God Moved Into The Neighborhood
Text: John 1:1-18
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church,
December 3, 2024 First Sunday in Advent
When we think of what we call “The Christmas Story” we think of Mary and Joseph and the babe in a manger, and shepherds and angels. But there is another Christmas story. It is this passage we have just read from John 1. It’s not a birth story, but it is about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.
Like the prologue to a book, like an overture before an opera or show, John 1:1-18 sets up the story John will tell about Jesus in his Gospel. And for the next three Sundays and then on Christmas Eve, the sermons will come from John 1:1-18.
When did Jesus begin? When he showed up by the Jordan river to be baptized? That is where Mark begins his story of Jesus. Did Jesus begin at his birth in Bethlehem as Matthew and Luke tell us? No, John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word…” The Word that John writes about is Jesus.
And Jesus wasn’t created, nor did he come into existence simply when Mary bore him. The Word – Jesus – was in the beginning. The expression for “beginning” doesn’t refer to a specific place in time as if the Word came into being or was created at a specific point. It refers to that which is beyond time.[1]
What is the unanswerable question children ask? Who created God? No one. God has always existed and don’t try to get your mind around that because you never will. And if you want a God who is small enough to get your mind around you need to look elsewhere than the God of the Bible.
Jesus is eternally pre-existent. He always was. He came from outside of time. The Father sent him to this world in human form at the appointed time but Jesus always existed in relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
“The Word was with God” it says. And it says, “The Word was God.” Different from the Father and the Holy Spirit yet sharing the same substance and being.
Why call Jesus the Word? Words express ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Part of the fun but also the frustration and challenge of a game like charades is that you can’t speak words. You are limited to gestures, hand signals, and often undignified actions. (I mean, try doing “riding an elephant” at your next game of charades.) People have to guess what you mean. If you could just speak and say a word people would get it.
God the Father wants us to get it. He wants us to get who God is and what his heart is like. He doesn’t want us to have to grope and guess about who he is. And so he spoke to us by coming in his Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s clear speech to us, the expression of God’s mind and heart.
“The Word” was also a loaded phrase in John’s day. John was Jewish and many of the people he is writing this gospel for were Jewish. In Jewish thought words were alive and could do things. As in Genesis, God creates the world by speaking. “And God said let there be…”
One person put it this way, “The spoken word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive…It was a unit of energy charged with power. It flies like a bullet to its (target).”[2] Today there is an entire market for motivational speaking. People pay hundreds of dollars to hear people charge them up and inspire them to new and great things. Words can motivate. The words of a football coach can motivate a team to play harder, smarter, and better. Winston Churchill inspired the entire country of England during one of the darkest and hardest periods in its history in World War II.
“In the beginning was the Word…” sounds like the very first words of the Bible in Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” And John wants us to think back to Genesis 1:1.
And John tells us that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The eternal Word became a human being and lived here on this earth with us. As the late pastor and writer Eugene Peterson wrote it in his contemporary language version of the Bible called The Message, “God moved into the neighborhood.”
God became flesh and blood. Like one of us. The theological and spiritual term we often use for this is incarnation. Incarnation is a Christmas word. How many of you have “incarnation” on your Christmas cards this year? Probably lots of peace, joy and hope. But “incarnation”? It comes from Latin “in” and “carn” meaning flesh. The incarnation is God coming in the flesh in the person of Jesus. God became incarnate as a human being. The incarnation says God became human while still remaining God. God came from outside of his creation to become a part of his creation.
You know, Christianity is the most material of all faiths. Christianity celebrates the material world. It doesn’t celebrate materialism which is having too much of too many things and loving those things in an unhealthy way. But Christian faith blesses the material world: the earth and sea, bodies and food, birds and horses, touch and sight. And when God came he came in a body. He had substance. The Word didn’t come as an idea. The Word didn’t come as an immaterial spirit. The Word didn’t come as a dream or vision. The Word became flesh and blood in human form. God moved into the neighborhood. God came and set up shop right on this earth and was seen, heard, and touched.
There was a way of thinking in John’s day that the material world was actually evil. It was corrupt and you had to become so spiritual that you transcended all of this world. And because material things were bad then God shouldn’t be wandering around in it.
But John tells us that through the Word – Jesus, the Son of God - all things were made. All things. And that without him nothing was made that has been made. God created this world and everything in it through the Word and called it good. God entered this material world in a human body, took part in and enjoyed this material world.
It is a scandal in Islam for Allah to be identified with anything material. Allah is way separate and apart from the stuff of our life. Other religions are bent on transcending this world. Not so with the God of the Bible.
By coming into this world Jesus blessed the things we enjoy in this world. Jesus shows us that stuff isn’t bad. It can become bad if we use it wrongly, hoard it, abuse it, or mistreat it. But our bodies, food, relationships, artistic endeavors are good.
By going to weddings Christ blessed marriage. By turning water into wine he blessed grapes, the vine and what comes from it. By feeding people he blessed food and bread. If you read on in John’s Gospel we see Jesus with water and fish. He is making fires and breakfast. He heals human bodies. He uses bread, vines and shepherds to speak of himself. He washes feet. He feels real pain. Bleeds real blood. Dies a real death.
