power they have. They amuse and divert us; they hurt and heal us. They help to share our deepest thoughts and feelings; and are also woefully inadequate to express those thoughts and feelings. We are bombarded with words; we bombard others with words. And now, thanks to Chatgpt, we can use artificial intelligence to manufacture words for ourselves, for others, or for class assignments. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that preachers are using AI to manufacture or produce sermons.

That’s quite an irony, isn’t it, given today’s gospel reading: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” 

I said to a couple of people last night as they were expressing sympathy for me having to get up today and do this service, that for me, in many ways, as beautiful and powerful as the Christmas Eve services are, with choir, and carols, candlelight, and a full church, this service is the one that matters most to me—and it’s for one reason, that I have the great honor and privilege to proclaim this gospel text: John 1:1-14, and to preach the good news from it. Although I’ve preached on this passage more than twenty times, it will never get old; I will never exhaust its meaning, and I will never fully comprehend it.

In the beginning was the word. In principio erat verbum. En arche en ho logos. The Greek word behind our translation of word is “logos.” It means much more than “word.” In Hellenistic philosophy, it referred to the underlying order and reason of the universe and many scholars think that the author of the gospel, or the author of the hymn on which the gospel’s author was drawing, used another Greek word—sophia, or wisdom, which in Greek thought and in Jewish scripture, was the personification of wisdom. Because it is in the feminine gender it is thought, it was changed from “Sophia” to “Logos.”

But word, or reason, or order, or even wisdom points to something deeper. It’s not just that the Word, Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity was present at creation. It’s that God created through the Word, by speaking. As Genesis 1 states, “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.

This is powerful stuff. There’s another image that I find particularly compelling. When the great Dutch humanist Erasmus went about publishing the first Greek New Testament, and then re-translating the Greek into Latin, he recognized the inadequacy of “word” as a translation of “logos.” So he chose another Latin word “sermo.” While it’s the root from which our word “sermon” comes, it actually means something quite different: “conversation.” 

That image intrigues me. Erasmus is implying that at the heart of God’s nature, at the heart of the Trinity, is conversation, communication. I find it wonderfully reassuring that in spite of our experience of the inadequacy of words, and of communication, that in the Trinity, in God, there is perfect conversation, perfect communication.

Of course, all of that is fine theological speculation; much more than a word game, but also, in a way, a word game. To place Christ at the very beginning, in creation, the means of creation, is to say something or many things, about God’s nature, and about the nature of God revealed in Christ.

But our gospel goes further; our faith goes further. The majestic language, the lofty theological reflection that is revealed in the opening cadences of John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” concludes, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” 

That’s the message of the gospel, the message of Christmas. In fact, the Greek could be translated “tabernacled” or “tented” among us. Again, there are multiple meanings here. John is referring back to the way God was present among the Israelites during the Exodus, in a tabernacle or tent but there’s also a powerful sense, that he is alluding to the temporary, ephemeral nature of a tent. Like our bodies, tents are not permanent, they lack solidity; they are easily damaged. 

That is to say, the word took on frail human flesh to be like us. But John goes on and in one of his key paradoxes, reminds us that in that temporary dwelling, we catch sight of God’s glory.

So we are back in Bethlehem, back in the confusing paradox that God became incarnate in a very ordinary way, in the poorest of circumstances, in the weakest of all human forms, a baby. And it is in that paradox, that we see God’s glory. For John, it is the same paradox as the cross, which he almost always refers to as the glorification of Christ. What he is telling us is that in these moments of weakness, we see God’s majesty and power.

But we have the reality of that incarnation before us in many ways. We see it, we taste it in the bread and wine of the eucharist, when we receive the body and blood of Christ. We see it in the very imperfect Church, both our local community, and the worldwide communion, bodies filled with flaws and imperfections, but also, mysteriously, the body of Christ. And finally, we may see it in ourselves, imperfect human beings though we are, but by the grace of God filled with the presence of Christ. May this Christmas rekindle in all of us the knowledge of Christ’s presence, of Christ’s glory, in ourselves, in our church and community, and in all the world.

