In true [TheHardestQuestion] style, I’m going right for the stuff in the brackets. I’ve noticed that many of my fellow THQ bloggers love wrestling with the stuff that the lectionary framers considered [optional]. Or, better yet, they go for the verses that are completely left out of those absurdly discontinuous readings – you know, the ones with all the commas, colons, and hyphens; the ones that are the discombobulated bane of preachers and church office administrators alike.
[Brackets = Revelation]
Editors often use brackets to create a space for something else. They fill their brackets with instructions or, alternatively, with lorem ipsumisms to denote a space that's to be filled by someone else, with something else. It seems to me that the bracketed verses of this Gospel work the same way. The RCL citation unwittingly frames the space for revelation.
John 1:1-14 is the Nativity of Our Lord (III) for years A, B and C. But in case you missed it (probably because watching kids opening their gifts from Santa trumps worship for most of us on December 25th), preachers get another crack at this text a couple Sundays later – this Sunday – now that the Christmas frenzy has settled a bit.
Verses [1-9] are deemed optional, but I think the brackets are irresistibly illuminating. John's telling of God's move to establish an extraordinary [lorem ipsum] for the Word of God to emerge, a tzimtzum that’s both apart-from and in-between ordinary space and time. I like to think that God’s sacramentally in, with, and under the lacuna, the liminal moments of our lives. The stuff in the brackets matters. . . . at least to me.
At Least to Me
But that’s a slippery slope; is it not? The Gospel According to Me? The gospel that matters to me? It’s not a godawful jump from there to the pre-Christmas cover story of USAWeekend that prompted all this. “How Americans Imagine God” is how the title goes.
The idea of God actually revealing God’s self seems pretty passé in our post-modern realities. We [Americans] prefer to imagine our very own [personal] version of [God]. It’s easier that way. [Wrestling] with revelation is too [strenuous] a task. Fill in the brackets with your own words – verbs, nouns adjectives. Have fun with it! Make it game! Americans love games. Luther, however, would call the task tentatio or, auf Deutsch, Anfechtung. Just the sound of that seems way harder than simply imagining God, doesn't it?
Filling the Brackets
But does it really have to be either/or? Imagination or revelation? Imagination versus revelation? Something seems horribly wrong if we can’t keep both in creative juxtaposition. Revelation without imagination stays on the bookshelf, caked with dust. Imagination without revelation feels insubstantial, insignificant, even narcissistic.
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. . . . He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.
These passages from John 1 are all about filling brackets. Here we see God actively, palpably, imaginatively, filling the space betwixt and between us with light and life and being. John 1 is bursting with creative revelation. God making Godself known in here-to-fore unimaginable ways. I don’t believe this was intended to be a singular moment, but the beginning of an endeavor we all share – filling empty spaces, with profound imagination AND revelatory love. But that leads me to . . .
The Hardest Question
It’s not a new THQ, but it's one that both disturbs and challenges me none-the-less: How is it that God in Jesus can come so fully and yet be so thoroughly unknown? What does it mean to be known? Why does it matter?
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Christian Walther - now there's a name. What can I say? Christian? Why, yes, I am. Thank you very much. No one has made a better offer[ing] than Jesus, the Christ, as far as I’m concerned . . . least of all nihilistic atheism. As for the Walther heritage? You’ve got to love a guy who says of the Word and Sacraments: “Whoever does not go to these places to lift the treasure will not fetch any gold. What he gets may look like gold, but it is mere tinsel” ( C.F.W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel, Sixteenth Evening Lecture).
