I preached the below yesterday on the last Sunday in the Christmas season and the morning after the Trump administration opted to illegally bomb Venezuela.

First, the texts on which I depended, and then the sermon.

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First Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-14

 7 Thus says the Lord: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,  and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say,  “Save, O Lord, your people,  the remnant of Israel.” 8 See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,  and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame,  those with child and those in labor, together;  a great company, they shall return here. 9 With weeping they shall come,  and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water,  in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I am as a father to Israel,  and Ephraim is as my firstborn. 10 Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,  and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “The one who scattered Israel will gather them,  and will keep them as a shepherd a flock.” 11 For the Lord has ransomed Jacob,  and has redeemed Jacob’s people from hands too strong for them. 12 They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,  and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil,  and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden,  and they shall never languish again. 13 Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,  and the young men and the old shall be merry.  14 I will give the priests their fill of fatness,  and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord.

The Gospel is from John 1:1-18.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The Word was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through the Word, without whom not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.]   10 The light was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a man, but of God.  14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made God known.

Grace to you and peace from our incarnate Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

On April 25, 1981, the US Navy commissioned a lethal nuclear submarine to be named “Corpus Christi.”

Actually, the word that was, and still is used wasn’t ‘commissioned,’ but rather “christened,’ as in ‘baptized.’

Well, this just made the matter even worse.

See, “Corpus Christi” means, in Latin, ‘The Body of Christ.’

I was 12 years old at the time, but I still remember my father, his low resonant voice quivering in furious words from the pulpit at Grace Lutheran Church in Eau Claire Wisconsin, condemning Ronald Reagan’s approval of these words for this weapon.

Dad knew he was adding his voice to those of the Conference of Catholic Bishops, all 270 of them expressing words of appalled objections to placing the name of the Prince of Peace onto a nuclear submarine designed solely for massive destruction of God’s creatures and creation.

One Jesuit theologian, a Rev. Richard McSorley, wrote in the Catholic Standard that “we have a new type of blasphemy…We call [the sub] Corpus Christi. What does God think of that? Do we think God feels honored by the words? Are we honored?”

Their collective words gained traction, and ultimately, Reagan quietly saved face, renaming the submarine “The City of Corpus Christi,” maintaining that the vessel would just be honoring the Texas town.

Dad knew that his role as preacher in the pulpit in the sanctuary was to speak the Word of God, and that the Word of God said different things than the words one might hear outside of the sanctuary, but that the People of God came to hear not the same thing but rather a re-orienting thing, a reminding thing of who and whose they were.

The Word of God indicts, consoles, cajoles, and emboldens those who believe in the risen Christ. It’s a hefty thing, to hear, to speak, to live it.

This story about my father came to mind thanks to the Jeremiah/John combo of today, coupled with our administration’s decision yesterday to illegally bomb Venezuela and kidnap its—very much granted illegally elected—President Maduro, and his wife.

God, I do believe, would like a Word.

The World Council of Churches, a federation to which we the ELCA belongs, has sure offered a Word, though, Holy Smokes: “The attacks conducted by the United States of America in Venezuela and the capture and detention of President Maduro and his wife are stunningly flagrant violations of international law. These actions set a dangerous precedent and example for others who seek to shrug off all constraints against the use of armed aggression and brute force to achieve political objectives.

The World Council of Churches calls urgently for the cessation of such attacks, for respect for the principles of international law and sovereignty of States, for the resolution of disputes through dialogue and diplomacy rather than by armed violence, and for the United Nations and the Organization of American States to take swift action to ensure all members respect the relevant charters and conventions.

In these dangerous and uncertain times, the world needs wise and courageous leaders for peace, rather than the proliferation of conflicts and the normalization of international illegality risking a deeper descent into chaos. We pray for wisdom and peace to prevail in this context and in other parts of the world.”

Their unequivocal words, words which are as loud as my father’s were 45 years ago, are thoroughly grounded in God’s Word.

The question before us is whether we will listen to the Word of God rather than the words of the world.

So, “Thus says the Lord,” thunders Jeremiah to his people and now to us this morning.

First thing we hear from that passage: Thus says the Lord.

It’s a turn of phrase in the Hebrew tradition, very much meaning that God’s Word stands behind what follows. You can trust what is being said, because these are not the speaker’s words, but the Lord’s words being spoken, and you can trust, must trust, the Lord.

Thus says the Lord.

Not some power-hungry despot.

Nor one’s own self-deprecating inner voice. Nor some marketing, especially this time of year, that says that you are not beloved enough, beautiful enough, young enough, rich enough, or simply enough.

