First Sunday of Christmas: The Word Took Flesh to Bring us to Life
Transcription
Good morning. It is good to see you. Merry Christmas again to you.
As we look at our passage from the Gospel of St. John this morning, let me go ahead and begin with a word of prayer for us. “In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight. Oh Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”
Well, since we have lots of kiddos in the service this morning, I want to start with a question for the kiddos to test your Bible knowledge. I'm gonna say a phrase, and you can tell me where it's from. In the beginning. Anybody know? Any kids know? Yeah? Yep. What were you gonna say, Gregory? What? He made the earth. That's right. Cole? The light of God? Absolutely. That's great. Yeah, so in the beginning makes us think of creation.
And you know what? I'll be honest, it was sort of a trick question. Because in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth as Genesis, but in the beginning was the Word as the beginning to the Gospel of John. And so when the early readers of this Gospel would have heard the beginning of this Gospel read, their minds would have gone back to the book of Genesis, which they would have also read in Greek at the time.
And it's interesting to have this passage in the Western tradition fall in the first Sunday in the Christmas season, because we're so used to thinking of the Christmas story as shepherds and, you know, possibly the Magi and Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem, we don't often stop to think about the fact that the beginning of the Christmas story is actually back in creation itself. And that's what this text points us to this morning. We don't just have somebody who can deliver God's people from their sins, we have somebody who can make all things new, to make a new beginning.
Because this Word who makes all things new is in the beginning creating the world at the very beginning of creation. The Word who was God, who is God, has taken on flesh completely, so that humanity can fully participate in God's divine life. And so that's one of the pieces of good news of Christmas, is that God is not just delivering people from sin and death, he is delivering them into new creation life.
And there's this important point made about the good news from John 1. It's that by adding humanity, human nature, to God's divine nature, he raises up our humanity to his divine life. And I'll spell that out over the next few minutes. The prologue to John chapter 1, these first 18 verses, introduce us to the divine Word, this Word of God, this speech of God that doesn't diminish from God when it, you know, leaves the mouth of God.
But this Word has created the heavens and the earth, and he came to do a new work of creation in those who would believe in his name, according to verse 14. There was never a time when this Word was not. He was in the beginning with God, he was God, and we affirm that in the Nicene Creed when we say, he was eternally begotten of the Father. So yes, the Father begets the Son, but there's never any time where we can point to and say, that's when the divine Christ was born in his divinity. There was not a beginning, because there was no point at which the Word was not. That's why one of those, one of those things you just, you affirm, you don't try to explain.
Got people into trouble a lot over the last 2,000 years. So the addition, the math of the Incarnation, the addition here is that God took on human flesh, human nature, and that was something foreign to his essence. About 1,400 years ago, Pope Gregory the Great said it this way, “But we say that the Word was made flesh not by losing what he was, but by taking what he was not. For in the mystery of his Incarnation, the only begotten of the Father increased what was ours, but diminished not what was his.” And so in taking on human flesh, he never took the flesh off again. That's the mystery of the Incarnation.
He took on flesh, and he suffered unjustly in the flesh. He died in the flesh, he was crucified in the flesh, he was resurrected in the flesh, glorified in the flesh, and ascended on high in the flesh where he reigns as king. And so Jesus fully assumed humanity. He took it on himself. It's interesting that he didn't destroy flesh as something evil, which that seems to be an error that crops up cyclically over the last several millennia. Flesh is not evil.
Your body is not evil. He didn't come to destroy it. He raised it up to his divine life, the life of the Creator, which is the end for which all of us are made, the end of which all of us look, which is why in the Creed we talk about being raised in the body. And I think, as we think about this in a Christmas sense, it reframes salvation for us in a really helpful way. Sin is real, right? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the world and know how broken it is. We can all acknowledge that sin is real, but let's begin with this other reality, that each person on the earth, every single person on this earth, bears in himself or herself the image of God, the image of their Creator.
You don't come under into the world under the hateful gaze of a vengeful God. No one comes into the world that way. The narrative is not that you're as bad as you could possibly be, or even that you were made bad. That is not the narrative that Scripture tells. When you were born into the world, regardless of who brought you into it, you were born under the loving gaze of a good Creator who loves you because you bore something of his image. And so people are fundamentally made good because they reflect their God.
They're made with good bodies that reflect the goodness of God's handiwork and his image. But what does sin do? Sin distorts what is good. Sin comes in and introduces something foreign and perverts that which is good, the goodness of creation. It distorts the good desires that good image bearers have. And so when somebody is bound up in sin, this brings us to a place of compassion. Whether someone is under generational sin, whether they're under systems of injustice or patterns of thinking or behavior, what they're doing is not just being as bad as they could possibly be.
Sin is distorting the good desires they have, the goodness of who they are, and moving them away from their identity as an icon of their God. And so salvation, then, it reframes salvation as not just forgiveness of sins, but God's realigning of our loves and our affections with his loves, and God's restoring of our nature and not our destruction. So salvation is actually becoming fully alive in Christ, becoming fully into the image that God has made us to be.
You become fully yourself when Jesus raises up your everyday stuff into the life of the kingdom of God, which he inaugurated at his baptism, and it is here and now, and we long for it to be in its fullness. And that involves entrusting ourselves to this Creator, and that's what John 114 is about. He came to bring life to those who would believe in his name and having faith in his name.
