SERMON 12/25/11 Christmas Day

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John 1:1-14
On the beach, the crowd stood silent.  Couples were holding each other, childrenwere frozen in the time, and it was quiet and still.  It was a sacred moment.  The bright ball, our source of heat andlight, was dipping ever lower below the horizon.  The colors were vivid, the hues intense, thebeauty overtaking.  It was I guess holy,an instant in which creation was shouting praise to the glory of God.  It was a sacred moment.  God’s love brought about this beautiful,wonderful world, this vast and expansive universe, this expression of God’slove, God’s creative nature, this cosmos. God’s presence is in all that we survey and we the created, are verymuch intimately connected and woven into it. God acts and we respond.  Godcreates and we have our being.  Godredeems and makes us whole and we show praise. Simply stated, God created and entered the life of creation in Christ,so that we might enter into the life of God. A sacred moment.  God’s gracemediated through the ordinary.  Thesacred moment in which creator and created become whole.  It was in the Incarnate One that God wasfully present and it was the God created that redeems us in Christ and makespossible our salvation.   God restoresour relationship to God and each other in Christ and thus, our estrangement ishealed.
          Themystery of the “Word made Flesh” and the mystery of creation are mirrored inChrist. Theologian R. Kent Hughes asserts "The biblical doctrine ofcreation is a fundamental truth. Everything in the universe was made and putthere by God. God has made it all, and He has made it through Jesus Christ.Because Jesus Christ is the Creator God of all things (Col. 1:16), we "cantrust such a God with everything. Because He is Creator," says Hughes,"He knows just what His creation, His people, need.". R. Kent Hughes,John: That You May Believe (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1999), 18.  This babe in the manger, this man who walkedamong us was fully divine and fully human is the one in whom we can trustbecause he knows our needs; he has experienced them himself.  God in Christ who was and is and will be; wasbefore time and through him creation emerged and by his life, death andresurrection, we are restored to union with God and each other.  God did not create and then leave us to ourown devices.  No, God continues the workof creation through redemption. 
God is not aloof and outside the realm of humanexistence.  The Holy Spirit is God'sactive presence in the world today.  Godbreathed in the lives of the saints, and God is breathing into our lives today.  God’s love present in creation is presenttoday.  God is no mere ethereal presencebeyond and outside of us.  God isactive.  A thought is a thought until itis made real by being conveyed either in speech or writing.  Emotion is brain synapses until enactedthrough outward action.  Illuminationwithout anyone to illuminate is nothing. Spirit needs the flesh.  Thecreative, redemptive, sustaining acts of God is in and through Jesus Christ,God in flesh; one of us, one with us, and us one with God. The mystery of themanger is not so far from the mystery of God’s creative work in thebeginning.  In the beginning was the Wordand the Word was with God, and the Word was God and through him all things weremade.  Our great Christian hope and thebasis of our faith remains, that God does not abandon us, but walks withus.  Glimpses of the mystery is allaround us in the lives of our neighbors and in the beauty of creation.  The presence of God’s grace is conveyedclearly to us in water and oil, and in bread and wine.  The grace of baptism is a sacred moment.  Holy Communion is a sacred moment.  It is in these that we clearly come to knowthat God is with us, God is for us, God is, and we are made whole.