No, the Lord speaks this Word, and with it says something new. //

Now, if there were to be a word cloud made up of these passages, the biggest bubble of the word cloud would be WORD. “Word” appears a whopping 33 times total throughout our readings.

So the word for ‘word’ in Greek is ‘logos.’

That’s why we have bio-logists, namely people who have a word about bios, life.

When Karl was so injured and tiny in Germany, we had therapists—that word means, in Greek, to heal—who were his Logo-therapeuten, his speech-healers, speech therapists.

I am a theo-logian, because I have some words—some say too many, especially at sermon time—to say about Theos, namely God.

So when John tells us that in the beginning there wasn’t just a logos, but rather the Logos, well, a person ought to sit up and pay attention.

And you don’t need to have been an English major to catch a reference, an allusion here about this Word, immediately at the start of John’s Gospel, because of all the words John could have chosen to launch his gospel, he chose these: “In the beginning.”

Not the first time we’ve heard these words launch a biblical book, followed by some speaking.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And then God said.”

In the beginning was the Word, says John.

In the beginning, God said, says Genesis.

God said, “Let there be light! Let there be seas and sky and earth, and let the earth put forth vegetation, and let there be the sun and the moon and the stars, and let there be fish and birds and animals.”

And finally, God said, “Let there be humans, humans in our image, humans who have dominion over it all.”

Now, I realize I’m taking a little liberty here, injecting Genesis into the mix: it’s not like there isn’t enough to preach about sans the creation story.

But a friend of mine in high school still teases me about how in college, we were taught to begin the first paragraph of our papers with a broad statement and then whittle it down to our thesis statement—a bit like an upside down triangle.

So I did. “Throughout the ages,” I said, and I got an A on it, for the record.

John must have had the same English prof, though he took it a step further: “In the beginning of it all,” John writes, but what John is wanting to do here is root the story of Jesus not just with Mary and Joseph, all due respect to Matthew and Luke, and not just with the genealogy of Joseph, thank you for your service Matthew, but into the very essence of God and God’s delighted vision for creation and way of creating from the primordial get-go!

In the beginning, he says. Right from then, there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and this same Word has threaded itself through time, and then the same Word became flesh, and we are still telling the Word of God across the world even in this collective space right now.

John wants to remind us that God was from the beginning, and Jesus was God, and therefore also from the Beginning, and now John very much wants us to know that God who has spoken since the beginning of time and through the prophets has now put flesh on the Word, making the intentions and essence and presence of God accessible in history, tangible, incarnate: The Word Incarnate literally means a God with flesh on! Carne, as in, well, just to make my point, carnivore, carnal, chili con carne.

Flesh on the Word Bones of God means that we need not speculate about who God is, there is no room to impose our notions or expectations of God onto God, there’s little latitude now to act in God’s name when God’s name has no business being attached to our act-ions when our actions reflect not God’s agenda but ours: that is what it is to take God’s name in vain, by the way, attaching God’s name to a way of being in the world that has nothing to do with what has been revealed in God’s speech, not least of all in Jesus, which is why it is imperative that I say every pulpit opportunity I have that Christian nationalism is nothing but a heretical word mashup rising dangerously, and likewise America First, because in the beginning God created the world, God so loved the world that God sent the Word into it, which yes, of course happens to include the US, right along with Somalia, Venezuela, Iran, and all the other not-coincidentally non-white countries our present administration has attached with words like “evil,” and “garbage.” Moreover, if you look at the Story of God told with words we say we treasure in our Bible, you see and hear that God consistently aligns most of all with the people who are most suffering, and with the people who serve those who are most suffering, not with the powerful, the rich, and the proud.

I am not making it up.

We believe in Jesus, the Word Incarnate, the embodied Word, the one who walked among us, and who revealed God’s will and ways in tenderness, mercy, and radical love and welcome to strangers, misfits, the forlorn, the subjugated, the broken—and to the powerful, the rich, and the proud, yes, but by telling them directly, in no uncertain words, the sort that would probably get me run out of this pulpit were I to give it a whirl, to knock it off.

Still not making it up.

We hear that this en-fleshed God “lived among us!” I like even better the way the late theologian Eugene Peterson translated it in The Message, “God moved into the neighborhood!”

God moved into the neighborhood.

And listen to this dropped Word: “The light was in the world, and the world came into being through him.”

The whole world is God’s neighborhood.

And therefore the whole world is our neighborhood, and there is no place for bullies in the neighborhood of God.

