Christmas Day 2014 Sermon – The Word Became Flesh

My very first Christmas Day sermon. Given on December 25, 2014, at St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church in Dubuque, Iowa. The Christmas Day lectionary Gospel text is John 1:1-14.

Grace and peace from the One who has come to dwell with us. I don’t know about you, but for me, Christmas day, today’s service, almost feels a little anti-climactic. My family has always had our family gathering and big holiday feast on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day itself, we eat leftovers from last night and open presents. We go to church, but it’s a much more quiet, smaller service, like today. Working in the church office for the first time this year, it’s felt so busy to me with all this build-up up to Christmas Eve, and…here we are. Instead of the pageantry and candle-lit carols, and creative skits about characters in the story, like we had last night, we have these more esoteric, more philosophical readings.

My guess is that most of you, when you think of the Christmas story, you picture Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem and Mary giving birth to little baby Jesus and laying him in a manger. That’s a great version of the Christmas story. It’s vivid, easy to picture. It’s easy to set up decorations like these (the crèche scene), to think about what it would have been like for Mary, for Joseph, for the shepherds, or, as we’ve heard throughout Advent, for the innkeeper and his wife.

And it’s a wonderful story. There are elements that hint at how important this birth is, miraculous bits like the star the magi from the East follow, and the angels filling the heavens to proclaim the Savior’s birth to the shepherds, and of course, that bit about a virgin birth, but most of the story is concrete, easy to picture. The way Matthew and Luke tell the story, the miracle is that the Son of God comes in such an ordinary way. That’s Matthew and Luke’s versions. You may not have noticed, but Mark doesn’t even bother to include a Christmas story. He starts his story with John the Baptist and Jesus as adults.

Then there’s John, the reading we just heard. John tells the same story, but his scope is completely different. Instead of zooming in on a family scene in the little town of Bethlehem, John’s Christmas story zooms way out to cover all of creation, the entire cosmos. John steps back from the physical details of the story, and ponders what the birth of this Christ-child means. What does it mean for him, writing years after it happened, and what does it mean for us?

John concludes that the Christ-child’s coming into the world is the most important event in all of history. The light of God has come into the darkness of the world.

As he tries to explain this profound miracle of the incarnation, this story, he begins his gospel with the words, “In the beginning.” That’s a natural place to start, like “Once upon a time,” but John’s not just using it as a normal opening line. He’s setting the stage. He’s talking about creation itself, about the whole world. The book of Genesis, the story of the creation of the world, begins with the exact same words, “in the beginning.” John’s opening line of his gospel story is an allusion to creation itself. He’s establishing who Jesus is, and why Jesus is important. His poetic language can be almost mesmerizing, but let’s follow his logic.

We know from Genesis that in the beginning was God, but here John says in the beginning was the Word. We know there’s only one God, so alarm bells are already going off, for us and for his Jewish readers. But it’s ok, he clarifies, because the Word was God. The Word was present at creation, and everything that exists, everything that has come into being, has come into being through the Word. And it’s because of the Word that we have life. Genesis describes creation as God speaking creation into being with words. The best way John can find to describe God’s being is as the Word. In Greek, the logos.

John’s trying to figure out how to talk about Jesus’ significance, and he treats this as a whole new creation. This is big. It’s a new beginning. It’s the biggest miracle of Christianity. God the Creator, the one who made all things, comes into the world. In some ways, it’s the most challenging thing we as Christians believe, and it’s the centerpiece of our faith.

John talks about the Word, the creator, coming into the world as light, shining in darkness.

We know where the darkness is. We see the darkness in the world around us. I’ve seen the darkness, the depth of suffering just this week in my aunt’s family, waiting for days in a hospital to see if she’s going to live or die. Or in the person who called the church office as I was working on this sermon, looking for somewhere for his friend who got kicked out of his room to sleep tonight in a city where all the shelter beds were full. In families for whom Christmas is not the best time of the year, but the hardest as they mourn the loss of loved ones and remember Christmas’s past. In school children murdered in their classrooms in Pakistan, in police officers killed as they sit in their patrol car in New York. Seeing the darkness is easy. And it would be easy to get overwhelmed by the darkness.

But in that darkness, John claims, the light comes. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not, has not, will not ever overcome it. God is not distant, somewhere else, looking down at the world wishing it would get better, or worse, giving up on it. And God doesn’t occasionally prod parts of the world to see what happens. John’s claim, our claim as Christians, is that the light came into the world. The Word became flesh and lived among us.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. That’s one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible. Lived among us isn’t really strong enough. Literally, it’s, the Word came and pitched a tent among us. It’s what God did in the Old Testament in Israel, when God’s presence was in the Tabernacle. God has come to dwell with us, in our darkness, experiencing our reality.

Celebrating the birthday of a person who lived 2,000 years ago isn’t that difficult. But believing that person is God? That’s harder. The Word became flesh. We call it the incarnation. God becoming incarnate, coming to live with us, in our darkness. God with skin on. And of course, the incarnation, God taking on flesh and being born as a real human person, is completed on the cross. That’s really the most surprising claim of Christianity, the claim that God died on a cross. God didn’t come just to somehow experience life as a person; God came out of love. We hear the beginning of the story today, but John’s gospel leads inescapably to the cross, to God’s plan to redeem us out of love. Love for you, for me, and for the world.

This is big. It’s so much deeper than just a babe in a manger, than shepherds in a field, even shepherds with angels. I love John’s Christmas story, because John is about the cosmic reality of God entering the world.

This prologue to John’s gospel ends with the words, “We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We have seen God’s light in the person of Jesus, the only Son of God, begotten of the Father’s love. We see God’s light lived out in each other, in the body of Christ.

In a world with plenty of darkness, God brings light. It can be hard to see, but we have faith that God is with us. We can catch glimpses of God’s light in others, and as Christ’s body, the church, we reflect that light into some of the darkness. Light shines in the darkness, in the world’s darkness, in my darkness, in your darkness, and the darkness does not overcome the light.
Amen.