Sermon for Wednesday, December 24, 2025 || Christmas Eve || John 1:1-14
Good evening and Merry Christmas. It is a great joy to celebrate this Feast of the Nativity with you tonight. We’ll start this sermon with a little trivia. Did you know there are two Nativity stories among the four accounts of the Gospel? There’s the one everyone remembers: the familiar story from Luke’s Gospel about Mary giving birth to Jesus and laying him in a manger in Bethlehem. You might think the other is the story in Matthew’s Gospel about the magi coming to bring Jesus presents, but that’s not a Nativity story. Jesus isn’t born in that story. The story of the magi literally begins “After Jesus was born…”
No, the second Nativity story happens in the Gospel reading we heard tonight, what scholars call the “prologue” to the Gospel According to John. In these beautifully poetic verses, the gospel writer presents the entire sweeping history of God’s creation in just a few short lines. The prologue begins just like the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning…”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Through the Word, all things come into being. The Word is the creative energy that made existence happen. What makes God the Creator is God’s Creativity, which the Word. The Creator uses Creativity to make Creation. This is the Cliff’s Notes version of the creation stories in Genesis when God speaks light into being and then everything else and proclaims everything to be Good.
Skipping to the last verse in tonight’s Gospel reading, we discover what happened to the Word. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Using the idea that the Word is God’s Creativity, we might translate the verse like this: “And God’s Creativity became part of God’s Creation, and we have witnessed what it means to be a new creation made from the building blocks of grace and truth.” Not as poetic perhaps, but let’s think about the implications of God’s Creativity becoming part of God’s Creation.
First, some background: God created life to be generative and adaptable. For most of existence, life as we know it was confined to single-celled organisms swimming around in the primordial ooze. Then something happened and the cells began combining. Multicellular organisms evolved, then slightly more complex multicellular organisms, then – and I know I’m skipping a lot here – insects and fungi and fish and plants and dinosaurs and birds and mammals and eventually humans. Every time an organism adapted to its environment so it could better thrive, that was a celebration of the Creativity of the Word of God. And not only was the Word creative, it was also orderly – in the sense that Creation works due to a set properties that scientifically-minded humans are trying to figure out. This orderly Creation includes the gravitational dance of celestial bodies all the way down to the nuclear forces holding together individual atoms.
The Word caused Creation to be both adaptable and orderly. There’s a tension between these two principles (Adaptation and Order), a tension that we are all familiar with in our own lives. Most creatures strive to live in equilibrium, a state of being that balances the intake and output of resources. For you biology nerds out there, this is also called homeostasis. But humans are not like most creatures. While some humans – most notably those steeped in Indigenous wisdom – strive for equilibrium, many humans do not. Over the course of history, these humans have striven for domination, a desire to achieve security both by amassing more resources than are necessary and by removing real or perceived threats from the environment. All of the great structural sins of the world – from war to racism to climate catastrophe – can be traced to this rejection of equilibrium in favor of domination.
And so, humans, rather than adapting to fit our environment, adapted our environment to fit us. This undermined the orderly processes of Creation on this planet and led to the isolation of humans from one another, from the environment, and from the Creator. But order always tries to reassert itself. And when it did, the new order reflected the death-dealing sinful systems made by humans rather than the lifegiving order granted from the beginning by God’s Creativity. Humanity fell into a new homeostasis, in which domination was expected and accommodated, to the detriment of all people, both the oppressed and the oppressor.
Then God’s Creativity became part of God’s Creation. This Creativity opened our eyes to new ways of being – not just adaptations of the old but entirely new forms of creation based on the truth of God’s grace permeating existence. The Word of God did not just “live” among us. The Word of God made a home among us, dwelt among us – literally “camped” with us. The homeostasis of domination did not like being challenged, so it did what it always did. It killed God’s Creativity, but Creativity cannot be erased so easily. The Word of God kept speaking in new ways, promising to be with us always, urging us to step into the New Creation.
Tonight, we celebrate the birth of God’s Creativity in our world. We celebrate the revelation of the New Creation that God dreams for existence. We celebrate our participation in God’s dream, acknowledging that sin does not have ultimate power over us, no matter the persistence of sinful systems. And we embrace the truth of a grace-filled Creation, where domination has no place, where all of Creation is brought back into right relationship with God, and where God’s Creativity spurs us to unbridled acts of love.
Banner image: You Star Trek: The Next Generation nerds will get why I chose this one.
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