Tuesday January 2, 2024
Steve falci
Sunday sermon:Growing to Know Jesus More Deeply in 2024
Jesus is the Word who is one with God from the beginning of time. The Word became flesh and lived among us, giving us the opportunity to know God more deeply through Jesus. As we move into 2024, how can we deepen our relationship with Jesus and experience the light that John tells us no darkness can overcome? Read the full text of Steve’s compelling sermon on John 1: 1-18 below.
Growing to Know Jesus More Deeply in 2024
In John’s Gospel today’s we are greeted by, what for me has always been, among the most powerful and mystical lines in all of Scripture:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
First a little context – Please bear with me (or maybe even tolerate me) – this is what happens when the preacher’s context is some recent academic learning. 😊
All of the Gospels provide a perspective on origins or lineage of Jesus:
· Mark tells us that Jesus was a man from Nazareth fulfilling the prophesies of the prophet Isaiah.
· Matthew and Luke provide genealogies – Matthew links Jesus to Abraham and proceeds through David and Luke takes Jesus’ lineage all the way back to Adam.
While these three Gospels link Jesus to the promised messiah in the Hebrew scriptures, John takes us back to the beginning of time and establishes Jesus as the Word who predates creation who is one with the God of the Hebrew scriptures. John’s Gospel was composed later than the three synoptic Gospels (Mathew, Mark, and Luke) as Christianity was growing throughout the Mediterranean world where Greek philosophy was prevalent. Word, translated from the ancient Greek Logos, was understood by Greek philosophers as the “ultimate reason” that brought order to the world. Understanding the Logos and the Logos’ relationship to God would be a quest for the early Christians in the first centuries of the Common Era as they sought to know and understand Jesus as the incarnate God who traveled through Palestine teaching and performing miracles.
As we sit here at the end of 2023 where we have experienced much darkness, on the precipice of 2024 where we look out with both hope and trepidation and amid the joyous season of celebrating the birth of our incarnate Lord, I believe this powerful, mystical opening of the Gospel of John is an invitation to us to reflect on the quest that continues in our time to better know God and God’s revelation to us as the Word, Jesus Christ, here and now.
While the opening line of the Gospel today firmly establishes Jesus as one with God, later in the gospel John reminds us that the Word became flesh and lived among us. For me the Jesus, the Word made flesh, who walked the earth, experienced joys, and sorrow, loved, and suffered, puts a face on God that allows us to come to know God better through Jesus.
It points to one way we can continue the quest to know God through Jesus. Coming to know Jesus more deeply as a friend, companion and continuing to develop a relationship with Jesus as a way to deepen our relationship with God. Having Jesus as a friend to walk through challenging times with, to let us know God is there and that friend is the light that overcomes darkness that John heralds in the Gospel this morning.
And looking back on 2023, there were many times we needed to see that light.
· The massacre of our Jewish brothers and sisters on October 7 and the ensuing war that still rages.
· Closer to home, the mass shooting in Lewiston
· On a national level, we are as divided as a nation as we have been since the civil war.
· On a planetary level, it was the hottest year on record and the recent global climate summit did not seem to do nearly enough to set a collaborative path to mitigate the potentially catastrophic impacts of Climate change.
This says nothing of struggles and loss each of us may have experienced in our individual lives.
An Australian Jesuit priest, Richard Leonard, was moved to author a book entitled Where the Hell is God, after his sister was tragically and inexplicably left a quadriplegic after a terrible car accident. He writes about relating to God as a friend who can “accompany” us though the darkest times we encounter.
“The image [God as friend] is appealing because we choose our friends and they choose us, we like to spend time with them, and tell intimate things to our best friends that we tell to few others. Sometimes, when we are on top of the world or in a crisis, we may call our best friends even ahead of our families. And we know our friends like us because they seek us out and want to share our life. They accompany us throughout life, attending us, enriching us, and supporting us.”[i]
Leonard continues. “It’s not childish to call God our friend, or to claim Jesus and the Spirit as our best friends, I think it’s a particularly adult idea. Jesus is with us every moment of life, especially when we wonder where the hell God has gone.”[ii]
All good friendships are mutual and require work to grow. Leonard adds, “Christ as friend does not barge in. He waits patiently for an invitation to enter our lives at whatever level we want.”[iii]
I would humbly suggest that our work is to strive to make ourselves continually available to Jesus so there is an open invitation for him to enter our awareness so that we can feel his presence and guidance in our daily lives.
