ISAIAH 61:10 – 62:3

GALATIANS 3:23-25, 4:4-7

JOHN 1:1-18

Sermon – 12/29/02

No human being ever could have dreamed up the original Christmas. It happened, and slowly we began to recognize (if not fully comprehend) the enormity of it; and today, the first Sunday after Christmas, we need once again to take a deep breath and peel away all the attractive but secondary trappings of this holy-day and consider the Event itself.

No human being could have dreamed up Christmas. Oh, pagans often enough have imagined their gods coming down to earth disguised as human beings for a brief time. St. Paul and St. Barnabas themselves were taken for Hermes and Zeus by a pagan crowd in interior Asia Minor after they had healed a man by the power of God—but such appearances were imagined to be brief and designed to be thinly disguised so as to inspire (or command) worship.

The idea of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the eternal Word of God, the pre-existent and immortal Christ, descending to earth and spending nine months in the womb of a Jewish peasant woman from an obscure village and then being born in a stable, to grow and live, preach and heal, be betrayed, suffer and die in excruciating pain, never would have been dreamed up by human imagination.

It is shocking that the Creator of the Universe should stoop so low for the sake of us dim, confused, sinful and too often violent bipedal creatures on the third rock from an ordinary star in the suburbs of one galaxy among God only knows how many galaxies.

But that is what happened.

This is what we’re talking about at Christmas. The birth of Christ was the act of the eternal God becoming incarnate, becoming voluntarily subject to the potential joys and pains of human existence, experiencing the ebb and flow of ordinary life in obscurity for 30 years after his wondrous birth, then leaving his home town and the family he grew up in to create a new family, which would eventually make the entire planet one home town, but at the cost of his life.

For Christmas would be empty if it did not lead to Good Friday, and Good Friday would be despair if it did not lead to Easter. It is all one piece, but it began with this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church