Father Jud: “Maybe these stories of faith aren’t lies or fantasies like Disneyland. Perhaps they resonate with something deep and profoundly true inside us that we can’t express any other way.”
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When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde
The reading reminds me of where this Narrative Lectionary started with the Genesis creation story and the Holy Disruptors Summer series that preceded it. This Sunday, the Narrative Lectionary moves from Old Testament readings to the New Testament's book of John. Immediately, the language that confronts us is completely challenging and audacious
John’s Gospel opens not with a manger, but with a daring vision. In the beginning was the Word. Before doctrine, before institution, before fear calcified into control, there is Logos, which, for us, is creative, relational, and luminous speech moving toward the world in love. And then comes the most audacious claim of all: the Word became flesh and lived among us.
To become flesh is to dare to be powerful in exactly the way Audre Lorde named, who was featured in our summer series.
To become flesh is not power as domination, but power exemplified as embodied truth. This is not strength as coercion, but strength in the service of vision. God’s Word does not hover safely above the world; it enters vulnerability. It risks misunderstanding, rejection, and even violence. The Incarnation is not fearless; it is faithful.
We are taken back to Genesis. John tells us that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Notice: the darkness is real. Fear is real. Resistance is real. Yet the light does not wait for safety before shining. Like Lorde’s insight, divine power is not the absence of fear but the refusal to let fear determine the future.
The 4th candle in our Advent Wreath symbolizes Love or Mary. The story is near fulfillment.
Still, this Gospel insists that God’s vision is not abstract, but rather takes on skin. It enters bodies marked by race, gender, class, grief, and hope. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. The Word knows what it is to speak truth and be dismissed, to reveal love and be met with suspicion. And still, the Word persists.
This matters deeply. Too often, faith has been used to silence, to domesticate, to make fear holy. But John proclaims a God whose glory is revealed not in control but in presence; not in purity but in proximity. Grace and truth arrive together, inseparable, and walking among us.
Audre Lorde reminds us that when we dare to use our strength in service of our vision, fear loosens its grip. John goes further: when we dare to receive the Word made flesh, we discover that we are drawn into that same daring. To all who received him… he gave power to become children of God. Not passive heirs, but participants in incarnation, becoming people through whom light continues to take flesh.
To follow the Word, then, is to risk embodiment: to speak when silence is safer, to love when hatred is loud, to tell the truth about injustice even when it costs us belonging. It is to trust that our fear does not disqualify us. Our fears simply names the stakes.
The Word is still becoming flesh, whenever courage serves vision, whenever power bends toward love, whenever light refuses to ask permission from the dark.And in that daring, holy work, fear becomes less and less important.
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