Creekside Church Sermon of January 4, 1998 "Present From Day One" John 1:1-5, 10-14	Rev. David Bibbee
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"In the beginning was the Word." We last heard this familiar first sentence to the prologue of John's gospel on Christmas Eve. In particular we focused on the principal passage of the New Testament..."And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us." Today we are back to the prologue. The first three verses are so thick and profound you could spend scores of Sundays probing them and not exhaust the meanings.

Some may wonder why we read this passage around Christmas. It doesn't have any of the elements we associate with the Christmas story...no angels, shepherds, or wise men. No star, no Mary, no Joseph, no Bethlehem, no birth. Jesus just shows up ready to be baptized and get to work. He seems to know what he's doing-like he has been around a while, which is what John wants to impress upon us.

In fact, if you take John's word for it, the way we date history isn't accurate. We date things in relationship to Christ's birth. We have just begun the one-thousand-nine-hundred and ninety-eighth year since he was born. But according to verse two, there is no before Christ, only after. "The Word was with God." Jesus, the Word was in the beginning with God. Not the beginning of the Christmas story, not the beginning of the Bible, but way back...before God created the heavens and the earth, before the big bang or the carbon molecule, before time, Christ was already present, coexistent with God.

Jesus was around before he was born. This is heavy stuff. I can identify with those who say we have more of Jesus than we can handle "after" he was born without thinking about what he was up to before Bethlehem. How are we supposed to deal with the pre-existence of Jesus when we're still working on his lesson about loving our neighbor?

Let's face it, pre-existence doesn't concern us much. Children sometimes wonder about it. Did your kids ever ask, "Where was I when you were 20?" "You weren't around yet." "But where was I before I was born?" "Your mother will tell you all about that when you're older." It's hard to grasp. I'm here now. Where was I before? Other religions have doctrines concerning where we were before this life and where we will be when we're not here. The Old Testament writers speak of God's knowing us before we were knit in our mother's womb, but Christianity has nothing to say about pre-existence. Not ours, anyway.

Before Jesus had a name, before he became flesh he was the Word who was with God. In Colossians 1:15 Paul says, "He is the image of the invisible God; the first-born of all creation. In him all things were created. He is before all things and in him all things hold together." The letter to the Hebrews begins, "God has spoken to us in these last days by a son...through whom He created the world." Pre-existence. Before David or Moses, Adam or Eve, before Eden was on the drawing board, there was the Word, with God, creating and ordering.

And the average person responds to such a thought- "So what?" What does such an ultimate concept have to do with my day in, day out life? Good question. I confess I don't spend much time thinking about what Jesus was up to before he was born, and I would guess you don't either. It doesn't apply to our situation. We do best to dwell on what we know. Apply the little lessons we have learned along the way to here and now. We "occasionally" talk about what we believe, but most of the time we order our lives according to what we can do with our influence, ingenuity, resourcefulness and common sense. We speak of God's guidance, but practically speaking, we stick by what the philosopher Protagoras said twenty- five hundred years ago..."Man is the measure of all things."

It's easy to forget, however, that our measuring stick is a short one. In the Buddhist tradition there is a story about a meeting between the Buddha and a little creature called the monkey- god. The monkey-god was ingenious, but also very vain and boastful, and he wanted to show Buddha that he was just as powerful, if not more so. The monkey performed all kinds of amazing feats, but the Buddha just sat-silent, polite and unimpressed. The monkey-god was becoming frustrated, so he pulled the last feat out of his bag-the most impressive one of all.

"Watch this!" the monkey-god shouted. He took an enormous leap and disappeared from sight. He was gone for a long time but finally bounced back, wanting like everything for Buddha to ask where he had been. But the Buddha said nothing, so the monkey-god told him anyway, "Where have I been? I'll tell you where I have been. I was at the outermost limits of the universe. Want to know what I saw?" No response. "Okay, I'll tell you. I saw five huge granite pillars reaching up till their tops disappeared in the clouds. What do you think of that?" Buddha sat expressionless and finally answered the monkey-god, but not with words. He raised his hand and held it to the monkey-god's eyes, and as he looked, his attention was drawn to the fingers, but he did not see them as fingers, but as five huge granite pillars which reached up to and disappeared in the clouds.

Something similar goes on when we forget the larger measure of things. The pre-existence of Jesus matters greatly because it tells us we are part of something more grand than our own projects. When we sign on with Jesus, we are part of something older and larger than we can imagine. The pre-existence of Jesus teaches us to be humble. We all one day will pass away and so will all we accomplished and collected during our time on earth. Heaven and earth will pass away, the Bible says, but God's Word will not pass away. Jesus Christ, not man, is the measure of all things.

But this cosmic concept not only makes us humble. It also gives us hope. While we may not think much about it because of our comfortable existence, many in this world who have a hard time think about another time. People who live in poverty, people who are homeless and hungry, whose homelands have been destroyed and their families killed by the ravages of war, people whose lives have been swept away on a tide of sorrow and suffering will tell you the pre-existing Word is important. They, more than we, know the transitory nature of things. They know well how life can pick you up and cast you down. They know this world isn't home. They draw hope from the Word with God at the beginning because they know that their pain is not what God had in mind. It wasn't God who decided they should suffer.

In Hebrews 11:15 it says, "For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland, a better country, a heavenly one." Those of us who have it good tend to make peace with what we have and hold onto it. But people who have had it hard draw hope from being connected to who was in the beginning and who will remain at the end.

I know adoptive parents whose son wants to connect with his family, but not his family of origin. His earliest memories of abuse and neglect are too painful to cause him to want to connect with them. He has made a family tree and collected photographs of people he has never met, yet whom he feels he belongs to because the love of his adoptive family saved him. He feels he belongs to people who lived long before him, though not connected by blood, and being part of this larger family gives him a feeling of belonging and hope.

It makes a difference whether you believe you are connected to the Word that is as old as time, or if you believe you only occupy a little wisp of time and that just as you came from nowhere you will be absorbed into nowhere in the silence of space. It makes a difference to believe that the Word present from the beginning, came into the world, emptied himself and became flesh, one of us, to teach us, suffer with us and die with us. To those who know the hard times of life, the belief in Christ who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, makes a profound difference.

The pre-existence of Christ matters because it helps us be humble. It gives us hope, and part of that hope is tied to knowing we are connected to a constant. Sometimes it seems that constants are like an endangered species. Tomorrow flows like a river and there are changes at every turn. But there remains one fixed point.

In his commentary on John, William Barclay said the idea of pre-existence is nearly impossible to grasp but means one practical tremendous thing. "If the Word was with God, and if the Word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God was always like Jesus." From day one, through the millennia, God's light, life, and love have come through. We know because we have seen it in Jesus.

When Lloyd Douglas, who wrote the novel "The Robe" was in college, he lived in a boarding house. In the first floor apartment there lived a retired music teacher. Every morning the two engaged in a friendly ritual. Lloyd would come downstairs, knock, open the man's door and say, "Well, what's the good news?" The old teacher then picked up his tuning fork, tapped on the side of his wheelchair and said, "That's middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C!"

The Word from beyond time, entered time, clothed himself in human form, illumined our dark with his light, gave us the unchanging constancy of God's love.

He was in the beginning with God, and the Word became flesh and blood and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth, and we have seen his glory.

I hope you now understand a little more about the importance of this passage. Remember...the one who made middle C, the one who is always like Jesus, is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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