The Word Made Flesh….

John 1:1-14
The Rev. Sara Fischer

From the letter to the Hebrews: In these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Oops, I mean, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The first verses of John’s Gospel which we read on Christmas morning do, in fact, shed light on the whole story of creation. The echoes we hear in John’s Gospel of the creation story suggest that God’s plan for creation was always that Jesus would come and redeem the world through love.

Welcome to this Christmas morning Feast of the Nativity of our Lord, the Feast of the Incarnation. This is what Christmas is truly about—Incarnation—and nowhere in our church year do the readings speak more clearly to what we call the “Doctrine of the Incarnation” than on this Christmas Morning.

On Christmas morning, scripture reminds us that Jesus was not God’s afterthought, a last-ditch effort to save humanity from itself. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Jesus was God’s heart’s desire from the very beginning. This is spelled out week after week when we recite the Nicene Creed, but the creed one of those things we rarely actually hear, and we certainly don’t hear the remarkableness of it. When we say “eternally begotten of the father,” we affirm that Jesus is God’s gift to humanity from the beginning. Christmas is our celebration of God made human to walk with us. If that’s not the best Christmas present, I don’t know what is.

It is Jesus’ birth that reveals his humanity most of all, but it is also Jesus’ birth that most reveals God’s love for us. John the Evangelist doesn’t give us the birth story we hear every year on Christmas Eve from the Gospel of Luke, but instead begins his gospel with the statement that is the basis for all of Christian theology of the incarnation: The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

In case you missed last night’s services and the Christmas Gospel according to Luke, I’ll give you my version of the Good News. Good tidings of great joy are brought to humble shepherds. They find a manger and the baby whose very being spells good news for all people. It is good news and great joy that a Savior has been born to a people so desperately in need of one. The need for a savior is writ large in the writings of Isaiah and of all the Hebrew prophets, in words we read all through Advent.

It is also good news that the baby was born in a stable, in a manger. If there had been room at the inn, if the infant Jesus had been dressed in something other than scraps of cloth, we might never have learned just what kind of God we are dealing with, or rather, what kind of God is dealing with us. But the angel tells the shepherds that the manger and the swaddling clothes are a sign, a sign of God’s presence and God’s action in the birth of this particular baby.

Jesus becomes an outcast at his very birth. It is not difficult to imagine that the stable was probably not the kind of place that any of us would choose to spend the night. The Word becomes flesh in a dark, untidy place. Our lives are sometimes dark, untidy places. God expresses his will for humankind by being born into a human family, sometimes the most untidy place of all. God’s will, from the beginning of time, is to dwell among us, wherever we are and whoever we are.

God’s will is to dwell among us everywhere. We know that Jesus is present with the destitute. We know that Jesus is present with the downhearted. Jesus is present with us when we feel we have failed. Jesus is present when we struggle with our neighbors. Jesus is present when we make fools of ourselves. Jesus is present in our celebrations. Jesus is present with us in our joy and in our sadness. Jesus is present with us when we are at our worst and at our best.

The second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyons said that God became human, that we might become divine. It is through God’s becoming flesh, through Christ’s coming to us in the earthy humanity of the Christmas story, that we are shown the fullness for which God created us in the first place. In other words, the incarnation is about us as well as about Jesus. The incarnation is about Jesus becoming fully human and allowing us to rekindle the divine within ourselves.

The Feast of the Incarnation is the feast that tells us who Jesus is; it also the feast that tells us who we are. We are beloved of God, so beloved that God took on flesh in order to walk with us in our human journey. How do we love God back? We love God by being willing, with God’s help, to go into those dark places where the word becomes flesh. It is there that we find the joy of the Christmas story.

We sometimes say that every Sunday is a “little Easter.” I think we could also say that every Sunday is a feast of the Incarnation. When we come to the Eucharist, when we offer our souls and bodies, and offer all of the earthy parts of our own lives to God and share in Jesus’ offering of himself for our salvation, we get a foretaste of the divinity to which each one of us is called.

Holy and loving God, you made your Word flesh to dwell among us. Please let us, who are flesh, become your Word and dwell in you.