[Is. 52:7-10; Jn. 1:1-14]
Grace to all of you who are one in Christ. Amen.
Isaiah, our designated prophet this morning, introduces us to someone very important, someone that we often encounter in Isaiah’s and his fellow prophets’ writings.
And you might be wondering, isn’t that something we read about in the New Testament? Why then are we referring to Old Testament prophets?
As a very clever German once pointed out, we find Gospel in the Old Testament, and Law in the New.
This is Im-anu-el.
Im-anu-el’s face might look familiar, even if we can’t always pinpoint them exactly or recall where we’ve seen them before.
Perhaps you’d like to come and have a closer look.
Most likely, you’ll recognise them from somewhere; Im-anu-el tends to give others a feeling of familiarity, of relatability. The same is true the other way round, Im-anu-el is familiar with all of us, they recognise all of us, they relate to all of us.
As for their story, we might say that Im-anu-el is too introverted, too timid to speak up for themselves; like with the writings of Isaiah and his colleagues, it feels as if others are always telling the narrative, not given them the opportunity to tell it for themselves: many voices sounding through the ages, sometimes very loudly and clearly, sometimes more muffled.
In that case, does that mean that we’re getting all the facts? Who’s actually telling the story?
 |
All these different voices -sometimes even contradictory!- are encapsulated in the Bible.
The Bible is called the Word of God.
Probably you’ve come across this slogan,
THE BIBLE SAYS IT, I BELIEVE IT, THAT SETTLES IT!
It’s not that simple though; that stance is rather simplistic, even if you believe that the Bible is God’s word, that it’s the norm norming and framing everything else.
However, the Bible is also God’s wordS -plural- because there are all these different books, and literary genres, and contexts, and copies, translations, and editions.
 |
And of course, there’s only one Word of God, the Word which Saint John is writing about.
To paraphrase the very clever German again, the Scriptures are the manger where we find God.
It’s sad and dangerous, that in our passion, our zeal for these same Scriptures, we all too often focus too much on the literal printed text, rather than on the overall message of a God who’s ever present, ever with us, who is presence.
The Bible then becomes God itself, and that’s idolatry, bibliolatry.
Do we take the Bible seriously or literally?
Building on the Scriptures, the Church invented something quite quaint which we use to talk about the faith when we believe it needs clarification: it’s called a Creed, and it’s a literary genre all by itself. A Creed is composed out of Bible verses, and it’s a good exercise to compare and puzzle all the verses together.
It was meant to unite the squabbling Christian factions in their reading of the Scriptures, and keep the heathens and heretics at bay, not always successfully.
In a Creed we claim that we’re expressing, we’re specifying that what we assert the Bible is telling us, we claim that we’re summarising what we’re reading in the texts, what we believe from the texts.
We usually encounter the Creed in the worship service, it’s part of the way we worship God; in the Creed we pray the Bible.
A Creed however isn’t an individual exercise, it’s meant to be corporate, all of us together, all of us in the Church together.
Together, the worshipping congregation, the Church professes and believes. The Creed is supposed to bring faithful Christians together, it’s supposed to be a mutual basis between the churches. Again, not always successfully.
Instead of coming together, through the centuries, Christians have made a sport of infighting and religious wars and mutual condemnations, all in the name of the Truth, all to keep the true Faith and the true Church safe and pure.
And to make their respective doctrinal positions clear, the various churches perfected yet two more literary genres, the Catechism and the Confession; throughout the centuries there has been a proliferation of these question-and-answer booklets and short or long essay-type statements.
If you skipped a paragraph or got an answer wrong, you were out!
Rather then teaching the faith and the particular faith tradition, and rather than each denomination contributing their insights to the universal Church, Catechisms and Confessions became possible tools of exclusion and separation, each phrase or question became a possible tool for doctrinal rigidity and aggression.
Parallel to all this, we developed liturgies, and rules and regulations, and hierarchies, and prayer books, and canon laws and formularies and faculties, councils, conferences, synods, conventions, etc.
Layers upon layers upon layers, mounting up ever higher.
Do these express our relation to God, the Church, our churches? Or are they just about us and our ‘special group’?
You might have noticed that we haven’t actually mentioned Im-anu-el in all of this; we’ve lost them along the way.
Coatings of church history and mistrust and religious strife, traditions and laws, socio-political interests, human greed, and so on, have buried them.
But some things can’t be hidden, some things can’t be denied, some things can’t be ignored nor wished away!
Some things are stronger than human stupidity and sin!
These layers covering Im-anu-el were meant to keep them warm and safe, not suffocate them, not kill them off. All these extras were meant to emphasise them, proclaim them, not push them aside.
If we thought that we had sealed Im-anu-el in this dark tomb of heaps of selfishness and self-interest and self-aggrandisement, we were wrong...
because from all this, they will rise into the light...over and over and over again!
These different sheets c
an be a force for good, unification and ecumenism, organisation, creativity and variety, solid theology, catechesis. As long as we employ them as tools not regard them as sacred and eternal goals of themselves. These layers aren’t all necessarily bad things, there’s a lot of potential here.
As long as it’s Im-anu-el telling their story.
More often than not, we take Im-anu-el’s presence for granted, sometimes we forget about them altogether.
Im-anu-el however has always been and always will be here. In the beginning was the Word...
Im-anu-el is part of our world, Im-anu-el is part of each and every one of us. And the Word became flesh.
Im-anu-el is still here...always here!
No matter how much we cover them up, they will appear in our lives, and their face will seem familiar, and their presence will be comforting, healing, forgiving.
Im-anu-el.
Immanuel.
God with us.