Jesus came in the flesh, was crucified in the flesh, and came alive again in the flesh. And when he appears to his disciples he says, “Touch me.”
And when Jesus gave us a way to keep connection with him he gave a meal. He didn’t give a thought to keep in mind or a mantra. He gave bread and a cup, material things. The Word who became flesh gave us something that involves touch, taste, smell, and sight. All the senses of our God-given bodies get involved in this.
We call it Communion because we keep communion or relationship with Jesus in this way. We call it The Lord’s Supper because it is from the Lord himself. As he celebrated the Jewish Passover meal with his disciples he took bread and a cup from that meal table and told them to share it and to do it to claim the forgiveness of sins that he would bring with the sacrifice of his life. Communion is a primary way how we touch God and God touches us.
My first pastorate was in Philadelphia. During Advent I would try to get around to some of our homebound people and bring Communion to them. One afternoon when I was fairly new as a pastor, I and one of our elders, Bill Heinz, went to visit Josephine MacMahon, one of our homebound members who was in the Chapel Manor Nursing Home.
Josephine was from Ireland and spoke with a thick brogue. This particular church was originally founded by Irish and Scottish immigrants and there were still a few of the older folks around who were from those countries.
She shared a small room with another resident. Josephine’s side of the room was maybe about as big as the restroom back in our narthex. She had a bed, a chair, a night stand, and maybe a picture. The room was rather bleak. The floor was cold, hard tile. Care facilities have become much nicer today, but this nursing home reaked of an odor too characteristic of many such places.
Josephine was elderly, large, her hair was long and greasy and unkept, and her clothes were plain and needed washing. She wore large glasses with lenses as thick as bottles. When we walked into her room she was sitting in a wheelchair looking around at the floor. When I greeted her, she just looked up at us with a blank stare and said in her classic Irish brogue, “I can’t find my shoes.”
Josephine was in the deep stages of dementia. She didn’t know us. She didn’t seem to know anything that was really happening around her. She just kept looking around the floor saying, “I can’t find my shoes. Can you help me find them?”
She had slippers on her feet. We didn’t see any shoes around. When we told her who we were and that we were from her church we got a blank stare. There was really nowhere to sit so we sat on the edge of her bed.
As I tried to talk to Josephine it was clear that she mentally wasn’t with us. We tried to make some connections by mentioning some names of some of the old timers from the church that she might know in days gone by. Josephine did look up and said one of the names we mentioned as if there was some familiarity. But then she put her head down and started looking for her shoes again and talking about things that made no sense.
I was a young, new pastor and began to wonder – do you give Communion to someone who isn’t in her right mind? Who didn’t understand what would happen? Who couldn’t comprehend?
They hadn’t talked about this in seminary. Is it worth it? I asked Bill if we should go ahead, and he just shrugged his shoulders.
Well, I opened my traveling Communion set and Bill set things up on the little table in Josephine’s side of the room. I always read a passage of Scripture before sharing in Communion because the Word always illuminates and needs to go with the Sacrament. As we were making our rounds that Advent season I had been using John 1, the very words we read today, to the people we had been visiting.
I told Josephine that I was going to read a Scripture to her. She didn’t even look at us. She was too busy, eyes on the ground, looking around for her shoes. I thought, “What am I doing this for?” I began to read, “In the beginning was the Word…” And no sooner did I read that then just as surely as I am looking at you right now, Josephine looked up at us and in her deep Irish brogue picked up from where I had just read and began to quote John 1.
No, not quote. It was as if she was telling it to us. Like she was preaching it to us. Like we needed to hear this and get this. She continued “...and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” And she didn’t just stop with the first verse. She went on,
“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…”
And then she paused for a moment as if remembering. This woman whose memory had been ravished by dementia, trying to remember. And then she finished with, “…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Well, let’s have Communion!
Bill and I just looked at each other absolutely stunned. Josephine MacMahon’s first sign of cognizance was hearing “In the beginning was the Word…” She didn’t know us. She didn’t know where her shoes were. But she knew that God had moved into the neighborhood. Mental loss could not take away what was deep in her soul. I guess the mental capacities can go but the heart and faith is deeper still.
We all ate bread and drank the little cups filled with juice. All the while she was still looking around for her shoes. Josephine was heavily disoriented, but the sacrament of The Lord’s Supper was no less powerful or effective.
She didn’t understand much but Communion isn’t totally about understanding. It’s about God touching us. It’s about God coming to us.
God moved into the neighborhood called earth, and his touch was so deep that centuries later his presence was in the room of a woman far gone in her mental state whose church brought her Communion, and his touch went right past her mental failure to her heart and soul.
I’m telling you this God is something.
Josephine MacMahon died a couple years after that visit. I don’t know how it works, but I believe what Jesus said, in one of his more material/fleshly sayings that, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in that person.”[3]
People might prefer to think about God in more abstract terms: a power, a force, a source, enlightenment. But God is much more tangible, specific, real. He is the Word made flesh. God wanted to touch us and us to touch him. He came in a material body as a person in Jesus. Maybe that is why he gave us something so material to keep communion with him.
[1] C.K. Barrett, p.127
[2] Patterson, quoted in William Barclay, John vol.1,
[3] John 6:53-56