Dominate, as we hear in Genesis, does not mean what humanity has tended to want it to mean.

Jesus’ entire life was one of “You have heard it said, but I say unto you a new Word.”

This Incarnate Word is not about domination as the world understands it, not about power as the world understands it, not about violence, not about oppression; it’s not about isolation, fear, loneliness, enduring grief; it’s not about exploitation and mockery; it’s not about self-protection and a scarcity mindset; it’s not about despondency or apathy; it’s not about grimness or pursed lips; it’s not about division and sameness; and it’s certainly not about violently overturning another country for the exploitation of oil that benefits the gazillionaires, especially as we simultaneously tout that we are a Christian nation. Like, just this morning the Wall Street Journal reported that reps from Wall Street finance, energy, and defense firms are already on their way to Venezuela to “investigate investment prospects,” and no one not anyone needs to be sitting down to hear that.

I tell you what my Dad woulda had a word here from this pulpit today. Sheesh even I quiver to think of it.

See, instead of all this nonsense, we hear today “What has come into being in the Word was life.”

None of that above business is life-giving: it’s life-taking, life-sapping, life-denying.

This is the most bananas “You have heard it said” that Jesus offers up:

You have heard it said that death has the final word.

But I say unto you, death does have a word, oh yes it does, but it is not the last one.

Life does, because I am the Word who promises that at the end of every day, and all our days, life awaits.

We no longer need to act out of death, or in deference to death, but are instead liberated for life, to steward life, to announce life, to embody life.

I know enough of you now to know of many deaths which have touched so many of you, my family and myself included. Even if I were not to know a single soul here, I’d know that in this single sanctuary there are countless deaths of loved ones, relationships, regrets, addictions, dreams, ways of life, expectations.

Jeremiah would know it too: he tells us of a people who have been in exile, who have suffered deaths caused by pride, and the death of pride; the death of a nation, and the deaths endured because of warring nations.

We hear plainly words of weeping and mourning, because God’s spoken promise does not deny nor erase the realities of death: I like to remind people that the risen Jesus still had the scars.

But it does deny the ultimacy of the realities of death.

And God’s promise denies those who claim ultimacy over the Word of God, who try to redefine the Word of God as it benefits them.

And here’s where we circle back to both the beginning of this sermon, and the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word, a Word which breathed life into creation, a creation which God declared to be ever so good.

That Word became flesh in Jesus born of Mary, who had some words of her own to drop.

John, as well as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not to mention Paul, and all the rest of the Epistles, paid attention to Jesus because they believed that he was God incarnate, and therefore what he did is what God would have done, and, in effect, did, and the lessons that we learned from Jesus were to be understood in a “Thus says the LORD” sort of way!

They wanted us to hear a word that walked in the neighborhood of the world forgiving. Offering mercy. Expressing righteous anger. Healing. Teaching. Exhorting. Feeding. Welcoming. Upending systems that center the powerful and the rich rather than the misfits, the outcast, the powerless, and the poor.

THAT’s the Word Incarnate, the tangibility of God.

In a few moments, we will be celebrating the tangibility of God in the Eucharist, Holy Communion, when we receive quite literally the Body of Christ.

Corpus Christi.

And with it, we become, guess what, the body of Christ.

Corpus Christi.

Rumor has it that Francis Assisi said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.” It’s quite possible that he didn’t actually say that, but the point remains.

It doesn’t need to be either/or, though, but both/and.

We can preach the Gospel with words, announcing loudly that death no longer wins, that there is no need to amass, to protect, to dominate. Speak what needs to be said, write what needs to be written, redefine words which need to be re-understood.

We can also incarnate the Gospel by embodying it, incarnating it, by showing up where there is death or fear, wrapping arms around those who grieve, welcoming those who are vulnerable, especially these days; sharing and celebrating the goodness of God: good food, good beverages, good music, good art, good beauty, because God declared such things good, so very good.

Like, it matters, people.

Words wake up every day with one goal before them: Have meaning.

So if we say that we are a Christian, it means something.

It means everything, actually.

We too wake up every day with meaning, with a purpose, wired not to advance destruction but to advance, absorb, and announce the Word of love in a world mad with so many words of hate, even to our own selves.

We actually are Christened, and we actually are the Corpus Christi.

So now, refreshed in the Word, go, be, do, trust, speak the Word, for it has spoken to you from the beginning.

Thus says the Lord.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/11/26/bishop-resists-naming-a-sub-corpus-christi/b8cf3981-9301-4ba7-a965-ccbe7b1246de/

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