Sermon on John 1:1-14 | by Frank C. Senn |

Hodie Christius natus est. „Today Christ is born,“ says an old liturgical text. Today is the birthday of Jesus the Christ, Son of God and son of Mary. Usually many churches in the United States, especially Protestant churches, are closed on December 25 – „in honor of Christ’s birthday,“ many of us have sarcastically said. But today is also a Sunday, the fixed day of Christian worship, the Lord’s Day. So many Protestant churches are having services today in spite of it being Christmas.

Let us not forget that the Puritans who settled in this country in the 17^th century, and who influenced much of American Protestantism, purposely did not observe Christmas. The puritan objection, of course, was that Christmas was bound up with the pagan solstice festivals and in Catholic practice never completely shed the pagan trappings. And then there was all that merriment. „God rest ye merry, gentlemen.“ Christmas merriment was not for the Calvinist Scrooges.

Well, it’s true. Once Christians got started celebrating a yearly festival of the Nativity of our Lord, they couldn’t stop themselves. A number of generations after the time of Jesus some far-flung communities of Christians around the Mediterranean Sea began to surround the winter solstice, the shortest days and longest nights of the year, with stories and songs about Jesus‘ birth. The center of such observances was Rome, the capital of the sun-worshiping Mediterranean world. Once Rome started it sometime in the 4^th century, the practice spread elsewhere.

So was Christmas just a way for Christians to counter the Roman celebration of the birth of the Invincible Sun that had gained popularity during in the 3rd century? Perhaps. Were Christians influenced by the way pagans kept sacred holidays at the solstice? Certainly. Did they have any knowledge of when Jesus was actually born? Probably not.

However, there was a spiritual way of calculating the date that Christian teachers had learned from the Jewish rabbis. It’s a rather complicated calculation. It involved the conviction that their Savior had to have been conceived on the same day that he passed over from death to life, to fulfill the Jewish view that the redemptive Passover occurred on the same day on which God began to create the world. Jesus‘ death was clearly at Passover time, near the spring equinox. So his birth would be nine months later. What better time for a festival than the gloomy days of late December.

So for better or for worse, whether it was intended or not, Christmas became intertwined with the solstice festival. In the culture of Christendom, when the whole society was Christian, this may have worked. Christological meanings could be perceived in symbols provided by nature. Many of the symbols of Christmas echo the solstice aspects of rebirth and hope in darkness. Holly, for example, was thought to be important because it retains its greenery right through the winter months, and as such it’s a symbol of summer life in the winter starkness. Holly was the male symbol of this greenery, and Ivy was the feminine, the two often placed together as a symbol of fertility at the dark end of the year. The Christmas tree may have roots in this same symbolic universe, although it’s evolution is pretty complicated, including its use as a prop in the late medieval paradise play on December 24, complete with dangling fruit to tempt Adam and Eve. But Lutherans were the first to put lights on the tree to symbolize the light of Christ.

With the dissolution of the culture of Christendom under the advance of secularism, combined with growing religious pluralism in Western societies, the public celebration of Christmas has become a solstice festival shorn of any Christological meanings. Things have really deteriorated when Santa Claus has replaced a Christian saint and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer becomes a Christian symbol.

Well, solstices celebrations from time immemorial have demanded celebrations. Remove the Christian liturgical overlay and the secular symbols of celebration will come to the fore.

Having been twice „down under,“ I can’t help but think about how my Australian friends are celebrating Christmas with outdoor parties and trips to the beach during the holidays. The winter solstice symbols of the northern hemisphere certainly don’t work for them, although that doesn’t stop European immigrants from trying to make them work. Increasingly, however, southern hemisphere Christians are finding symbols drawn from their own natural and cultural contexts that are appropriate to Christmas.

Christmas owes its popularity to the solstice. If you think about it, the Word didn’t become flesh in the nativity of Jesus but in his conception. The feast of the Annunciation proclaims the big theological statement. But on March 25 that’s overshadowed by a bigger theological statement – the death and resurrection of the Son of God. So the Nativity at the solstice received the incarnational focus. It has become so big – so big that the economy depends on it – that I doubt that we in the northern hemisphere can disentangle Christmas from it. There’s even a reference in our Gospel today to the light shining in the darkness and the darkness not extinguishing it.

Yes, the daylight is now growing longer for us. But the theological meaning of Christmas doesn’t depend on the solstice symbolism of light and darkness. It transcends that symbolism and speaks to us in both the northern and the southern hemispheres. This meaning is also found in the Prologue to the Gospel of John: „The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.“

Word-made-flesh: this is the ancient Latin et incarnatus est that we recite in the Creed: „And became incarnate of the virgin Mary, and was made man.“

„The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.“ If we want both literalness and clarity in translating this phrase, we might say: „and pitched a tent among us.“ The reference is to God tabernacling or tenting among us, just as God dwelt with his people Israel as they traveled through the wilderness of Sinai, which is the central image of the Jewish Feast of Succoth or Booths.

But the one word that Latin-speaking Christians sang over and over again in this Season tells us the why and the what and the how of the festivity of this day. That word was „today“ (Hodie).

„Today“ echoes through the songs that come down to us through the generations. Hodie Christus natus est-„Christ is born today.“ It did not mean and it does not mean „On this day many years ago.“ It meant and it means today – this day. It is the truth today. An old song says, „Today true peace has come down to us from heaven; today the heavens drip honey upon the entire world.“ Do we want an image we can feel and taste today? „Today the heavens drip honey.“

Can we make this word hodie our word? Can we believe that it is today that the Word is made flesh and dwells among us? Can we believe that today the glory of God gets down on earthly streets and into earth homes? Can we believe that today Christ is born in us? „Born that man no more may die,“ as Charles Wesley put it? Can we then let Christmas burst the 24 hours of December 25^th so that its stories and songs, its hodie of hospitality and peace and of heaven-raining-honey, fill all the days until we celebrate The Epiphany on January 6 or Candlemas on February 2 and beyond? Can we look each morning at the stories in the newspapers and say to them, hodie, today the Word of God has pitched a tent in our midst? Can we look straight into the face of evil in our day – in all its guises – and shout, hodie, today you are finished, washed up, washed out in the waters that burst when a baby was born today, washed out in the waters that pour down baptism upon us. We live to make it so.

And so we will keep the festival. We will keep it in these weeks with the stories of Scripture, with the Bible open to Isaiah and to Luke’s and Matthew’s first chapters and to the first page of John’s Gospel. We will keep it with the Christmas songs and carols that now can be fully sung in our churches and in our homes. We will keep it with gifts for one another, with surprises that spring on us throughout these days. We will keep it with some precious and lovely silence as well. Hodie Christus natus est. „Christ is born today.“ Amen.