Christmas Eve Sermon
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Text: John 1:1-18
Pastor Phil Hughes at American Fork Presbyterian Church Utah
December 24, 2023 Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Eve
Prayer: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in this place, in this moment speak. And give us the grace to hear what is deeper than even these words will say. Let your voice be heard in our hearts. May there be less of me, less of all of us, and more of you. Amen.
Luke 2 is what we know as the classic Christmas story. But John 1:1-18 is also about the coming of Christ. It is not the birth story that we heard in Luke 2 with Mary and Joseph and angels and shepherds and the baby. John tells a different story. John takes us way back before Jesus was born and tells us how God came in the person of Jesus from outside of time and history. It is the story of how Jesus Christ, who John the Gospel writer calls the Word, became flesh and lived among us.
This church has been hearing this part of John for the past three Sundays. And the title for these sermons comes from the way John 1:14 reads in The Message: The Contemporary Language Version of the Bible. The more literal translation and the one in most of our Bibles reads as “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” As The Message puts it: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”
That’s what happened when God came in Christ. He moved into the neighborhood of this world. The Christian claim is “the full and actual God — had a body, grew leg hair, cried salty tears, and breathed ordinary air. Not only that but that the full and actual God was a baby, an embryo, lacking all autonomy, utterly dependent and vulnerable.”[1]
God became human and lived in a family. He experienced boyhood and grew into adulthood. He had friends. He went to weddings and made breakfast. He ate food and got thirsty. He walked and he slept. He was subject to all the things that human existence brings, things like weariness, joy, anger, delight, suffering, and anticipation.
John calls Christ “the Word.” A word is talk. It is speech. When we say someone has a word we listen to hear what that person has to say. Jesus is God speaking to us. And God spoke to us through a human life. Not some angelic being. Not some spirit who just looked like a human. God made himself known by becoming flesh and blood and moving into our neighborhood.
The Word – Jesus Christ – was and is God speaking to us. As words utter thoughts, so Christ utters God.[2] God is not silent. He has spoken to us in Jesus Christ, his Son.
The expectation for centuries had been that God would come with great might. He would come like thunder, like a mighty warrior, and the world would be absolutely rocked.
And then this Jewish carpenter from a poor family in Nazareth showed up. Mary’s child. For thirty years he lived an ordinary life. But then he began to preach. He healed people. He did miracles. He made claims about the Father no one else had ever said. He touched, spoke to, and blessed people no one would touch, speak to or bless.
Another passage in the New Testament says that though Jesus was,
“in very nature God, [he] did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!”[3]
The Word of God made flesh. God moving into the neighborhood. Looking like us. Living like us. Being like us. Being with us. He is the God who shows up.
Anyone who thinks about God has big questions. Who is God? What is God like? Does God exist? These are the big questions we think about. The Bible says, “If you want to know who God is, what God is like, and if he exists, then look at Jesus.” If all the arguments, wondering, and conversations about God get confusing, then look at Jesus.
John writes, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
In his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey says that if Jesus came to reveal God to us, then what do we learn about God?
First, it shows that God is humble. The Creator of all things “shrank down to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye.” God became little. World leaders and rulers move through the world with fanfare, bodyguards, an entourage, and only the best of everything. “In meek contrast, God’s visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough.” And if Jesus showed such humility how can those who follow him show anything else?
Second, in Jesus God became approachable. Jews had a sacred place walled-off in the temple for God. They would not even pronounce or write the name for God. Other religions bow, make sacrifices, and often fear their gods. “What can be less scary than a newborn with his limbs wrapped tight around his body? In Jesus, God found a way of relating to human beings that did not involve fear.”
Read the stories of Jesus and see how people came up to Jesus, touched Jesus, and called out to Jesus. And it most often ended up with them encountering God as never before.
Third, when Jesus came he showed us that God was for the lowly. He was for the underdog. God was a refugee. He was from the lower class. He was not a homeowner. He had no high position. He most often gave himself to the poor, oppressed, and those who felt the hard burden of life. And it seems that those less occupied with themselves, not full of pride, who aren’t self-satisfied, the hurting, and those who know their need, receive God a little easier. As we sing in one of our Christmas songs, “where meek souls will receive him still the dear Christ enters in.”
G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. So fourth, by coming in Jesus and as a human being, God showed courage. He laid aside his power and glory and became just as vulnerable as anyone else. How did God the Father feel that day when he watched his Son come as an infant in this harsh and cold world?
He came with humility, was approachable, for the lowest, and with courage.
Jesus he is the light. He is the light that shines in the darkness.
We live in a dark world. Pain, suffering, and death are everywhere. There is darkness in the turmoil among nations. There is darkness in our politics. There is darkness in our movies, books, and music. There is darkness in our own hearts. But we’re told that Jesus, the light, shines in the darkness and the darkness has not and cannot overcome it.
Jesus is life. We can have all the necessities of life and more, but still not really have life. The life that Jesus spoke about and brings has to do with what really matters, what we long for in the deepest parts of our being.
And we are told that to all who receive this Lord Jesus Christ,
…to all who believe in his name,
…he gives the right to become children of God.
When we are born we are given life. To be born of God is to have life in Christ. We belong to him as his sons and daughters. Whatever comes we are his.
God moved into the neighborhood. The most effective way in which God believed he could express himself to us was by coming in the flesh. Not as an idea, not as a philosophy, not as a religion, but as a person. Jesus is not some impersonal spiritual power. He is not one in a series of gods or manifestations. He is not the result of religious invention.[4] Nor did he claim any of those things. He is God come in the flesh.
He didn’t make us climb the ladder to him. He didn’t set up some special path of spiritual enlightenment in order to begin to catch a glimpse of him. No, God descended down to us in human form. He came to us.
It has been said that Christianity is the most materialistic of all faiths and philosophies. We value and cherish flesh and blood. It’s because God came in flesh and blood. This is why Christians have always started and maintained hospitals, schools, orphanages, and shelters. Our faith isn’t just a bunch of ideas but a person who entered time and history. He touched, held, fed, healed, embraced, bled, died, rose. spoke. Human life matters not because we have to think up some meaning for it. It matters because the Creator came into it telling us it matters.
The mystery, the power, the giganticness of what we celebrate at Christmas is that the word and wisdom of God, which created the world, of whom prophets spoke, came from outside of time and space, out of eternity, into this universe, our small planet, to become a human being.
And the lesson of Christmas and God coming in the flesh and moving into the neighborhood is that all of us are broken yet loved, and worth reaching out to and redeeming.[5] God came because we matter.
Amen.
[1] Tish Harrison Warren, How Christmas Changed Everything, The New York Times, Dec. 26, 2021
[2] Henrietta Mears, What The Bible Is All About, p. 411
[3] Philippians 2:6-8
[4] See The Book That John Wrote, Earl Palmer, p.18
[5] Peter Wehner, The Forgotten Radicalism of Jesus, The New York Times, Dec. 24, 2020