Creekside Church Sermon of January 7, 2001 "Before the Beginning " John 1:1-14	Rev. David Bibbee
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We have all wondered the same. Where did I come from? Why am I here? A poet has written, "We come from a dark abyss, and we go to a dark abyss, and the luminous interval we call life." I never found these verses terribly satisfying. A theologian coined a concept called, "The threat of non-being." To not exist is not a thought that can easily be grasped. To think that we appear, then disappear, and that's all there is, is a threat. The longing planted within us rebels against the thought. Each person has a yearning to be connected with something permanent and have a place and purpose within it. The Bible has something to say about life following death, but very little about before we were born, although it was a widespread belief during the period the scriptures were being written. But not so with Jesus.

We have just completed another celebration of Jesus' birth. As we pass the candlelight at the close of our Christmas Eve service, I recited several scriptures, one from our gospel lesson. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God. Through him all things were made. What struck me in that moment was that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem...he appeared there.

Jesus was present before his birth and conception. He was present before Mary and Joseph. He existed before the prophets and patriarchs. He was there before Cain and Able, Adam and Eve; before birds and beasts, before the first fish wriggled from the sea and gulped air, before the first single-celled organism appeared, before the earth, before the stars were made and assigned their places, before the Big Bang, the Word, Jesus Christ, was with God. Before the beginning, Jesus was fashioning creation at God's will.

Some of you might be thinking, "We have all we can handle already with what we know about Jesus, and we're not exactly doing a stellar job with it. Now you want us to deal with his preexistence? It's all we can do to be his little lights in the world, as it is. Making Christianity credible with all of those miracle stories is hard enough in a day when people don't believe such things, so what could be tangible and fruitful about this preexistence stuff?

Our answer to this has to do with how comfortable we are with the present arrangements. If you don't have the time or imagination to see a better world, a better life, or a better you, preexistence will seem of little value. People for whom it matters what life was like before things got into the state they are, are those for whom preexistence is important. If you are hurting, hungry, or homeless; if you have been broken and suffered and have endured the sting of death and the burden of grief, it is not all that hard to believe that there was one day before, and will be some day in the future, a life that is better. Life is so tragic for so many. For many the only thing to base their hope upon is the blueprint drawn up by the God and Son Construction Company, detailing what they had in mind when they began creating.

One of the most popular mayors in New York City was Fiorella LaGuardia. He liked to stay in touch with what was happening in city government, so he would surprise everyone by filling in for office holders when they were sick or on vacation. Once he was called to preside over night court. It was mid- winter. The temperature stayed in the single digits. So the mayor was moved by the sight of a trembling man charged with stealing a loaf of bread. He pleaded, "I had to do it, Judge, my family is starving."

LaGuardia was in a tight spot. The last thing he wanted to do was add to the man's burden by fining him and putting him in jail. He buried his face in his hands several seconds, looked up, and said, "I have to punish you. There can be no exception to the law. You are fined $10." The observers gasped, but LaGuardia was reaching into his pocket. He then picked up his famous sombrero and tossed a bill into it. "Here's the $10 for your fine." He said. "Furthermore, I'm going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a city where a man has to steal bread to feed his family. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant." The courtroom erupted into applause as people dug into their pockets. The hat was passed, and the disheveled man left the courtroom with $65 in his pocket.

The mayor's decision was not based solely upon a statute which demanded punishment for the offender. LaGuardia was not satisfied with present arrangements. He appealed to a higher principle-an established understanding of goodness and mercy which existed before the rule of law.

"He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him. Without Him not one thing came into being." Echoes of John are heard in Colossians I where Paul writes, "He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth are created. He himself is before all creation, and in Him all things hold together." The One who loves us, heals us, and saves us, is the One who in a manner beyond comprehension, established the stars in their course, molded the mountains and wove the winds, and created the beauty and complexity of the earth.

We live in an amazing time. Incredible discoveries are made every day about the world inside us and around us. The human genome project is on the verge of mapping the genetic code of human beings. What was considered inconceivable a short time ago, is now fact. The benefits of these discoveries are profound, but is also tinged with an element of arrogance. In this technological age, life is looked at as a problem to be solved. Some day, science will get to the bottom of everything. The extraordinary will be ordinary. There will be an explanation for everything, and God will no longer need to be part of the equation.

But guess what? Just when science puts the massive jigsaw puzzle together, it is startled to realize that the puzzle is just one tiny piece of a much larger puzzle. As one physicist said, "The more we know about life, the stranger it becomes." A theologian observed, "We do not solve the mysteries of God, we enter into them. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go."

The preexistence of Christ is something filled with tremendous mystery, but it is not something you will see on the X-Files. It has implications for our church. As I studied this message I learned something about the context of Paul's two references to Christ's preexistence. He brings it up while dealing with challenges in the churches of Colossia and Philippi. The issues? The same things we deal with today... quarrels over teaching, dissention, the budget, fresh or silk flowers on the altar.

Paul wanted them to see their everyday issues against the backdrop of a very big picture. Our relationship to Jesus and his plan for the world are bigger than we know. The plan was in place long before we came along...long before Elkhart City was at Benham and Wolf, or at 6th and Garfield, before that. As we make preparations for moving to an interim facility, I will talk with you about the nature of the church, the foundation upon which it is built, and the purpose of our existence as members of it.

For the first layer of the foundation I have chosen this theme of Christ's preexistence. I chose it because in the course of all that must be done, we must remember that we are part of a project that has been a long time in the making. It is enormous. It is eternal. Believing that we are a part of this ever-enduring project begun by God before time itself makes a difference in how we conduct ourselves.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God... and the Word became flesh and lived among us. Jesus didn't look how we thought God should look. He didn't act the way we thought God should act. He didn't avenge his accusers. In a way that always will baffle us, he suffered and died, all because he loved us so much that he wanted to call us out of our darkness and into his light, and give us a part to fulfill in the plan which began before the hills in order stood or earth received its frame. Believing this makes all the difference, because there won't be a time, a test, a trouble, or a transition we face, alone or as a church, that we will face alone.

There is an invisible road leading from this place to an as yet, unknown place. The building we are in will change, our ministries will change, and we will be changed. We are excited. We are uncertain. We are scared. But we are never on our own.

When the author, Lloyd Douglas, was a college student he lived in a boarding house. On the first floor there lived a retired music teacher whose health prevented him from leaving the room. The two became friends, and every morning they repeated a ritual. Douglas would knock, open the old man's door and ask, "Well, what's the good news?" The teacher would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair and say, '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!'"

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