The Eternal Beginning

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

January 5, 2025

Scripture: John 1:1-18

I sincerely appreciate how the church shows up these few days and weeks after Christmas. Unlike our cultural and economic institutions, the church, in its liturgical observance of the Christmas season, does not immediately focus on the next holiday or the next big event. In their wisdom and faithfulness, our spiritual forebears left us a tradition that takes seriously the opportunity for reflection on what it means that God is now with us. Through scripture, prayers, hymns, and liturgies, they invite us to think about the so-what question of the birth of Jesus. Whether it is the first or second Sunday after Christmas or the observance of Epiphany, Scripture, tradition, and experience of the Christian liturgical calendar allow us to sit with the implication of God’s self-disclosure to us in our time and context.

I can think of no more fitting Scripture lesson to help us discern the impact and implications of Emmanuel, God with us, than this prologue in the Gospel of John. For the writer of John, a straightforward birth narrative, as we read in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, while colorful and inspiring, doesn’t go far enough in spelling out the impact and implications of God’s ongoing act of incarnation throughout all time. This Gospel writer wants to consider the cosmic nature of God’s revelation in and to humanity. At Christmas, we joined Mary and Joseph, the angels, the heavenly hosts, and the shepherds in celebrating God’s decisive act of being born into time and history in Jesus. During Epiphany, we journey with the magi, paying attention with them to the signs of the incarnated presence of God. However, the evangelist of John is worried about our temptation to be time-bound and stay fixated in the moment. This is a critical observation because we are bound by this time on the calendar, which tells us that this is the moment to observe the beginning of the New Year. Can there be more to that beginning than simply marking time?

I hear John saying, “Let me tell you about the beginning.” So, this prologue we read today borrows from the first line of the Bible itself, “In the beginning.” To fully grasp what is happening now and what lies ahead, we must understand that it goes all the way to the beginning. John testifies that before there was anything, the very idea of a beginning originated with God’s Word, or logos, that theological and philosophical idea describing that which gives meaning and coherence to the world. In the Hebrew Bible, God speaks a word, and creation begins. In the Christian testaments, God’s Word is born, and it all starts anew. “Everything came into being through the Word.” It is the source of life, light, and glory. And the Word became flesh and made his home among us. No one has ever seen God, but because the Word became flesh, because life, light, and glory came into being with the Word, we can perceive, experience, and know the presence of God. This connects us to the beginning. When we experience moments of epiphany, that light that draws us out of darkness and despair to the place where God can be found, where, despite what looked hopeless and impossible, the Word makes life possible, we are experiencing God’s eternal beginning. How do we know? We know this because a man, a simple human being like you and me, John, witnessed it and testified about it.

There is something powerfully prophetic about this season of our faithful observance. What we have experienced is a convergence of the eternal with the temporal. We are part of the wonder of creation, able to access and experience God as the beginning of all things. In the life, light, and glory of God’s Word, we experience God in our time and context. God’s Word, in the person of Jesus, is the human manifestation of that eternal beginning. That’s why John could confidently declare that we can see God in him. In him, we can see the fullness of God. And from the fullness of God, the wholeness, the completeness, the all-inclusiveness of God,  we are part of something bigger and everlasting no matter what time of year it is. We have received grace upon grace, inexhaustible love, favor, and abundance. We get a new identity as God’s children, conferred upon us not by birth or will but because God ushers in life, and that more abundantly. From now on, with God, whether we fail, fall, lose, or even die, there is always a next, a newness, a possibility because God is ever the God of the beginning.

And I pray we remember that because the world constantly seeks to separate us from God’s living and eternal word. As we go into a time of what looks like economic and political uncertainty, when the institutions we’ve relied upon for faith, governance, and information become less trustworthy, when the change for the good we hope to see appears to be slipping away, we have access to God’s eternal beginning. When poverty, violence, and injustice seem to be winning the day, God’s Word holds out the promise of tomorrow, when we can begin again. Because God is with us, enfleshed and dwells among us, we are a part of something eternal that resides in the temporal—life, light, and glory here in our lives that will outlive this at this moment to which we can bear witness.

I know that life, light, and glory can feel like abstractions, like obtuse theological or philosophical concepts. The theologian Howard Thurman observed that recognizing life and light amid death and dying is a growing edge for people we should lean into. We are surrounded by life, light, and glory. We have seen the signs of life amid death, that breakthrough of survival and healing in the aftermath of war, violence, and disease. We have seen the light of love, forgiveness, and beloved community amid paroxysms of hate, division, and conflict. We have felt the presence of God amid despair and hopelessness, giving us the sense that it will be all right because we are God’s people.

I don’t think it is by accident that the evangelist of John uses life, light, and glory throughout this prologue. They are visual words and metaphors that are perceptible through sight. They are graspable concepts, suggesting that they are part of God’s intention to be witnessed and talked about. They suggest that God speaks and manifests blessing, newness, abundance, and transformation in ways we can hold onto to combat despair and disconnection. Is it likely that God’s life, light, and glory are always available for us to perceive, but we have stopped looking for it? Have we let the magi continue searching for God’s revelation without us? Isn’t it just possible that every day we are encountering, as one author puts it, “God unrecognized” in the people, places, and experiences in our lives, but we are too busy, too distracted, too caught up in the business of living to see or hear?^[1] Perhaps we have moved away from the posture of our spiritual forebears, who have been described as being in a “revelatory state of mind,” meaning that they were open to encountering God.^[2]

Scholars and pundits have recently voiced their frustration and desperation at social and spiritual dislocation and political, religious, and economic corruption and indifference. We live in a religious environment that is more often the source of division and oppression than liberation and salvation. In this environment, now more than ever, I believe God is calling, speaking, and revealing God’s self, trying to get our attention so that we can join in the new thing God is doing. Now more than ever, in light of wars and rumors of wars; of rejection of the widow and the immigrant; of political neglect and corruption; of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, God is looking for people who will be witnesses to the new thing that God is making possible, who know that we share in a God of beginnings, especially when things appear to be dying.

I want to close with Thurman’s poem “The Growing Edge,” in which he witnesses the convergence of the eternal with the temporal, seeing how God makes possible the eternal beginning all the time:

“All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new lives, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and [people] have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of a child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!”

[1] Using a phrase from James L. Kugel, The Great Shift, 7.

[2] Ibid., 18.