Throughout this season of Advent, we have been focused on the meaning of God’s creativity as we prepare for our celebration of the birth of Christ. We’ve been guided by our reading this morning from the beginning of John’s gospel throughout the season as we’ve considered what it means to say that “the Word,” the grand and initiating Idea of existence, become real in creation itself. This morning, I invite you to embrace John’s description of the Word made flesh as “a creation story” of the Christian church.

I know that is an odd concept. We’ve been told over and over again that the first chapter of Genesis is “the” creation story in the Bible. It makes sense, given that it is the first story that one encounters when reading the Bible. But, an awful thing has happened along the way to the creation story in Genesis 1. Somehow, we’ve been brought to believe that “a” creation story – lovely and poetic – is “the” creation story – literal and unparalleled. Of course, that view of Genesis 1, which is rampant in Church School curriculum and sermons alike, has been perpetuated largely as a reaction to science. There are folks who call themselves “Christian apologists” who have made it their life purpose to teach the first chapter of Genesis as if it were a scientific text, “the Biblical view” of the world’s beginnings, and the anchor of a “Christian worldview.” And what that teaching does – besides make the church look like the ridiculous “flat earth society” – is that it takes away from all of the other wonderful creation stories in the Scriptures. Genesis 2, for example, has a different creation story that starts in the primordial dirt, rather than the global universe. Psalm 104, which we have been using for our Call to Worship throughout this season, is another creation story, that revels in the ordered wildness of creation. Proverbs 8, which we read two weeks ago, is an account of creation through the eye-witness of “Wisdom,” the first of all creation and the delight of God’s eye. Job 38-40 is a powerful tornado-like account of creation, posed in a challenge from God against Job’s and his friends’ hubris. “Where were you,” God asks, “when I created all of this? Could you do this? Can you even comprehend it?” My point is that the Scriptures are full of creation stories, the purpose of which is not to render a scientific origin of the universe, but a poetic, awe-inspiring, worshipful embrace of the world in which we are born and to which we return when we die.

When I ask you to read John 1 as a creation story of the Christian church, I am inviting you to read this Scripture in the spirit in which it was written. Contrary to an empirically-based attempt to master the world through knowledge, the Scriptures invite us to embrace the world in ways that do not meet the eye. And that is how we can read the prologue to John’s gospel.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of humans, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Well, there you have it: The source of life, the light that pierces the darkness, the Worded presence of the creating God is right here, among us, in ways that we can grasp grace and truth. This creation story changes our view of God and it changes our view of the created world.

When we read this story as a creation story, God is not a distant God, who once upon a time fashioned a world and has left us to work it out. This is not a God residing in the heavens, who only occasionally makes cameo appearances in our world to rescue or to destroy. With this story as our story of creation, what we have is a God whose primary way of being is to be wrapped up in our world. As the Apostle Paul once said, quoting the book of Deuteronomy, this is the God whose Word is “not too far away. It is not in heaven … it is not beyond the sea … it is as near to you as the word in your mouth and the truth in your heart. John’s creation story invites us not to look to a God “out there,” but to receive the God “right here.”

Likewise, when we read John’s prologue as a creation story, our view of the world changes. Those dormant trees that we view outside of our windows are not just “things” that we give value only as they benefit us. No, they are the handiwork of the Word, pulsating with life in their veins that will protect them from the harsh winter cold and emerge with leaves and seeds and fruit again in the spring. “What has come into being with him is life.” The person sitting next to you this morning is not simply a member of your club, someone who happens to agree with your way of thinking and worshipping, so you are gathered here in some voluntary society by dint of your own choosing. No, “to all who believed in him, the Word gives power to become children of God.” That person who looks back at you from a mirror is not the failure, the broken, the pointless, the lost person that you might imagine. No, that person is precisely the “flesh” in whom the Word becomes reality, created for God’s own glory and pleasure.

When we read John’s prologue as our creation story, everything changes: God is close at hand participating in our reality; and that everything in our world is infused with meaning and value. Thanks be to God, the Word made flesh. Amen.