And the Word became flesh and tented among us: A Sermon for Christmas Day, 2016

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“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”

We live in difficult times. The world is a dangerous, scary place. The future looks bleak. Not only are the problems we face apparently beyond our will and capacity to solve. It’s not just the ongoing wars, a challenging economy; Climate change seems to be occurring at a frightening pace—with reports this week about warm temperatures in the Arctic causing unprecedented ice melting.

It’s not just the immensity of the problems, in recent years truth and reason themselves have come under attack. First it was Stephen Colbert and “truthiness.” Now, we are victims of “fake truth” the manipulation of the media, and a widespread and vicious attack on science.

Some of this latter can be blamed on a certain understanding and worldview within Christianity. It’s been a practice among some Christians for centuries to draw a sharp contrast between faith and reason—to argue that one must believe in spite of evidence to the contrary; that faith in God goes against reason. In recent decades, that view has led to some Christians making contortions in their efforts to explain away the theory of evolution, the fossil record, the big bang, arguing that scientific evidence like fossils were given by God to test our faith, or worse, planted by Satan to deceive us.

In a way all of this has led us to this point; where we’re not quite sure of anything; that every position no matter how supported by scientific evidence, is only a matter of opinion.

These majestic, transcendent verses from the very beginning of the Gospel of John reflect and present us with a very different perspective. John is writing from within a particular worldview that permeated the Hellenistic culture of his time. In the beginning was the Word, in fact, in the beginning was the Logos—more than word, it could be translated as reason. You could understand it as the underlying order of the universe, natural law, if you will.

John is asserting not just that God created the universe, but that this created universe is imbued with divine order and reason; that it makes sense, and also, that by exploring the universe, we can come to know something about the nature of God.

Of course, to translate logos as “word” is to make another important theological point—that at the very beginning of things, the second person of the Trinity was present, involved in creating the universe. Indeed, in Genesis 1, God creates by speaking the universe into existence—God said, “Let there be light.”

This is all well and good, but the reality is that the world we experience only dimly reflects the divine order and creative power that brought it into being and maintains it. Our fallen natures have clouded our reason, and creation itself bears signs of our disobedience of God.

We experience our own sin and fallen-ness, we know our broken-ness and the broken-ness of the world, and we struggle to know and to love God and ourselves. Given that, we’re tempted to experience or understand God as utterly beyond us, beyond our comprehension or understanding, remote, uncaring, unmoved or unmoving.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the heart of this passage, the heart of the gospel, it may very well be the heart of Christianity. The God who is utterly beyond us, incomprehensible, infinite, has become one of us, has dwelt among us. The God who created the world and us, has come to us in human form, becoming human, sharing our lives and our existence.

But more than that, the word we translate as “dwelt” could be translated as tabernacled or tented—it’s a reference back to the experience of the Hebrews in the wilderness when they created a tabernacle to be a symbol of God’s presence among them as they wandered through the desert.

That’s one way we should think about it, that in the Word becoming flesh God tented among us, taking on a frail, temporary body like ours, but also that God journeyed with us, that God journeys with us, that God is with us as we wander through our lives.

It’s a remarkable journey that we make through our lives, it’s a remarkable journey of struggle, change, and love. There’s a remarkable journey in this text, from before time and the universe existed, to the Word becoming flesh and tenting among us.

To ponder that mystery, not just what the words say, but the mystery of the nature of God to which it bears witness—a God beyond our comprehension and imagination, but a God who so cares for us and loves us, that the very Word of God comes to us, becomes one of us, dies for us.

To contemplate that God, the God we see dimly in the beauty of creation; the God we see clearly in the incarnation; the God we see in the words and life of Jesus Christ; the God whose self-giving love embraces the whole world in his outstretched arms.

To contemplate that God, to contemplate that love, and to begin to express and share that love; that is what and who we are called to be by Christmas. Thanks be to God.