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A weekly sermon podcast from Ojai, California. Grounded in scripture and open to the world, these reflections invite you to listen, wonder, and live the story.
Christmas is not over.
The Church insists on this, even as the world begins to move on.
While the decorations are coming down and the music is fading,
our liturgy lingers in the season.
Not out of sentimentality,
but because what Christmas reveals about God and the world
cannot be grasped in a single night.
So today the lectionary does not return us to shepherds or angels or a stable.
It takes us somewhere else entirely:
back before Bethlehem,
back before history,
back before anything we would recognize as “the Christmas story.”
“In the beginning was the Word.”
John begins his Gospel where Genesis begins.
He wants us to understand that what has been revealed
in the birth of Jesus is not an interruption in God’s life with the world,
and not a late response to human failure,
but the disclosure of something that has always been true.
The Word was with God.
And the Word was God.
All things came into being through him.
John calls this eternal reality the Logos --
the living self-expression of God,
the deep coherence and meaning of all that exists.
Creation itself, in this telling, is already an act of divine generosity:
God’s life given outward, shared, made fruitful.
Before there is law or covenant or commandment, there is gift.
And then John says what no one would have thought to say on their own:
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Not appeared as flesh.
Not visited flesh.
Became flesh.
This is God revealing, in time and space,
what has always been God’s way of being.
The self-giving love through which all things were made
now takes on the vulnerability of human life --
not as a disguise, but as a dwelling place.
The verb John uses matters.
“Lived among us” means pitched a tent -- more precisely, tabernacled.
The glory that once filled the wilderness sanctuary
now chooses ordinary human life as its home.
God’s presence is no longer located behind veils or guarded spaces.
It is found in breathing, feeding, growing flesh.
This is the heart of the Christian claim:
God chooses to be known from within the life of the world.
And John is clear-eyed about what that choice entails.
“The light shines in the darkness,” he writes,
“and the darkness did not overcome it.”
The darkness is real. John never denies that.
He names resistance and rejection.
“He came to what was his own,” and his own did not recognize him.
The Word enters a world that does not always welcome what gives it life.
The Gospels do not sugar coat this.
They tell the Christmas story in a world where fear exists,
where power feels threatened by vulnerability,
where even children can become entangled in the anxieties of the strong.
The joy of Christmas continues to unfold in these days
alongside the Church’s remembrance, early this week,
of the Holy Innocents, the victims of fear and power.
John does not linger there --
but he does not look away.
And still, he insists: the light shines.
Paul takes this vast, cosmic claim
and brings it down to the scale of human belonging.
“When the fullness of time had come,” he writes to the Galatians,
“God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.”
Born -- into the conditions of ordinary life.
Subject to time, to vulnerability,
to the structures that shape human existence.
The Incarnation is not an escape from history;
it is God’s deep immersion in it.
And the purpose of this immersion,
Paul says, is adoption.
“So that we might receive adoption as children.”
This is not sentimental language.
Adoption establishes belonging where there was once distance.
It bestows a name, an inheritance, a future.
Paul is saying that what is true of Christ -- his relationship to God --
has been opened to us,
not as an achievement, but as a gift.
“You are no longer slaves,” he writes,
“but children -- and if children, then heirs.”
John says the same thing in his own way:
“To all who received him… he gave power to become children of God.”
This belonging does not rest on comprehension or moral completion.
It flows from God’s self-giving life,
which has always been meant to be shared.
Isaiah gives voice to the joy that arises from this recognition.
“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,” the prophet sings,
“for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation…
as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”
Salvation here is not rescue from embodiment, but delight in it.
God rejoices over human lives not as problems to be solved,
but as beauty to be cherished.
God’s glory is revealed
not in distance or control,
but in faithful presence.
This is why Christmas can hold both joy and gravity without contradiction.
If the Word became flesh from the beginning,
then flesh matters -- everywhere.
If God’s self-giving has always been the source of life,
then no life is expendable.
If God’s light shines without coercion,
then we are called to bear that light
through fidelity and deep care.
So we linger here, between feast and ordinary time.
Between wonder and responsibility.
Between what has been revealed
and what is still unfolding.
Christmas is not over.
The Word is still dwelling among us.
The light is still shining.
What was true in the beginning
is now revealed among us.
Amen.