John 1:1-14

John 1:1-14

The Festival of Christ in Creation although celebrated in the Orthodox Church since 1982 was approved by the Church of England only in July this year and I have the enormous privilege of preaching on this new addition to the church calendar on the first time it is celebrated in All Saints. The Festival of Christ in Creation is not a harvest festival. It is not a day for feeling guilt at the part we all play in the structural sin of environmental damage, nor is it about our anxieties over what climate change will mean for our communities. According to the CofE website, the Festival celebrates creation “understood through the person and work of Jesus Christ, created through him, sustained in him and destined for renewal in him.” The festival reminds us that care for creation is not an add-on to our faith, but a core part of the Christian message, And it reminds us of this, By taking us pack to core truths about Jesus Christ.

So my sermon today is going to be a little different. From the new Gospel reading for today, I’m going to focus on a single word, and the word in the original Greek at that. For John’s Gospel opens

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God.

In the original Greek, the Word is logos. In the beginning was the logos and the logos was God, and the logos was with God. He was in the beginning with God.

Now logos meant a lot of different things to different readers. To those versed in the Hebrew Scriptures, it would have recalled Biblical language of God creating the world through his Wisdom.

Proverbs 3:19-20 reads:

The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.

Sirach in what is sometimes called the Apocrypha, speaks of Wisdom pre-existing creation.

Sirach 1:4 reads:

Wisdom was created before all other things, and prudent understanding from eternity.

The pre-existent wisdom of God, Through which the world was created is surely part of what John meant by logos.

But for those of the first readers who were versed in Greek philosophy particularly that part of it which had influenced Jewish thinkers of the day, logos would have meant so much more. As well as Word, it would have meant reason, rationality, understanding, order. It would have included the idea of the order that we see in the world around us in contrast to the chaos of a world not yet ordered into things, land/sea, sky/earth, day/night etc. It meant the ordering principle of creation. 

In modern terms a word which provides reason, meaning or order can be termed information.  We have in this ancient text which dates from around AD100, give or take a decade, the concept that behind the existence of the world is information. I grew up in a household filled with code. My father was an amateur radio enthusiast. 

I grew up with the sound of a morse key in the background, and with it the idea that a series of beeps could carry meaning. My uncle and his wife were both blind from birth. I grew up writing on Christmas cards in braille, and with this the idea that a series of dots could carry meaning. In my own life, this became an interest in languages, but it also meant that the first image of God to make any sense to me as a secular older teenager, was the Word of God, creating and sustaining the world through information. What I am saying here is this: like the morse code that was the soundtrack to my childhood, behind the world you see around you now, Christ is continually speaking the world into existence through information.

This is not some New Age idea: it is rooted in Scripture and earliest teachings about Jesus Christ..

Let’s start at the very tangible. I have with me today a basket of pine-cones all from the same tree. The pine-cone illustrates well the mathematics that is so often found in nature, from sunflowers to sea shells. The scales on these pine cones, seen from the base are arranged outwards from the centre, spiralling left when counted from one starting point, spirally right when counted from another. Catch me after the service, and I will show you how to see it. For these pine cones, there are 13 spirals in one direction, And 8 in another direction. 8 and 13 are two numbers next to each other in a special series of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. This pattern that is found all through nature from the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower to the arrangement of leaves up a stem. 

Now all of this is perfectly explainable through natural selection without referring to God. I’m not offering this as any kind of ‘proof’ of God’s existence, what is called an argument from fine tuning. These spirals are the way the sunflower, for example, can fit the most seeds in its disk. But for those who already believe that God created the world, these patterns are a reminder that you can hold in your hand, that Christ the logos created and sustains the world through logic and information. 8 and 13 are the numbers he is saying to speak the pinecone into existence. All things came into being through the Word and without the Word not one thing came into being.

Now we can go deeper, continuing to find information at the very centre of creation. Most people are familiar with DNA, the genetic code unique to us that we each hold in every cell of our bodies. The information in DNA is encoded in the arrangement of a series of molecules which can be named with the letters A, T, C and G. All the code needed to make you you is made up of these pairs of letters A, T, C, and G, arranged into groups of three just like short words. And just like the capital letters and full stops to show the start and end of an English sentence, DNA has a start code and a stop code to show where the DNA sentence starts and finishes. 

For example, one start code that you will have in your genes is ATG, that means “start the sentence” and one stop code that you will have in your genes is TAG, that means “stop the sentence”.  And so in every cell of your body, you have information making you you. You may like to hold the end of one of your fingers now, and imagine the code inside you speaking you into existence: ATG AAC GAA AAT CTG TTC GCT TCA TTC ATT…

Now I’m not saying that everything in your genetics is directly willed by God: that’s a whole other theological can of worms, and of course things like radiation can damage our genetic code. What I am saying is that we have moved from an everyday level with the pine cone and gone to a genetic level and still we find the general idea that it is information that brings things into existence. All things came into being through the Word and without the Word not one thing came into being.

And we can go deeper still. Those of you who have seen the film Oppenheimer will be familiar with the idea of Quantum Physics, a deeper level of looking at reality,  far more chaotic and unpredictable than the everyday physics we are used to. But notice that I have never said that the universe is ordered. I have been saying throughout that the universe has information as its basis. John Wheeler was a physicist who worked alongside Oppenheimer. He proposed an idea which is yet to be generally accepted, but remains a live possibility. Wheeler suggested that at a quantum level every physical reality comes about from the binary answer to yes-no questions about its existence. This sees the basis of creation as a binary code, “physics as information” is what Wheeler called it. On Wheeler’s view, the basis of the reality of any object is nature is bits of information.

Quite who is asking these yes-no questions, and to whom, Wheeler never goes into. His idea may require no questioner and no respondent. But is it too much to imagine God the Father asking, and God the Son replying, as this dialogue within the Godhead speaks the universe into existence in binary code? 0100 0001 0110 1100 0110 1100 0010 0000 0111 0100.. All things came into being through the Word and without the Word not one thing came into being. 

It is God the Son who spoke the universe into existence, and sustains it by continuing to give information at every level of being. 

I pray that this sermon has in fact fed your imagination and filled you with wonder at the universe created through and sustained in the person and work of Jesus Christ. But I also want to remind you that the Word became flesh and lived among us. To meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation is to try to keep these two things in our head at once: The Christ who spoke creation into existence in code, became the despised and rejected Rag Man who lived a human life, who sweated and slept, and took our pain and sins upon himself, suffering with and for us. 

I invite you to take a pine cone home with you to hold and to pray with. May it deepen your love For the carpenter who made the world. Amen.