The Cosmic Nativity: The Word Became Flesh

January 5, 2025 Sermon - “The Cosmic Nativity: The Word Became Flesh”

This sermon expands on an earlier devotional teaching give to staff at the Yonge Street Mission in Toronto. It is adapted for the congregation of Church at the Mission, Yonge Street Mission

This is the first Sunday of the New Year. We are at the dawn of 2025. Time is a very strange thing.

A Pastor friend of mine said: My goal for 2025 is to accomplish the goals I had in 2024 which I should have done in 2023 because I planned to do them in 2022 after I made a resolution in 2021 after thinking long and hard about what I should change in 2020.

Now, some of us are quiet over Christmas. We’re glad it’s done. I hope you enjoyed our journey through Advent, through the themes of hope, joy, peace and love.

But, since in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Christmas is actually in 2 days, on January 7, in a sense, the church universal is still celebration Christmas, still marveling in the Incarnation.

So since in our own Advent service we mostly focused on the accounts of Jesus' birthday, account of the Nativity, from the gospel of Matthew and Luke, I thought we would have a look at the account of the Incarnation from the Gospel of John.

I want to say that I love the accounts of the Nativity, the birth of Christ that we find in the gospels. I love the story, I love lingering with the story, I love its innocence, its directness and its simple beauty.

I also love it because I love understatement.

**I’m going to play two versions of a chord progression. Tell me which one speaks to you more. [Play I-IV-II-V in fast flourish, then with simple, melodic expressiveness).

Which of those do you find more musical, better sounding? Some might prefer the energy of the first one, but the 2nd one was likely more meaningful to most of us here.

Before going to seminary I was trained as a jazz musician and composer and one of the things you learn repeatedly and have to apply consistently is the idea that ‘less is more’...that you say more musically when you keep it simple and subtle, as simple as it needs to be, when you cut out the fluff, when you understate rather than overstate.

That’s how you make music. That’s how you make art. That’s always just a good way to do life.

Now I see the Birth of Christ, or the Nativity, as the grandest understatement of all time.

I say that because at one level what occurs in the manger is what has happened at some point in the life of every human being.

Here’s something I can guarantee with absolute certainty: We were all born, present company included! Anyone not quite sure?

And Jesus is born to a mother and a step-father in a completely normal way, that we could also say was understated in terms of the dignity we would expect such a birth to occur in.

The narrative, the story we get from the gospels of Matthew and Luke gives us the real-time events in the order in which they happened.

That’s good of course, because the whole Bible is completely historically accurate, and the Christian faith is founded on real events like those recorded by witnesses like Matthew and John,

and Mark (who is credited with writing down Peter’’s gospel), or people like Luke who wrote a detailed report of information he gathered from multiple eyewitnesses.

But..,.peel back the simple melody of that story of the birth of Jesus just a layer or two and you get the true story, the reality that was happening behind the scenes,

the story that hints at ‘why’ of the extraordinary importance of this thing that we call the nativity, or the Incarnation.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

This is another telling of the Nativity, but different of course from the Nativity passages found in the other gospels. What’s the main difference?

This is what is really going on in the understated events in the manger.

St. Augustine said: “He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute”.

“The Word” here in the koine or ancient Greek is “Logos". And what the word “Word” means is at the heart of the matter.