I believe just being here this morning we are doing just that! Gathering, as a community of friends around Jesus’ table to share in the meal that he has invited all of us to attend. And we can do this weekly! Continuing to build and strengthen the bonds of community so that we can support each other and experience Jesus’ love through one another.
Developing a consistent prayer life to me is another way to give Jesus an open invitation to enter our lives even when we least expect it. I know this can be challenging amid times of tumult when I do find it hard to slow down and pray. But I also have found that striving to make time to pray, even among the tumult, is just part of the work we need to do to make ourselves available to Jesus.
This is a time of year when we generally make resolutions. Why not consider a resolution to renew or try a new practice of prayer to deepen your relationship with Jesus? There is no one best way to pray, and it can be fun exploring different ways to pray and finding what’s best for you. If I had a better sense of timing, I would have asked Rob to preach on this Sunday last year, because Sam Deflitch, Diane Harvey and I led a workshop on prayer last January to explore together as a group the myriad of ways to pray and connect with God.
One text we used, Learning to Pray,[iv] by James Martin could serve as a guide in an exploration of prayer. Martin notes Learning to Pray is written for all - anyone who is new to prayer, has had trouble praying, prays regularly or prays occasionally and wants to learn more. I have a couple of copies in the back of the church if you want to have a look and see if it might be helpful to you.
Learning to Pray is an invitation to explore prayer, while also providing some excellent summaries of specific practices of prayer. I’ll touch upon a few.
A practice that I have found helpful and is discussed in detail in Learning to Pray is a prayer called the Examen, a foundational prayer of Ignatian Spirituality, where you sit quietly, give thanks to God and reflect on the events of the day to identify where you may have felt God’s presence and where these movements may be providing you direction on where God may be calling you to make a difference in your day to day life.
There are opportunities here at St. John’s each week to gather in small groups to explore ways you may find helpful to connect to Jesus. One such opportunity is Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is ancient contemplative practice where we learn to slow down, sit quietly, and experience the presence of God. Dick Siener has led a Centering Prayer group on Thursday mornings for years. Derek Birch has recently begun to lead a group on Sunday mornings at 9:00, between the 8 and 10:00 services. So, if you can stay a little later after 8:00 or come before 10:00, this could help build a prayer routine into your week.
Exploring and praying with scripture is another way to deepen our relationship with Jesus. If you have time on Wednesday mornings, please come join our Reading Between the Lines Group and explore and discuss some of the upcoming Sunday readings. In Learning to Pray Martin also describes some prayer practices using scripture to deepen your relationship with God. Lectio Divina a practice dating back to the monastic traditions of the Middle Ages, is designed to help us find union with God through reading, meditating, and praying on sacred scripture. Ignatian imaginative prayer is another way to use scripture to deepen our relationship with Jesus. Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical of this practice, which involves reading a passage of scripture and using your imagination to place yourself in the scene. While sounding a bit hokey, there have been times it has allowed me to look into Jesus’s face and see the loving assurance of a dear friend.
I apologize for this whirlwind of prayer, but my intention is to leave you excited about the myriad of possibilities for you to connect with God and to deepen your relationship with God through prayer. Prayer, in whatever form works best for you, is an invitation to Jesus to come into your life as a treasured friend who wants to walk through life with you. A friend who is there to listen to your deepest fears as well as your boldest aspirations. Establishing a discipline of prayer can help you slow down enough to feel God’s loving embrace and listen for God’s direction.
It’s important to remember that this is not about getting prayer right all the time, it’s about the journey to deepen our relationship with God. As Thomas Merton points out, that while there is much uncertainty on the journey and we may often feel that we do not know where we are going, the desire alone to please God and search for God’s direction is indeed pleasing to God.
So let us consider the opportunities we have to continue, in our time, the quest of Christians throughout the ages to know the mystical Word, the Logos, heralded by John, who is one with God and who existed from the beginning of time. The Word who became flesh that John tells us came to live among us, lives among us today! As we move forward with hope and trepidation as we enter 2024, may we continue to reach out and build our relationship with Jesus, grow to know him more deeply, and experience Jesus as the light John tells us no darkness can overcome.
[i] Richard Leonard, SJ, “Where the Hell is God,” Hidden Spring, 2010, pg. 66
[ii] Ibid, pg. 66
[iii] Ibid, pg. 67
[iv] James Marti, SJ “ Learning to Pray, A Guide for Everyone,” Harper Collins, 2021