December 25, 2025
The scriptures for this Christmas Day make remarkable claims about Jesus:
- Jesus is the appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.
- He is the reflection of Gods glory.
- He is the exact imprint of God’s being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
- Jesus is the eternal word of God who was there at the beginning of the creation with God and was God!
- All things came into being through him. Life came into being through Jesus.
- Jesus and is the light for all people. The true light that has come into our darkness.
- And the eternal Word of God took on flesh and lived among us full of grace and truth. His name is Jesus.
These descriptions of Jesus are of Christ highly exalted – Lord of lords, King of kings, Lord of the church, Ruler of all. The proclamation of Christmas is that a tiny, vulnerable infant is all of these things. The exalted one is discovered in a child. The exalted and holy God becomes human, takes on our flesh. God came to us here in our humanity as a companion in our flesh.
Mind blowing! How is this possible that God should wear human flesh and dwell among us?
This very article of belief has served as a kind of intellectual puzzle and a source of debate over the centuries, including within the church itself. Christians have not always agreed about how we think about or speak about these claims.
A little later in the liturgy we will say together the Nicene Creed. The Creed says pretty much the same thing as these readings from Hebrews and John. This past fall we had an adult class on the Creed and we learned how our Christian ancestors struggled over these claims. A conflict arose between those who adhered to Jesus being the eternal Word of God who wore human flesh and the Arians. Arianism taught that Jesus only seemed to be human and that only his spirit was divine. These teachings of Arius made sense to many and to this article of faith they subscribed. Meanwhile, Christians who worried about the authenticity of the church’s beliefs saw Arianism as a threat. The whole debate really riled things up. In fact, it was reported that St. Nicholas (the inspiration for Santa Claus) punched Arius himself in the face. So passionate these early church leaders were about the Gospel!
One of the things we discussed in the class is how the Creed, now 1,700 years old is a description of what is essentially a mystery. The Creed is less an explanation and more an evocation. No words can fully describe the mystery of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet, words we have and words are important. Those who fashioned the creed were not so much intent on explaining the mystery of God as they were describing it in ways that tease our imagination and, at the same time, provide a solid foundation.
Followers of Arius were rightly impressed by his argument since it was reasonable. It made sense! The creed, describing the holy trinity of God, points to something that is essentially unreasonable and points us to the large world of faith and imagination.
When we are governed by reason alone, we may cynically quip that when it comes to things like the incarnation of God is really “a stretch of the imagination to believe such things.” Using our imagination to receive Christ may actually be a more life-giving option than reason alone.
What draws us here today isn’t the completion of an intellectual puzzle. We are here today because somehow and in some way we know this mystery to be true.
In one of his Christmas sermons, Martin Luther admitted that the mystery of the incarnation is, at face value, foolish. It is foolishness to believe, said Luther, that God, who can do anything would make himself weak as a vulnerable infant. Luther remarked that either we conclude that God has no wisdom or power of the whole story is made up. He said it makes no sense and speculated that if he were there at Jesus’ birth he would have concluded it makes no sense and would not have gone into the stable where Christ was born. This was a consistent theme in Luther’s preaching of the Christmas Gospel. It makes no sense and on the face of it is simply impossible and absurd.
So, today we come here not by way of reason or any exalted truth in ourselves but with awe and wonder at the sheer mystery.
In the recently released film Wake Up, Dead Man, Detective Benoit Blanc arrives in Chimney Rock, New York to investigate a murder. His first stop is the church, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. There he meets for the first time Father Judd by inadvertently disrupting Father Judd as he is praying. Blanc apologizes for the interruption and then comments on the splendor of the church. Father Judd remarks, “Yes, you can just feel his presence.” To which Benoit Blanc asks “whose?” There’s a bit more conversation between them before Blanc finally admits to the priest, “I kneel at the altar of reason.” It is what makes him a good detective.
Later in the film, during one of the intense conversations between Detective Blanc and Father Judd, the priest agrees that faith cannot be accessed through reason but, said Judd, we have stories. “Stories convince us of a lie or resonate deep with something inside of us that’s profoundly true.” Judd says that God cannot be accessed through any other way except through storytelling. It is one way, perhaps the most creative way to access profound truth beyond facts.
Just so, we remember the story. Last night, as the familiar story of Jesus’ birth was told in this gathering and in this place and I felt as if I was hearing it for the first time. I suspect others might say the same. We delight in hearing it again. Maybe it’s because the rough and tumble of daily life with Mary and Joseph, a couple that was essentially homeless, and shepherds who labored in their fields who were “rough around the edges,” and Jesus’ birth in a little town insignificant compared to some place like Jerusalem rings true. Pieces of the story resonate to some degree.
Reason cannot bear it, so we listen again to the story and in faith we make the story our own. We are in that story. Best of all, we discover again and again the presence of God in the story.
It’s remarkable. The eternal word of God, Jesus the High Priest, Lord of the Church and ruler of all, became remarkably human. Come to us in the flesh of an infant to love us where we are, where we live.
Here’s the best part: the wood of the manger where Christ was born became for us the Wood of the Cross. Love has broken into this world in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and love will have the final say. So, we approach this mystery toady and in the next twelve days of Christmas with awe and gratitude welling up in our hearts. Dear friends in Christ: behold the mystery in all of its resplendent wonder and in all of its earthiness. Amen.