It is Christmas day, and I just returned from celebrating Holy Communion and preaching at All Saints'. I was blessed to preach on the Prologue of the Gospel of John.
The first chapter of St. John's Gospel (yes, I know – the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to St. John; it's shorthand. Deal with it.) is one of the more widely known, heard and recognized passages of Scripture. A member of my family once told me of going to a Christmas service where the preacher stood up after reading this passage and said, "What else is there to say?" He then spent the next ten or fifteen minutes proving his point. The great sadness is that there is so much in this passage that a preacher could preach a lifetime and never exhaust the goldmine of John 1.
Because the message of the Incarnation—God who comes with skin on—is simply and solely this: God loves us, is for us, and would rather die than live without us, to the point that He would set aside all the perks of being God and become a tiny, helpless, human child. And He did so with purpose: that He might live a life without rebellion and be slaughtered for ours so that we could once again be able to stand the heat of a relationship with the One who set fire to the stars.
That's John's story. That's my story; and I'm sticking to it.
Merry Christmas, friends. May you find in the straw-strewn baby the saving joy of God in human flesh.
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