Light and Life to All He Brings
December 28, 2025 • The First Sunday After Christmas Day
Isaiah 61:10-62:3 • Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7 • John 1:1-18 •Psalm 147 or 147:13-21
My senior year of high school, I taught a fifth- and sixth-grade Sunday School class at my local church. I loved the curriculum: for each unit, there were a series of different activities that engaged the multiple intelligences and made lots of room for wondering and asking questions. One of these activities asked us, after reading Genesis 1 and John 1, to imagine what “the Word” that God spoke might have been.
My answer—I think influenced by reading a lot of Madeleine L’Engle—was the simple command “Be.” But two of my students’ answers have also stuck with me. One said “Love.” Another said “Jesus.”
I think Sara was right when she said in her Christmas Day sermon that the Word is ultimately unpronounceable and unknowable to us—in a language deeper and more mysterious than our limited human understanding can appreciate. But I also think these children were on to something with their ideas about the Word of God.
The Prologue to John’s Gospel, which we read every Christmas, invites us to consider the inner life of the Trinity. God exists outside of time, before all time, before space and time and form and matter and language and everything that we need to make sense of reality. But God is reality, and that reality exists eternally in Trinitarian relationship. “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” All things came into being through him, that Word being spoken by the Spirit of God over the face of the deep. And nothing that was made came into being without him. “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
In a flash, a bang: light and matter begin to exist. Stardust and potential swirl around, expanding out from their origin in the heart of the Triune God of Love. Each particle, each photon, is known and loved by God. God counts the number of the stars and calls them all by their names. And as God brings the universe into order, it grows in complexity, forming heavier atoms and larger molecules, and eventually forming what we would call Life.
The gift of life itself! That is the fundamental work of the Trinity: Source, Word, and Spirit. Unlike Aristotle’s principle of the Unmoved Mover, our God is constantly in motion, a generative motion that creates and sustains the cosmos: not just our Earth but the entire universe.
And unlike Deism’s vision of an old watchmaker, God is not content to sit back and watch creation tick along. Our story of creation says that on the seventh day God rested from his work. But that day of rest doesn’t mean God’s activity is complete. Rather, it is just beginning.
God’s Word continues to shine into the cosmos, saying to the universe: Be, and be loved. I love you into existence. God’s Word speaks through the Prophets, the lights of their generations, continuing to call his people back to himself.
But God so loved the world that God did the unthinkable and actually entered creation, sending his only-begotten Son the Word to be incarnate, to take on flesh and to dwell among us in the person of Jesus. It’s so central to our faith as Christians that we might forget how radical it is. Our God loves us so much that in order to draw us to himself he became one of us, became part of the fabric of the universe he created.
In the Incarnation, the immortal, invisible God becomes mortal and becomes visible to us. Though no one has ever seen God, we can now behold him in the face of his Son. And by knitting the divine and human natures together, not only does God come closer to us but we are also brought closer to God. Because God’s Son has become like us, we may now become like him: children of God through adoption and grace. In Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we know the way to the Father and we approach him as his children.
The Incarnation is scandalous. By entering spacetime, taking on flesh and its limitations, God in the person of Jesus redefines what it means to be God—and what it means to be human. The gift that Jesus gives to us through his birth, death, and resurrection is to make us children of God who share in the richness and fulness of the Trinitarian life. To awaken in us the divine image which has dwelt within us from creation. To show us that we are part of that creation which God has loved into existence and which God has pronounced “very good.”
So how do we remind ourselves of this good news? Look in the mirror. Society trains us to look in the mirror to examine ourselves, to find flaws. But what if you looked in the mirror and saw the truest version of yourself? The version that God sees. Yes, it’s flawed, as we all are, but more importantly, it is very good. It is made in the very image and likeness of God. It is made a child of God by adoption and grace. It is redeemed by the blood of Christ. This is grace upon grace: to look on ourselves, and on our neighbors, and be able to see the goodness and love of God reflected back at us.
God’s Word speaking at the dawn of creation has knit you and I together. We now share in that mystery of the Incarnate Word, Love which came down, by living our lives in the light of his resurrection. Through the work of Jesus in his Incarnation and Cross we are made joint heirs with him and made worthy of the banquet prepared from the foundation of the world. Through his Spirit we are preserved and re-created each day. In him is life and light, grace and truth, and we are the children of that light. Let us then pray that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives, bearing grace and truth to the world God loves so much.
~The Rev. Charles Martin