It’s good to be back with you this morning! I was gone last Sunday and for a couple of days last week on study leave. I went down to the “hill country” of Texas, about 1 ½ hours out of San Antonio, in the middle of a stunningly beautiful wilderness area to a retreat center called Laity Lodge. Longtime Bethany friend Steven Purcell is now the Program Director there, and he had called me a while back to invite me to a small gathering for just 2 days with N.T. Wright.

Some of you know that name. N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Anglican Church in England, one of the very top Biblical scholars and theologians in the world right now, and a prolific writer. His most recent book was the one I encouraged you to read as our “Read Good Books” offering in November called Simply Christian, a book that some have called a modern day Mere Christianity (CS Lewis classic from 1940’s).

“Bishop Tom,” as they call N.T. Wright, was just a delight to be with. He’s one of the more brilliant people I’ve ever been around, and a very humble man as well. I find that the older I get, the more I value people who can teach and lead without us having to trip over their egos. So I had a real treat, and I suspect you’ll have to put up with hearing about it a bit in these next weeks!

So. Here we are, in Advent. In our sermons this month, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to be reading together what is called the “Prologue” to the Gospel of John, that is, the first 18 verses. Each week we will read that whole section, but then focus in on just a quarter of it in each sermon.

Why do that? Well, for one it is one of the most profound passages in the New Testament. In very few words, it covers an amazing scope: creation, who we are, who Christ is and what God is about. Secondly, it’s very difficult to pull out just one piece at a time to read without at least hearing it in the context of the entire section. And thirdly, it is my subversive hope that by listening four weeks in a row we might have this text more deeply ingrained within us.

This text, by the way, in the early years of the church was routinely read over as a benediction over people who were very sick, or prayed over the newly baptized. As we reflect on it, I encourage you to think about why it might have been used that way.

John 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.

What do you long for? … What do you long for? Let me just take a leap here and say that whatever you just thought of, I want to invite you to go deeper. What do you long for? I’m not talking about our Christmas lists. What is deep down, deep in your soul in a place that is often not accessed? The place we cover up with hectic activity, with frantic busyness, with loud sound, with fast-paced media. The place maybe you’re afraid to go, or so unaccustomed to being there you’re not sure what you’ll find there. I’m not asking what you want. I’m asking what do you long for?

The book I mentioned earlier, N.T. Wright’s, Simply Christian is intended to be a book explaining the Christian faith in a fresh way, accessible to people tired of religious cliché and hypocrisy. And Wright did one thing I actually thought was rather brilliant. In the first four chapters of the book, he says very little about God, actually. Instead, he spends an entire chapter each on four longings that he identifies. The longing for justice, things being set right. The longing for spirituality, a connection with someThing, someOne, some Story bigger than ourselves. The longing for relationship, with people and with the God in whose image we are made, that desire to know and be known. And the longing for beauty, those fleeting moments of creation, of music, of art that take our breath away and make us feel that what we have settled for is something far too small.

You may think of others. These are longings, Wright claims (and I would agree) that reside deep within us, stirring and occasionally coming to the surface. They are longings, I think, that most anyone can identify with, no matter how they feel about God.

We long for the wholeness that justice and spirituality and relationship and beauty hint at. And when it’s not there, it hurts. So we gnash our teeth over the violence of Darfur. We ache for the peace of Palestine, we weep over a whole generation lost to AIDS in many countries. We long for something more, something different.

Were these kinds of things stirring in the first century A.D.? Of course, and long, long before that. In the Old Testament longings were brewing amongst the Israelites as they went to battle, fought for land, appointed kings, worshipped idols and foreign gods, or cowered under oppression. Or as they were distracted from who they were, what they were about. But slowly over time the longings of Israel took shape, the shape of a person, the desire for a Messiah from God who would come to set things straight.

“In the beginning was the Word.” In just six words (in English), the gospel writer John pulls together two entirely separate worlds, both present and influential in the days of Jesus (Greek and Jewish). The Greek world, the Hellenized world of Alexander the Great which so permeated the Middle East and lasted long after the fall of the Greek empire, contributed one sense of this “Word.” The Word, in Greek philosophy, was the “logos”, the supreme principal of reason or order in the universe, the force that kept the world from collapsing into chaos.

But far more influential was the Jewish world, “the Word,” debir in Hebrew that appears throughout the Old Testament. It pictures God’s activity, when God speaks, things happen. In the passage from the prophet Isaiah that Kimberlee read, God says “My WORD goes out and shall not return to me empty.” The Word has effect, it is an action.

It did from the very beginning. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1 says God speaks light, dry ground, animals, humanity into existence through his Word. By using the first words of Genesis, John is reminding us of the very dawn of creation, and Eden, the Garden, the place where all was well and fulfilled. Humanity walking with God in the good creation. All as it should be, the way it was designed.

“In the beginning, God created…,” that’s Genesis. But now, “In the beginning was the Word…,” that’s John. “And the Word was with God and the word WAS God. HE was in the beginning with God…” and without Him, the Message says, “nothing – not one thing!” – came into being.”

