John 1
This week the choir
brings us the message through their music, which revolves around the first
chapter of John, expressing the way that God came to us through Jesus, a
flesh-and-blood human being who was at the same time one with God.
Not to leave the
children out, this meditation on that subject will be offered before the
cantata. Obviously, it won’t be
verbatim.
The seed pods are
gathered from a tree in the churchyard, pictured here. Each child will have one. They are relatively fresh and when the kids
inevitably shake them in time with the later music, the sound will probably
only annoy their older siblings.
Good morning! I have
something for everybody today, but I’m just going to show one of these to you
for now, and give them out later. This
is a seed pod that I picked up from the ground under a tree out back.
Every fall, when the time is right, the tree produces seed
pods like this one. It doesn’t happen in
the summer or the winter or the spring.
It only happens in the fall.
Nobody forces the tree to do it.
I cannot walk up and say, “Tree!
Grow some seeds for us!” and I cannot walk up and say, “Tree! Don’t grow any seeds anymore!” It’s in the nature of the tree to produce
these seeds.
It’s a funny thing,
too. The seeds are both part of the tree
and separate from it. They come from the
tree and, given the right conditions, they grow up into that same kind of tree
again. It’s like the original tree is
part of the seed, like the seed is part of the tree. Without seeds, the tree wouldn’t be itself,
and without the tree, the seeds wouldn’t even exist.
That’s kind of one way to think about God and Jesus.
The Bible tells us that Jesus was with God forever, from before
the beginning of the world, that he was part of God, like the seed was part of
the tree even in spring, back before it even started to form. Then, when the time was right, he came to be
part of the world so that we could know more about God and his love. He was always part of God and God was always
part of him.
The Bible talks about it by calling Jesus the Word that God
speaks, because words are something that come from our deepest heart and say
something about what is way down inside us.
It says,
“In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God and all
things came into being through him…”
And it says,
“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
There’s
a lot about God that we don’t understand.
But what we do understand is what God shows us in the way that Jesus
lived, which was always the way that God wanted him and all of us to live. He loved us, and he still does, because that
is just who God is. God is love.
In a few minutes the choir is going to sing about that, and we’re going to hear
more from the Bible about how God sent Jesus to share that love, but let’s beat
them to it, and we’ll sing about it before they do. Do you know this song?
“Love came down at Christmas,
Love all-lovely, love divine.
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.”
Now, be sure you get one of these seed pods to take with you
as you head back to your seat.
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