“And He Leads His Children On”
Sermon — December 28, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…
so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4:4-5) Amen.
Take a seat, but don’t put that hymnal away quite yet. We’re going to have a short sing-along. Could you turn with me to Hymn 102? We’re going to sing just one verse, the fifth verse, beginning with “And our eyes.”
And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child who seemed so helpless
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.
The story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of a child becoming part of a new family. But the child isn’t Jesus, and the family isn’t the Holy Family: the child is me! And, lest you think the bubble of my ego has finally burst, the child is also you, and you, and you—because the story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of the adoption of a whole host of children from all sorts of families into the one family of God.
We sometimes use the phrase “children of God” as a vaguely-spiritual way to say “human beings.” We should treat one another with dignity and respect, a religious leader might say, because “we’re all children of God.” This is the sort of thing a milquetoast Protestant like me says when called upon to offer a prayer at some kind of civic event hosted by local politicians: it’s true, and it’s good, and it’s unlikely to offend.
But this isn’t quite what the apostle Paul means. Paul doesn’t think that “we’re all children of God,” at least not in the sense he means it in his letter to the Galatians. Human beings aren’t born the children of God. We become children of God, in a very particular way.
“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law—so that we might receive adoption as children.” (Gal. 4:4-5) For Paul, this is the point of Christmas: God the Father sent God the Son to be born as a human child, so that we human beings—young and old alike—might become the children of God, through adoption.
There’s some interesting context here about what “adoption” means. If you’ve ever studied ancient history, you may know what Paul, who was a Roman citizen, absolutely did know: that adoption was the primary form of succession to the imperial throne in the early Roman empire. Julius Caesar was succeeded by Octavian Augustus, a great-nephew whom he adopted as his son and heir in his will. Augustus was succeeded by his adopted stepson Tiberius, after two grandsons whom he’d also adopted died before him. Tiberius was followed by his grand-nephew and adopted grandson, Caligula, and so on, so that throughout Paul’s lifetime the position of emperor was inherited by someone who had been adopted, not born as heir. And the tradition carried on for several hundred years: in fact, adoption became such a dominant way of designating an heir to the throne that by the second century, it seemed completely normal for the elderly Emperor Nerva to adopt as his son and heir the 43-year-old general Trajan. This kind of imperial adoption was a legal and political arrangement; while many of the people involved were related, adoption wasn’t primarily about raising children.
When Paul calls us “children of God,” he shares this focus on inheritance. He means that through adoption, we become heirs: “heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ,” as he puts it when he’s writing to the Romans. (Rom. 8:17) If you think about it, this is a really remarkable claim: to the extent that Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, inherits something from God the Father—we, too, inherit that same thing on an equal basis, as “joint heirs.” If Christ will inherit the throne of God, so will we.
But Paul’s idea goes beyond this Roman imperial practice. It isn’t just a legal fiction; it’s something we really feel. God sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts, and we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6) We feel the warmth of God’s love for us, which we can only liken to the love that parents have for their children, and it really is as though the love that exists within the Holy Trinity, between God the Father and God the Son, is extended to us as well. In some mysterious ways, Christ’s birth among us as a little child enables us to become children of God. Jesus comes down among us, in order to raise us up with him to God.
It’s the same story in the beautiful Prologue to the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1, 14) In Jesus of Nazareth, John says, the Word of God, the eternal underlying logic of the universe, that has always been with God and that is itself God became flesh, and lived among us.
And this is such a big idea that it sometimes causes us to miss one small verse, which sounds a lot like Paul’s idea of adoption: the claim that “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” (John 1:12)
It’s the same arc, from heaven to earth and back. Paul writes: “God sent his Son, born of a woman…so that we might receive adoption as children…and if child[ren] then also heir[s].” John writes: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,” and “gave [us] power to become children of God.” Or as Cecil Frances Alexander said so well, in our sing-along hymn: “He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all… and he leads his children on to the place where he is gone.”
Christmas begins a circle from heaven to earth and back. Jesus came down to us at Christmas, so that we might rise with him to God. He came among us as a child, so that we might become children of God. He came to show us the love that has existed since before time, between God the Father and God the Son—and he invites us, in some mysterious way, to participate in that relationship of love.
You could spend most of your life trying to understand what that even means, let alone living into it. But the beauty of Christmas is that we don’t have to understand. We don’t need to know what it means for it to make a difference in our lives or in our world. Whether we believe it or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we like it or not, we have been adopted as the children of God.
We’ve been given the love of God, an unconditional love that embraces us wherever we go. God loved us so much, that Christ came down among us, to lead us on the road back to God. We are adopted as the beloved children of God, and God is with us as we continue to grow and to learn how to love one another. Our journeys through life may sometimes take wrong turns; but while we may sometimes find ourselves moving further away from God, and sometimes closer, we have been designated heirs, and we will one day receive our inheritance.
And at the end of our long journey, at the very moment when we leave this world behind, we will finally receive the full fruits of the love that came down at Christmas; we will finally receive the final gift; and when we fall asleep for the last time in this world, we will wake again upon another shore, and in a greater light,
And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child who seemed so helpless
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.
Amen.
