12/25/2025 - Christmas Morning -

John 1:1–14

On Christmas morning, the church gives us a different kind of story.
There is no stable here. No shepherds running through fields. No angels singing in the night sky. Instead, we are taken all the way back—before night and sky, before fields and flocks, before time itself.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

John begins Christmas not with a baby, but with mystery. With poetry. With God’s own breath and speech. The Word—Logos—through whom all things came into being. Before there was light in the heavens, John tells us, there was Light at the heart of God. Before there was life on earth, there was Life moving through God’s own being.

And that Life, John says, is “the light of all people.”
Not some. Not the worthy.
All.

This light… “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Notice that John does not say the darkness disappeared. He does not pretend it isn’t real. Christmas morning is honest: there is still grief in the world, still violence, still loneliness, still fear. Darkness remains.

But it does not get the final word. It does not win. It cannot extinguish the light.

John the Baptist comes as a witness — someone who points to it. Christmas reminds us that God’s light is often made known not through spectacle, but through human lives willing to testify — through people who say, Look. Pay attention. God is here.

And yet — this is also the heartbreak at the center of the text —
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.”

The Word who made the world enters the world and is unrecognized. The Light shines, and many turn away. Christmas does not deny rejection. Love always risks refusal. God does not force recognition or belief. God comes vulnerably, quietly, in a way that can be missed.

But John refuses to end there.

“To all who received him… he gave power to become children of God.”

Not by bloodlines. Not by achievement. Not by purity or pedigree. But by grace. To receive the Word made flesh is to be drawn into a new way of belonging—born not from human striving, but from God’s own life.

And then we arrive at the sentence that stands at the heart of today:

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Not hovered above us.
Not shouted at us from heaven.
Not protected from human frailty.

The Word became flesh. Skin and breath. Hunger and fatigue. Joy and tears. God chose embodiment. God chose nearness. God chose a human body.

This is the scandal and the gift of Christmas: that God’s glory is revealed not in escape from the world, but in deep presence within it. John says, “We have seen his glory”—and that glory looks like grace and truth dwelling among us.

Christmas morning proclaims that God is not distant from our lives. God is not waiting for us to transcend our humanity. God meets us in it. In our bodies. In our relationships. In our complicated, aching, beautiful world.

The light still shines.
The Word still dwells among us.
And we are invited—not to understand it fully, but to receive it.

On this Christmas morning, may we open ourselves again to the mystery:
that God has chosen flesh,
that love has taken on weight and warmth,
and that even now, the light shines in the darkness — and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Amen.