Deacon Leah Sandwell-Weiss

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

Dear friend,

We’ve heard this gospel reading from John 1 throughout the advent season this year. We’ll hear it again during Lent. And sometimes I get a bit bored with it, sad to say. I hear it so often that I fail to hear the amazing “new thing” that John is telling us: the Word was with God from the beginning and that Word was Jesus Christ. And even more amazing and new: this Word, this eternal divine concept, came to live with us, to dwell with us.

The concept of “the Word,” or Logos in Greek, sounds like it doesn’t have anything to do with earthly things. Several early Christians apparently thought so, too. They thought Jesus was a spirit in the form of a man, not a real man, and so his life on earth and the crucifixion were a form of play acting, and not “real.” God couldn’t, wouldn’t, live as a real human.

Yet he did.

He was a baby in a womb, born through Mary’s labor and blood. He nursed from her breasts and was hungry and cried and scraped his knees and got splinters in his hands working wood. He ate bread and cheese and dates and olive oil and maybe a little lamb on special occasions. He wept over the death of his father and his friends and celebrated at his brothers’ weddings. He drank wine and maybe had a pot of beer at the corner bar with his carpenter friends after work. He loved his family, his neighbors, his community, his God. He saw the disparity between the poor and the rich, Romans, urban merchants, religious leaders, and peasants – and knew that wasn’t the way God meant things to be.

And that makes all the difference in the world.

Leah Sandwell-Weiss, Deacon