In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
I’m a writer. And a talker. I love words.
Which is why, in college, I took a class on the philosophy of language.
It was wild. We read a whole bunch of really dense philosophy that tried to make sense of sense itself - tried to understand what language is, and how it works, not from a linguistic perspective but from a philosophical one.
One thing I really liked about this class was the focus on deconstruction, and in particular, the deconstruction of binaries.
In language, what this means is, essentially, that we like to make meaning out of binaries - we know what something is based on what it is not. What does “man” mean? A person who isn’t a woman. How do we distinguish a human? One who isn’t any other creature. We make meaning by setting things in opposition to each other and constructing binaries.
But we forget that those binaries are constructed. They’re arbitrary. They come from our desire to make meaning - they are not, themselves, the meaning. We lean so hard on these binaries for meaning that we think they are fundamental to meaning itself.
We get into this issue when it comes to faith, too. At least I do. For most of my life, I thought about God as something wholly separate from myself.
What does it mean to be Divine? To not be secular, worldly, profane. Another term for the Divine is the supernatural - it’s right there in the word. We have the natural world, and the supernatural.
It’s how we like to understand things. Who is God? Perfection, as distinguished from our imperfect selves. What is God? Love, the opposite of hatred. Where is God? Heaven. That-which-is-not-earth.
We see these binaries throughout our contemporary Biblical interpretations. We talk about the “spirit” and the “flesh.” The “kingdom of God,” set in opposition to “things of this world.”
God is God because God isn’t human...right?
The 20th century philosophers of language and the ancient authors of the Bible had one thing in common: they blew open these barriers, these boundaries, these binaries. They encouraged us to see meaning in the in-between spaces, the overlap. To understand that the truth was relational, not oppositional.
We don’t understand God by separating God from ourselves. We don’t find Divinity by looking somewhere else. Meaning comes from drawing close, not taking distance.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In addition to a very confusing philosophy class, I also had the privilege during my undergrad years to study under Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas, an incredible theologian who focuses on issues around justice, specifically the intersections of race and gender, through an Episcopalian lens.
Kelly encouraged us to think about large scale systems of oppression and injustice by asking: what is the site (S-I-T-E) where this idea plays out?
Often, when we try to talk about the problems in our world, we default to abstractions like “patriarchy” or “systemic racism.” Abstractions can be helpful, but they also allow us to distance ourselves from their meaning. They keep us disconnected from the truth of what we’re trying to talk about.
Kelly encourages us to ask: What is the site? Where does this abstraction appear? How does it play out in the day-to-day, minute-to-minute, reality of our world? When talking about patriarchy, we can understand the “site” as a woman, an individual person living in a physical body capable of suffering tangible harm and who faces discrete struggles as she lives her life under an oppressive system.
In the case of systemic racism, it is the Black person, whose body faces health threats both chronic and acute, whose daily life and individual experiences become the “site” where the effects of systemic racism become a lived reality.
So, we’re trying to understand God, right? And we’ve established that it’s not useful to think in terms of binaries or to use abstractions to distance ourselves and our daily, tangible lives here in this world from ideas about God, and holiness, and Divinity.
Well then, let’s take a page out of Kelly Brown Douglas’s book (she’s written a bunch, actually, highly recommend) and ask: what is the site? Where do the concrete and the abstract overlap?
What is the site of God? Where does holiness, where does Divinity, where does the truth of God play out in a tangible, visible way?
Since we’re coming at this from a language-oriented lens, lets look at some of the key nouns in today’s Gospel passage.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What is the site of God? Words.
Our language often feels inadequate to the task of describing God. How can God be in our words when we know God is bigger than anything we can come up with on our own? When we don’t even have the words to speak God’s true name?
But the Gospel tells us: God is active through, and in, words. How can we engage with ourselves, with each other, with God, if we can’t talk about all of it? Our words, our Bible, our prayers, our conversations, our hymns - these are the site, the overlap, the point of connection where we find God.
What else? Where else do we find the site where the abstraction of Divinity becomes meaning we can access?
Us.
Today’s Gospel passage tells us that “What has come into being in him was life.”
Life - another abstraction. What is life? A big, bold concept. A definition we memorize in biology class. That which is not death. What does it mean to have life? To be life?
Let’s ask instead: What is the site of life? Living beings, of course. Cells, moving and dividing. Lungs, breathing.
God is life, and life is us, and we are life, and we are in and of God.
We later hear that Christ’s presence in the world allows us to “become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
Now we’re back to the binaries, right - not born of blood or flesh, but of God. Sounds like a definition-by-contrast to me, right?
But it’s not. Because we know that those who live in God, who are born of the Spirit, don’t stop being flesh and blood. The Godliness within us doesn’t cancel out the physical reality we inhabit. It’s not an either/or. It’s a yes/and.
What is the site of God? Us. Our bodies. Flesh and blood and aches and pains, living not in the abstract world of love and life and light but the day-to-day, walking through each minute and finding an opportunity to act, in this world, on the realities of love and life and light. Those moments, those actions are the site of God’s love, that moment of connection in which we find true meaning.
Today’s service includes one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time. In a few minutes, we’ll sing lyrics like “Love came down at Christmas” and “Love was born on Christmas.”
I love these lines because they initially make no sense. How is “love” a thing that can be born? What does it mean for “love” to “come down?” It feels like the wrong noun for whatever was in the manger with Mary that night. What was born was a baby. A flesh and blood - probably a lot of blood, giving birth in a manger - baby, situated in time. A concrete noun, not an abstraction.
But that’s the glory and the mystery of Christmas. What is love? Not some unattainable concept floating out beyond the reach of our hands. Not some abstraction that belongs in a realm we can’t begin to touch, limited as we are by our temporal bodies.
Love is us. Love is in us. We are the site of love. A baby, born in a manger, can be love incarnate. A body can reach out and touch love. A person can act in love and thus make love incarnate - bodied - present - manifest.
The story of Christmas reminds us that we are not separate from God. We do not have to look beyond ourselves to find meaning. Divinity is not defined by disconnection. Holiness is not the opposite of the world we find ourselves living in.
Instead, we are the site - the intersection where binaries collide, where truth becomes tangible, where God is present. The baby, flesh and blood in a manger, the living embodiment of love.
We are the site. Our bodies, our lives, our actions, are the location where God’s big ideas - holiness, righteousness, truth, love - become real.
We are love, and love is us, and love is in us, and we are in love.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.