John 1:1-18

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. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power 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.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Sermon Text

There was a time where we did not exist. Does that sound obvious to you? Let me put it a different way. I am not saying that there was a time we had not been born, that would be obvious. What I mean is that, before we were created for this life, we did not exist at all. We do not, as some vainly suggest, exist before our soul enters into our body. The pre-existence of the soul is a concept in all kinds of religious traditions, but it is does not exist within Christianity. Our soul, that essential part of our self that gives life to our mortal body, does not exist apart from the particular creation of our body itself. We do not predate ourself.

This is true of all creatures in existence. Birds, bees, bears, and briar bushes are all only alive and only exist from the moment they enter this world. There is no soul or ideal which precedes them. When a thing comes into being, so too does its life essence, and for human beings that includes the soul which becomes the seat of our personhood. We are not a soul which is given a body, we are a body and a soul mixed together as one being. This is why, when we read Paul’s letters, he is absolutely clear that the resurrection at the end of time is of our physical bodies. Our spirits, which leave our bodies, are then brought back into our bodies at the end of time. As Jesus was risen in glory, so we too are made new through this rejoining. The flesh failings bleed away, until all is perfection from top to bottom, body and soul.

There are many reasons that the Church teaches there is no preexistence of the soul. For one thing, there is nothing in scripture to suggest that our souls exist heavenly before we enter this world. Secondly, the preexistence of the soul opens up a door to a variety of heresies. If we preexist our bodies, then we could sin before we were born. If we sinned before we were born, then no one could truly have a choice in how they conduct their life. If we have spirits that exist before we do, then we cannot truly be responsible for our own life.

The other key feature of our limited scope of existence is that it points us to the singular reality of God’s preexistence. When nothing was, God was. When there was neither a heaven nor and earth, no nebulae or atoms or electron fields – when matter was not even a thought – there was God. God in God’s own eternity existed in perfect unity and love as three persons. We know them as God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Word (otherwise known as the Son.) These three persons do not have a hierarchy – they are co-equal in a way humans cannot easily understand. Neither is any part of God older than another, the Son has existed for the same amount of eternity as the Spirit as the Father. All are God, all are distinct, yet all are eternal.

God alone has this unique eternity and it is important to remember this as we continue to celebrate the season of Christmas. Jesus existed before he was a human being, the only human to preexist his physical body. However, Jesus did not just happen upon a body either. When Mary conceived her son, the atoms that formed into cells that formed into a person were all crafted specifically to conform to the Spiritual reality of the preexistent Christ. Jesus the human being, born with all the frailty and reality of any other person, was uniquely born into human life with a preexistent soul that his flesh perfectly aligned to – such that the two distinct human and divine wills of Christ nonetheless acted together in perfect sync.

Now, this is all a lot of theology to be talking about at… about 10:30 AM. However, one of the things we as the Church do not do a lot of these days is talk about some of these deeper Spiritual ideas. I had a woman tell me once that she thought her children were fallen angels given human form. She thought this because she read a book about how angels are sometimes born as people to get a second chance, and that’s why some kids grow up rotten. This kind of belief is something the Church has taught against for fifteen hundred years, so why did she read this book and gravitate toward this idea? Because no one told her otherwise, and it sounded good.

I have read many things where someone claims, usually a child, to remember what it was like to be in Heaven before they were born. This is usually treated with some amount of reverence, as if the Child has a unique window into the Heavenly courts. Yet, I have to tell you that any story like this is only that, a story related by a child and their imagination. It is an essential part of our theology that we do not preexist ourselves, and to let up on that belief opens up the door for all kinds of other false beliefs. Sometimes we have to go into the esoteric, the difficult to understand, because without that understanding we will go into more convoluted, more therapeutic falsehoods.

We are granted a vision of God’s eternity in our scripture today. “In the beginning was the Word,” that is the eternally begotten Son of God, “and the Word was with God,” because God has never existed outside of the three persons of the Trinity, “and the Word was God.” Lest we forget that the three persons of God are all co-equal in their divinity. This eternal God came into the world, in the person of Jesus, a perfect union of the Divine and the Human, the first pre-existent thing to hold human flesh. Despite having made all things, this God-Man was not recognized by the people, he was rejected, cast aside, and killed. Yet, through faith in him and his resurrection, the chance is given for us to be more than just a flash in the pan. Though we be not eternal, we might be immortal through faith in Christ.[1]

The life that goes on beyond this one is a life in imitation of Christ. Through his unique existence in all time, we are able to escape death. Not through sublimation into nothing, not through a return to some primordial spiritual state, but through a new, recreation of ourselves. May God show us the complicated truth of incarnation, that we may be truly reborn in Christ’s resurrection. – Amen.

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[1] I do not mean that the soul ceases to exist without Christ’s intervention, but that “eternal life,” in the sense of a life of blessed bliss in God’s presence, is granted through participation in God’s grace. The extinction of the soul is not an orthodox Christian belief either.