Christmas 1 - 2025
Sermon for The First Sunday After Christmas, 2025
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty
The spectacle of Christmas Day may have passed—but the lectionary does not let that energy dissipate too quickly. On this first Sunday after Christmas, we are invited to linger, not on the manger, but at the meaning of everything. Because John’s Gospel does not begin with shepherds or angels, but with eternity itself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
These lines are given in passing. John is not giving us a bedtime story; he is offering us a vision—of Cosmic Jesus.
At the center of that vision is the Logos—the Word.
For the ancient Greek world, Logos meant the reason, logic, or ordering principle that held the universe together. The Logos was the intelligence beneath the stars, the rational structure behind reality itself. Nothing existed apart from it.
For the Jewish people, God’s Word was not an idea but an action. The Word spoke creation into being ("Let there be Light"). The Word called Abraham, thundered from Sinai, whispered to Elijah, and came to the prophets as "fire in the bones." God’s Word did things. It created. It moved. It proclaimed.
John takes both of these traditions, the Greek and the Jewish, and makes the declaration: this Logos—the rational order of the cosmos, the creative and saving Word of God—has a face. The Logos has taken on a human name. Jesus.
“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
The Logos does not hover above human life, untouched and untroubled. The Word, the Incarnation of God in Christ, enters fully into the limits of human existence. God chooses to be born into the chaos and beauty of the world.
In the 1960s and 70s, the theologian Karl Rahner challenged the Church's medieval views of the Incarnation as merely a response to human sin—as if God became human only because something went wrong. Instead, Rahner argued that God’s desire to share divine life with humanity was always part of the plan.
Creation itself, he said, is oriented toward grace, and humanity is oriented toward the incomprehensible Mystery called God.
For Rahner, Christ is not simply sent to fix a broken invention. Christ is eternally begotten as the fullest expression of God’s self-gift to the world. The Logos becomes flesh not out of necessity, but out of love and self-communication with Creation. As Rahner puts it, God’s saving presence “cannot be limited to some space and some time, but is an intrinsic dimension of all space and all time.” This means that grace is not rare. God’s presence is not confined to sacred buildings or perfect moments. The Divine saturates the world.
It means our humanity is not an obstacle to holiness—it is the place where God chooses to dwell. Our questions, our struggles, our bodies, our relationships, our daily work—all of it becomes a potential meeting place with God.
It also changes how we see and treat one another. If the Word has taken on flesh, then every human life bears a sacred weight. Every neighbor carries something of the mystery of God. This is why John says, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” The Incarnation is not finished. It continues from then, to today, until all the tomorrows.
So let us claim and recall the new light of God's incarnate Word that it may shine forth in our lives all our days. Amen.
