God's Realm as Neighborhood (Sermon)

 “God’s Realm as Neighborhood”

Genesis 1:1-5 and John 1:1-18

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/21/24

 

Genesis 1:1-5

When God began to create[a] the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b]swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (NRSV)

John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake 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 He 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 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 he of whom I said, ‘He 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 the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.(NRSV)

 

         While the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 differ, they also affirm the same generative force within the universe. Everything, both animate and inanimate, derives from the willful intention of the One whose essence is creativity, relationship, and, therefore, love. The metaphor Genesis 1 uses for the agent of God’s creativity is speech. Even ancient minds recognized that the eternal energy that precedes perception, imagination, and reason hums, vibrates, and eventually explodes into an incarnate reality, a unified voice—a uni-verse. God speaks and water, earth, wind, and fire tumble forth: “Let there be light…let the dry land appear…let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures…let us make humankind in our image…” That’s why, for us, the Christ is synonymous with thepreexistent Word—or the Logos.

As people of faith, we look within and without and make the conscious decision to trust that the Creation, fraught as it is with violence glorified and suffering ignored, is still a magnificent wonder. To affirm God’s presence is to proclaim that the Creation has purpose and connection. And God is the invisible connective energy at work in the Creation. The Image of God, then, is relationship, interdependence, community.

In his paraphrase, The Message, Eugene Peterson rendered John 1:14 this way, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” The term neighborhood refers to far more than streets lined with houses inhabited by people, pets, and possessions. Anywhere that created things exist together in cooperation, contrast, and even conflict are neighborhoods. Our bodies are neighborhoods. Congregations are neighborhoods. Forests and deserts are neighborhoods. Rivers and lakes are neighborhoods. Oceans are the largest neighborhood subdivisions on the earth’s surface. Beneath the atmosphere, the earth itself is a neighborhood; and beyond it, our solar system, every planet and moon circling the same sun, is a neighborhood.

“What has come into being in [Christ],” says John, “was life, and the life was the light of all people.” As Word, Life, and Light, Jesus comes to scatter all the neighborhood-crushing darkness, all the selfishness, resentment, fear, and greed that not only disrupt God’s creative purposes in the world, but that often seem to be gaining the upper hand.

Increasingly, humankind does seem hellbent on denying its interconnectedness. Families, communities, and nations are choosing to close ranks and reject kinship with other families, communities, and nations. We isolate ourselves according to skin color, ethnicity, language, religion, political opinion. We judge those outside our narrow boundaries not simply as other, but as villains against whom we must strive, and whom we must defeat. When that happens, those who claim to believe in God reduce God to a tiny, vindictive, human-imaged idol.

Humankind’s self-inflicted chaos destroys community and threatens us with darkness and death. So, says John, God sends the Incarnate Word to reveal God’s heart, to declare that God’s intent and desire for Creation is life and light, connection and neighborliness.

While John wrote his gospel long before our New Testament canon was established, he also wrote it well after all other canonical gospels and epistles were written. When he begins his version of Jesus’ story, John specifically connects the Jesus narrative to the creation story in Genesis. To me, this says that the scriptures, laden as they are with conflict and contradictions, create another kind of neighborhood. So, the stories and teachings mean the most when we read them in relationship to consistent and foundational utterances such as: Love God. Love neighbor. Do justice. Follow me. Jesus’ own life says and means the most when we understand him as a presence in and for all of Creation, throughout all of time.

As the Logos, Jesus is also the Light which comes to shine into the darkness. For John, the kosmos, or the world, refers to God’s eternally beloved Creation—God’s neighborhood overwhelmed by darkness and in need of redemption and renewed joy. So, God sends the Logos into the kosmos, in the person of Jesus, to reveal the Creator’s love for all things. As the bringer of Light and Life, Jesus’ work is that of restorative justice. He comes to awaken us to paths of awareness, prayer, empathy, and compassionate action for the sake of neighbor and earth.

In talking about John the Baptist, John the Evangelist says, “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John…He himself was not the light, but he came to witness to the light.” The shared calling of all who claim to follow Jesus is to live as humble and grateful witnesses to the Light. To commit ourselves to living as signs of the restoring Logos in the midst of a broken kosmos is, according to John, “to become children of God.”

When talking about the importance of being children of God who do justice and demonstrate neighborliness, one person comes immediately to my mind. Few people have more overtly and gently lived and shared the Johannine vision of God’s neighborhood than Presbyterian clergyman Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers literally broadcast a vision of God’s holy intervention of the Logos into the kosmos, and he did so with Christlike love and kindness.

“I believe that at the center of the universe,” said Mr. Rogers, “there dwells a loving spirit who longs for all that’s best in all of creation, a spirit who knows the great potential of each planet as well as each person, and little by little will love us into being more than we ever dreamed possible. That loving spirit would rather die than give up on any…of us.”¹

To me, that statement of faith beautifully distills John’s theology of the Logos, especially the great affirmation of John 3:17: “God did not send the (Logos) into the (kosmos) to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

The most profound work of the children of God is the work of simply neighboring one another in the name of Christ. Our purpose is to live by the light and love of the Logos in the midst of a kosmos that always needs to be reminded of and restored to its eternal Belovedness.

What are your gifts for bearing witness to the Life and the Light? Our particular gifts reveal God’s purposes for our lives. They teach us that as children of God we are specifically blessed to live as unique blessings for others. Our blessedness leads each of us into our own truest and deepest joy. And that joy helps to lead all of us toward a more grateful, generous, just, and neighborly world.

         

¹https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/32106.Fred_Rogers?page=1