Christmas Day: “Love Came Down”
Sermon — December 25, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God…
And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.
(John 1:1, 14)
There’s something I love about reading the most cosmic and story of Jesus’ birth at the quietest service of the church year. On Christmas Eve, we celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, with a whole crowd of people singing carols that revel in the familiar details of the scene: the shepherds keeping watch in the fields, and the angels singing in the sky, and the babe lying in a manger. And then on Christmas Day—after the shepherds have gone home, and so have the crowds—a small handful of us come here to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation, “the becoming-flesh” of the Word of God.
John’s story of the birth of Christ is both familiar and strange, simple and incomprehensible. The meaning of the words is simple enough. The important ones are only one syllable: Word and God, life and light, flesh and blood, grace and truth. And yet the full meaning of what John says is almost beyond the capacity of our minds to understand: the smartest theologians and philosophers in the world have spent millennia discussing exactly what it means, and what it tells us about how Jesus Christ relates to God, and perhaps it’s ironic that in their efforts to explain John’s simple statement that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh, and lived among us,” they’ve ended up with some pretty complex terms: from “Incarnation” to “hypostasis.” The Word became flesh, and we’ve been coming up with new words to say so ever since.
But it’s Christmas morning, and the Word didn’t become flesh to give intellectuals something to do. The Word became flesh to change our hearts; to bring life into a world of death, to bring love into a world of hate, to bring light into a world of darkness. There’s only one kind of theologian that we need to consult on Christmas Day, and that’s a poet, of course: the queen of Christmas hymns, Christina Rossetti, who explains the mystery of the Incarnation of God in the words we all just sang:
Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine;
love was born at Christmas, star and angels gave the sign.
Jesus’ birth on Christmas Day was the beginning of many things. It was the beginning of a childhood, during which he would grow and learn and cause his parents much vexation. It was the beginning of a life of ministry, in which Jesus would teach and preach and heal the people around him. It was the beginning of the road toward the Cross, on which Jesus would give his own life to save his people from the power of sin and death.
And if these were the only important things about Jesus’ life, then you might think that Christmas Day is a celebration of the birthday of a great and important man—a day, like Presidents’ Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, on which we recognize the achievements of a person’s adult life by celebrating the day of his birth.
But in fact, that’s not the case. Because the birth of Christ is not just a prelude to the main event; the Gospel of John suggests that it is the main event: that Jesus was not merely a good and wise man who did good and wise things; that Jesus only born because God needed someone to die; that Jesus was not a man who later, somehow, became God. The Gospel of John insists that the process went the other way around: that Jesus was God-become-man, the Word-become-flesh, Love-come-down among us.
God looked at our world, past, present, and future. God looked at humankind, and saw who we were and what we do. God looked at the multidimensional cosmic landscape of all of space and time; God saw everything we have done and everything that we will do, good, bad, or boring. And God came down to spend a life with us. Love came down at Christmas, love incarnate, love divine.
And God invites us to respond: to accept the love of God made flesh on Christmas Day, and to respond with our own lives of love. To look for the light shining in the darkness, and to spread that light in our world. To become the children of God, not only in name, but in deed; to let our lives be enlightened by the love of God, until Rossetti’s words shine forth in our lives, until her prayer becomes our reality, and we become so full of the love of God that
Love shall be our token, love be yours and love be mine,
love to God and neighbor, love for plea and gift and sign.
