Beginning and New Beginning

John 1:1-18
Epiphany Sunday 2011

A couple days before Christmas, I was helping my eighteen-year-old son change a flat tire on his truck in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. To tell you the truth, I was enjoying myself. I’m not a fan of flat tires, mind you; but once your kid leaves home for college, changing a flat tire together in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant actually feels like quality time together.

We weren’t quite finished when we were approached by a panhandler, a man in his late 30s or early 40s asking for a meal. He said he was embarrassed to ask for help, and he didn’t want money. But he said he was an out-of-work construction worker and he had four mouths to feed, and if I would buy him supper, he would sure be grateful to me. I wanted to say to him, “Can’t you see you’re interrupting a father-son thing here? Leave us alone.” Then I wondered, “Do I have a neon sign on my back that flashes, ‘Sucker!’?” I wanted to say, “Go scam somebody else, man. I don’t have time for this, and your supper is not in my budget.” Not to mention the fact that we were in the parking lot of a burger joint and he wanted dinner for four from the chicken place a half a mile away. Right.

But it was a couple days before Christmas, and he sure enough looked as though he was down on his luck, and he didn’t ask for cash, and I thought about what I would want somebody to do for my son if he was out of work in his 30s or 40s with four mouths to feed, and besides, it had only been ten days since I had preached a sermon about God being in the business of filling the hungry with good things (Luke 1:53; 6:21), so the next thing I knew, I was standing at the counter of that chicken place buying dinner to go for four people I still don’t know.

I don’t know whether I got scammed or whether I actually helped someone, but along the way the fellow I bought dinner for said this: “I’ll be glad when this year is over. I sure hope next year is better than this one was.” At one time or another in our lives, every one of us has a deep need to turn the calendar to a new year. Sooner or later, every one of us comes to a place in our lives when we need fresh start, a new beginning.

That’s what those New Year’s celebrations that some of us are still recovering from do. “Ringing out the old and ringing in the new” is our culture’s attempt at a ritual of new beginning. Those resolutions we make his time of year express the yearning for a fresh start that deep in the human soul we hunger and thirst for. We need new beginnings, and that’s what this morning’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary is about. It’s about a new beginning.

John 1:1-18 begins by talking about the old beginning: “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.” Those verses are about creation, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). But the point of talking about the old beginning, about creation, in the first three verses of the gospel of John is to create a springboard for talking about a new beginning, about a new creation, about being born all over again “of God,” verse 13 says.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is about “new wine” and “a new garment” (Luke 5:36-37) and “a new covenant” (Luke 22:20) and “a new commandment” (John 13:34) and “new life” (Romans 7:6) and “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and “a new self” (Ephesians 4:24). God knows every one of us needs a new self every now and then! And this morning’s gospel lesson is the springboard to a new self for every one of us, for every one of us “to be renewed,” as Ephesians 4:23 puts it, and “to clothe [ourselves] with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24).

If you only look at the surface of the New Year’s celebrations and New Year’s dissipations and New Year’s resolutions and New Year’s dissolutions, you might not recognize that underneath it all is a deep hunger and thirst in the human soul for a fresh start, a new beginning; but that’s what it is. And verse 12 in this morning’s gospel lesson provides the blueprint, the “new and living way,” as Hebrews 10:20 puts it, to that fresh start, that new beginning, that “new self” that God knows every one of us needs. Three words in John 1:12: receive, believe, become. Receive, believe, become.

Have you ever thought about why it is that “self-help” books are a billion-dollar business? It’s because self-help doesn’t work. If self-help worked, you could by one good self-help book and you’d be done. But have you noticed how those of us who buy self-help books can’t buy just one? It’s like that bag of potato chips: you can’t eat just one. You have to have another and another and another because self-help doesn’t work. Self-help can’t create a new self; it only nurtures the hunger and thirst of the deep need of the human soul for a new beginning. The new beginning that leads to a new self can only come when that hunger and thirst on the inside receive from the outside the nourishment we need. That’s not just a theological assertion; it’s a biological and spiritual reality.

Your body can feed on itself. In the short-term, your body can burn the fat you have stored up, and it can devour the muscle you have built in order to keep itself alive and functioning. But sooner or later, your body must receive nourishment from the outside—protein and carbohydrates and minerals and nutrients and fluids—that will restore the muscle and replenish the fat reserves that it can live on for only so long. Like body, like soul.

The words of Jesus in the gospel of John express this biological and spiritual and theological reality when he said, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). How can that be? Never hungry? Never thirsty? We don’t know any condition of the human body or the human soul in this life in which hunger and thirst are permanently satisfied. But here’s the thing. It’s not one-and-done. It is the constant presence of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, “God with us,” feeding our hunger and satisfying our thirst, offering us again and again the bread of life and the cup of new life.

Now, look at the order of things John 1:12. Receive, believe, become. We don’t receive because we believe. Belief comes from receiving, not the other way around. Belief comes from receiving, not the other way around. That’s one of the things that the so-called “new atheists” refuse to understand about the Christian faith. The Christian faith does not begin with a prior assumption of belief. In fact, the Christian faith begins in the absence of belief. Christian faith germinates and takes root and sprouts and grows when someone recognizes that he or she has received something spiritual from the outside in that is every bit as real as the something nutritional that our bodies receive from the outside in. The Christian faith does not begin within us; it begins outside us in a mystery that we come to understand as God who acts on us and in us and with us so that we come to believe in God because of what we have received, not the other way around. Receive, and you will believe. Receive, believe, become.

When I was much younger, growing up Lutheran, I didn’t understand the old Baptist propensity for an annual revival. I understand it now. It was an expression of the deep human need for a new beginning. It was grounded in the recognition that sooner or later, every one of us comes to a place in our lives where we need fresh start, and an annual revival—like New Year’s and the arrival of spring and the first day of summer and the beginning of a new school year and the beginning of new church year at Advent and the celebration of the birth of Jesus in our world and in our lives—offered one more opportunity for a person and a community to claim a new beginning, a fresh start, for becoming who God has created and called them to be all over again. It’s a shame we urbane and sophisticated Baptists have lost that.

But we haven’t lost it entirely. Because every time we set this table we extend an invitation to receive, to believe, and to become. Not everyone comes here hungry and thirsty for this bread and this cup every time we serve it. That’s why communion doesn’t necessarily move you every time you receive it. We don’t do this every month for everyone. We do this every month for the sake of the one person among us who comes into this room hungering and thirsting to receive, to believe, and to become. The rest of us take the bread and pass it on, and we take the cup and pass it on, not for ourselves but for the sake of the one person in the room whose deep hunger and thirst has brought them this morning to this place and to this people where and among whom they can receive and believe and become who God has created and called them to be.

So let’s take the bread and pass it on; let’s take the cup and pass it on. Because someone among us has a deep need to turn the calendar to a brand new year. Someone among us—maybe you—is hungering and thirsting for a new beginning, a fresh start, to receive, to believe, to become.

Photo by Andrew Dallos, used under license by Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.