The Festival of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Christmas Day) ---- 25 December 2017

(This brief sermon was preached on Christmas Morning at Trinity Anglican's 9:00am service.)

John 1: 1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

14 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. ¹⁵(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.” ’) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. 

 And the Word became flesh and lived among us

·       When I was part of a monastic community (before I married and began ministry in the Lutheran Church), the passage I just re-read was part of a prayer that was said every day at the evening meal. When the community got to the words And the Word became flesh and lived among us, we all bowed at the waist.

·       In a way, this was a real prayer for the posture of our bodies can be prayer. When we kneel for prayer or stand for the reading of the Gospel, in a very real way we are praying in the attention we pay to what is going on around us by how we stand or sit or by any respectful positions we take up.

·       We are people with bodies. We are not souls that inhabit a body, for unless we are body and soul together, we are something other than human. Angels are said to be pure spirit. Sad to say, they can get the joke but can never laugh, for you need a body to laugh aloud.

·       Christmas is the festival of the Incarnation of Christ. We celebrate a God who simply didn’t come to visit, but to say. In the original language, the passage say “He pitched his tent among us.” The “tent” is the same word as the Tent of Meeting or the Tabernacle where the Ark of the Covenant was kept during the Hebrew’s desert wanderings. Quite a connection.

·       Jesus came to make this world his home like all of us other bodied humans. He is the meeting place or link between Heaven and Earth – Son of Man and Son of God.

·       Jesus knows us for in a particular way he is one of us while still divine. This knowledge is not for our condemnation but for our salvation.

·       Now, do you all know the Christmas Carol “O Come All Ye Faithful”? It think I’ve run across a new, unpublished verse, one I want to remember, for it goes right to the heart of the matter of the Incarnation and the Word becoming flesh.

·       I won’t sing it:

·       Oh, come, ye unfaithful

Broken and polluted!

Oh, come ye, Oh, come ye,

To Bethlehem.

Come and behold Him,

Born the Friend of Sinners.

Oh, come let us adore him,

Christ the Lord.