And so one way that people have thought about this in the past, the fathers of the church, like St. Basil the Great, they talk about a sword and fire, and it's not a perfect analogy, but I find it helpful. So the idea is that the fire burns bright hot, and you take a sword and you plunge it into the fire, and that sword begins to take on the properties of the fire, that the fire can communicate to the sword. And when the sword is taken out, the sword is no less a sword, and it's still a sword, but it's taken on the property of the fire, and it doesn't diminish the fire or the sword when that happens.
And so that's likened to what it's like to be in the life of the divine, to be in God's very life. What Christ is bringing us into, as we draw closer to Jesus, we are being forged in the fire of God's grace and his truth. And God is imparting to us something of his life, not destroying our nature, but making us fully human again in Jesus.
And so here is how that begins to change what transformation can look like when we think about discipleship. If you look at our website, one of the things I did in the last couple weeks, I changed our About Us page from being sort of a narrative about how we got started, to being more based on our vision and our values. Who are we? What do we care about here? And so it's got the vision statement, and then it's the core values that are under.
So when we talk about common people, common prayer for uncommon transformation, what I mean by that uncommon transformation is that we're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach to discipleship. It's not like ten steps to become more like Jesus. It's not that simple, because each of our stories are unique, and so two of our values are redeeming brokenness and then discovering God's story.
Those are on the website. And what this means is that we move at the pace of discovery when it comes to people plumbing the depths of their own stories and discovering God's story in theirs. We move at the pace of their stories. Discipleship is unique to each person, and so I'll give a hypothetical example, a hypothetical you. This isn't any of you, right? But your firstborn comes into the world, and they bring you so much joy, but you notice that every time that baby makes a mess, your anger just gets hot. Your voice raises whether you want it to or not.
You scold that little baby, you know, and you are breathing out little words of shame that you aren't even really aware that you're doing, and you really regret it afterwards. And you hope that the child's just gonna forget and move on, but man, it just happens every day, and you don't know why it's not getting better, and you can't recognize it before it happens. But you also think that apologizing makes you look weak as a parent, and you don't want your kid to think you're weak, so you're not gonna apologize either.
And so you're in this conundrum. Now kids, I'm gonna ask you an important question. This is a theological question. How does God view us when we make mistakes? Hmm. What do you think? How does God view us when we make mistakes? Anybody have an answer? Have you ever thought about that question before? I can see you guys commiserating over there. Somebody throw something out.
There aren't any. Yeah, you can have a collective answer. That's fine.
Yeah. A. God's really angry. B. God still loves you.
What do you guys think? Misha? Yeah, mistakes help us learn, don't they? Yeah, you can't learn without making mistakes. So that's right. Yeah, God loves us, has compassion on us, and mistakes are mistakes.
That's great. So the kids know this, and sometimes we forget it as adults, right? No, I mean the hypothetical person, not you or me. So we forget this, and we think that, you know, God gets angry and he wants to punish us when we make a mistake.
He's just waiting. It's tragic, really, and it's often because there's somebody in our lives that didn't teach us the right way to think about God and how he views us and how he views mistakes and learning, and that can affect the ways that we parent. It can affect the ways that we view relationships with one another, and man, if that hypothetical person had just begun to ask the question, I am noticing this in me, what is this? And then start to talk about it with other people in community to acknowledge that.
That would be the beginning to understanding this disordered anger and why they viewed apologizing as weak, which isn't objectively true, but why did they view it that way? And then seek help from others and from Christ, and so when that happens, that begins the hard work of discipleship, and that's what I mean of the uniqueness of somebody's story. You can't put a timeline on the healing of that, but that process has to happen with each person here in their own unique stories, and so that begins the hard work of discipleship transformation, and that's why it's not common to say it through our values. That is where we begin to redeem the brokenness, because we name the brokenness, and that's where we begin to discover God's story, because we find grace in the redemption, and so their good desire, their good desire for orderliness, this hypothetical person, needed to come secondary to their child's desire to discover things, right? They needed to rightly order their good desires, and so in that process of discovery, they find something of the divine joy in the story that God is telling in their life, and so they're being forged in the fire of divine love and divine life, and that's where God's grace is, and they themselves are not being destroyed at that point.
God is not destroying them. He is making them new, and they're becoming fully alive as a divine image bearer in Christ, and so Jesus assumed all of what we are so that we can be forged in the fire of his divine nature and God's divine life, and we can bask in the glow of the grace and the truth of God without losing who we are, but actually instead by becoming who we were meant to be, and that is the good news of Christmas from John chapter 1. It's by adding humanity to the divine nature that Jesus raises up our humanity to divine life. It's a theological concept that we don't often give attention to, but we ought to, because it infuses all of our daily stuff with the kingdom imagination, and we long for the day where the kingdom will be fully realized, where we fully enter into that divine life, but because our Savior came in the flesh, now the everyday stuff that you and I are going to go through has kingdom potential.
If we do Jesus' commandment to seek first the kingdom of God in all things, and so let's seek to know the grace and truth of God to become people fully alive in Jesus Christ. Let me pray for us. Oh God, you made us in your image, and you have redeemed us through your Son Jesus Christ.
Look with compassion on the whole human family. Take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts. Break down the walls that separate us.
Unite us in bonds of love, and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth, that in your good time all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Transcribed byTurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.