But something has gotten in the way, something that John calls “darkness.” He doesn’t say much about it yet. Just “darkness.” I think I’ve spent my whole adult life reading this verse, thinking this darkness was “out there,” in the world, in our culture, in other people.

That may all be true. But what if the darkness is in here (self)? If John’s “In the beginning” refers us to Genesis 1, then is “the darkness” Genesis 3, when things started to fall apart? What if Darfur and Palestine and AIDS and hurricanes and hatred and broken families and cancer are all in the darkness…but it’s also stuck in here too, in pride and the narrow-minded pursuit of my own interests?

Then I want something more, something different. I long for it. And whatever “it” is, it’s not just a return to a previous day in human history. We hear that a lot these days in politics, and in Christendom. If only we could go back to how things were earlier in the 20th century, or to the days of the founding of the country, or to the Reformation, or to the early centuries of the church it would be much better.

But it’s not the answer. Those days had their own Darfurs, their own Palestines, their own AIDS, their own darkness. It’s not going back, but finding the way things were designed and intended. I don’t want things to just look different, but to be set right. That’s the longing. John takes us first to The Beginning, creation. But now he takes us to something different, the Beginning of NEW creation. The most important moment in history.

The Word WAS God…HE was in the beginning with God. This is John’s leap.

The Word…is personal. Not an ambiguous, amorphous force, but a personal HE was in the beginning, and was in fact God. And we will find out a little later there is a name to the Word - Jesus. Jesus is the light in darkness, both out there…and in here. Thank goodness Jesus came to minister to those in darkness.

Last Easter I described for you an ancient belief from Celtic Christian times, the idea of a “thin place.” They believed that somehow, geographically/spiritually, heaven was exactly three feet from earth. But now and then, here and there, the distance grew much smaller.

“Thin places” were holy ground where earth and heaven came very near. Sometimes we experience that, I think. In a holy moment. In a baptism, at the Lord’s Table, in the love of a child, in the realization of true friendship, sometime when we sense that heaven and earth are almost overlapped, like we’re tasting the way things were meant to be. Yet, what John is describing here is not just a thin place of overlap, but a breaking through. The Word came into being, into life, light exploding into darkness. Heaven breaking in, in Christ, to begin setting things right.

Sometimes we get some glimpses of this. God invites us to be part of his new creation work. And it is hard work. Maybe some of you read in the New York Times a couple of months ago about Clarkston Baptist Church in Clarkston, Georgia. It is a church just east of Atlanta, with a long Southern history of racial separatism. It’s in a rural town that was declared by the federal government in the 1990’s to be the perfect kind of place to resettle refugees who had come to the U.S. Over five years, more than 19,000 refugees were resettled in the county that Clarkston is in. It changed everything. Half the town was suddenly from a different country.

It changed everything at the church as well. The church had long ago dwindled to just a few people, most not interested in people of different color or nationality. But a few were, and they pushed for change. They felt like the scriptures were clear, that God’s people were to be one people.

In 2004, over some strong objections and some people leaving, Clarkston Baptist merged with a Filipino congregation, and a Nigerian one. They changed the name of the church to Clarkston International Bible Church. It hasn’t been easy. Everyone had to compromise. They didn’t all like each others’ music. One elderly widow has to put her fingers in her ears when teenagers lead worship with electric guitars. Everyone has had to learn to do some things in languages other than their native tongues.

But not everything has been hard. The one thing, apparently, that has worked well, has been the Sunday potluck lunch in the gym. One person said simply “Everybody likes everybody else’s food!” We get glimpses. Sometimes it seems that heaven touches earth. Once, in Jesus, it broke through, starting new creation. We get to be part of the work. And when Jesus comes again, he will finish the job. In Advent, we remember one Coming, and we wait for Another. In the beginning was the Word…

When I was in Texas, we spent two days in a lodge with our chairs facing the speaker, or the worship leaders located in front of a big roaring fireplace. On the last day when we gathered to share in the Lord’s Supper together, we turned all the chairs around. Now we faced the big windows, and looked out at the sheer beauty of that place. Untouched wilderness. Rugged cliffs. A quiet river immediately below us, with big catfish swimming in it. Trees, birds, deer. As we did some singing, my eyes started to water. The more we sang, the more I cried. We went forward to receive the Lord’s Supper, and I cried. I sat and prayed with someone, and cried. We sang some more and I cried some more. I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Something was stirring deep within me.

It happens to me on occasion. There was nothing wrong, per se. I love being in ministry. I’m married to this amazing woman, the kids are all doing great, we’re in this fabulous community at Bethany. But deep in my soul I think I felt these longings that sent tears down my face. For an end to sadnesses in our lives. For more experiences of thin places, places where God is palpable? For people to get along. For things, once and for all, to be set right.

What are you longing for? This Advent, dig deep. In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God…the light shines in the darkness. The darkness does not overcome it. Amen.