word made flesh

Lots on the mind these holiday season days, the kind things that people enjoy doing, the nice things that folks bring, sugary spicy nuts, caky breads, wonderful pork sausages. This morning the delicious aroma of a ham in the oven. Red flowers, lights of the Christmas tree. Yesterday's drive to Pensacola, being with Kristen, day with my brother Walt, and Judy, high school sweethearts back together for the rest of life.

There in Maria's on Cervantes for noon dinner of perfect, large oysters on the half-shell and sharing them with my brother, a special joy in life with its own built in memories, fried oysters, fried mullet, looking up and there's my first cousin Suellen making a place for herself and a friend at the end of our table, nobody realizing that a family gathering is forming!

Later we had a drive, and, as we crossed Cervantes and 17th Street Judy said, This intersection is where Walt kissed me the first time. She was sixteen, Walt seventeen, some memories last more than a lifetime.

What a nice day, Christmas itself! I should have snapped some pictures, but was so busy with all the happiness of the day and the people I was with that it never occurred to me.

Folks' minds may be on Christmas Eve services and Christmas Day franticness, but my ragged piece of mind has moved on to the following day, Sunday, December 26th because I'll be "supplying" is our term in the holy-man trade. So, I'm contemplating a homiletic endeavor in response to the designated gospel for the day, John 1:1-18 or so, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ...", stirring theology in with Christmas pudding, and how to serve it up?

Like the Sunday after Easter, it'll be a traditional Low Sunday, which reminds me of once hearing friends use the term "holly and egg Christians" about those who only come to church at Christmas and Easter. But it's huge fun, all are welcome, it makes for a celebratory crowd gathered and singing, and our best part is all the little sheep and angelic little angels and wise kings and manger with a doll managed by a little girl in blue and a little guy representing her significant other. Our priest calls it "holy commotion", which is pretty much right on.

Someone is thinking Will anybody wear a mask? and I'm thinking that I will if for no other reason than that in this ongoing pandemic we never know if we ourselves are exhaling contagion; so, yes.

I have white N-95 facemasks with red straps that go round the head instead of looping my ears and jerking my hearing aids out of my ears.

But the gospel, "and the Word became flesh and ...", what to preach that I've not already said over the past forty years of Low Sundays?

Art, I've been browsing online for art about it, and so far found several works that don't quite say it to me for me, one above, and another

and a hymn, "Thy strong word did cleave the darkness", but that opens oriented toward Genesis 1 not John 1.

Browsing online is like plowing a field, one never knows what may turn up from ages and ages past. A poem by Emily Dickinson that I'll not use Sunday morning, but can share this afternoon. See what you make of it:

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblingly partook

Nor then perhaps reported

But have I not mistook

Each one of us has tasted

With ecstasies of stealth

The very food debated

To our specific strength —

A Word that breathes distinctly

Has not the power to die

Cohesive as the Spirit

It may expire if He —

“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”

Could condescension be

Like this consent of Language

This loved Philology.

Emily Dickinson

cohesive, condescension, philology, not words to work into a sermon or any spoken word but a college English lecture and homework to literary criticize the poem. A priest I once knew and respected ran his sermons through a word-checker program to make sure no words were above fourth grade level. Good idea, we are supposed to communicate, we're not meant to try and impress with our language skill and pretend we're so smart we didn't notice the mindbogglers. If you use a mindboggler you've lost them, because they'll be wondering what it means, and who the hell is he/she trying to impress, instead of listening to the sermon. I'll bear that in mind as I work again through what I'm thinking to say from our pulpit Sunday morning.

Here's another that's good, Pablo Picasso, but still didn't strike me as Word Made Flesh. The entire sketch shows him wearing thorns. I love the uncoordinated eyes, which, though signature Picasso, one might expect in the horrific trauma of his torment, the Passion of the Christ.

Maybe