Dwelling in the Transcendent and Immanent

Christmas 1, RCL, All Years
Sermon for December 28, 2025

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. And yes, still, Merry Christmas! We met here for services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day just a few short days ago, so I hope it does still feel like Christmas. Of the twelve days we celebrate this Christmas season, we’re only on day four, so I believe the song says you’re all getting calling birds, songbirds... though originally it was four “colly” birds, an old English term for blackbirds. However you want to hear it, a loved one is gifting you four birds today, probably after service. (Ha.) 

I have no birds for you here this morning, but I do have what may be the most mystical, theological, and poetic text in the entire New Testament, the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Before we get into that, we also have a selection of familiar Christmas hymns for you this morning, played by our last-minute substitute, Ken... We start with Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Angels We Have Heard on High (a bit heavy on the angels to start off), then we just sang Away in a Manger, and we’ll sing What Child is This at Communion today (maybe now we’ve balanced out the angels with a heavy dose of baby Jesus). And then of course, to finish, we have the beloved classic, Joy to the World.

As we put together services here at Epiphany, our liturgy team meets each week and tries to choose familiar songs that fit the lectionary texts, our Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel readings. We do occasionally mix in one or two hymns that are not as familiar so that we can continue learning new things. Luckily for our fill-in this morning, and happily for many of us here, there are just too many familiar hymns for the four services of the Christmas season, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, today, and next Sunday. We left so many hymns and carols on the cutting room floor this week.

But the ones we did pick, particularly those first four, have been interesting choices to me this weekend, as if the Holy Spirit might have been involved in our choosing them. Our liturgy team did not pick these four for this reason, at all, but as I read the bulletin Friday and Saturday over and over in preparation for this service, I realized that yes, we do start off angel-heavy and then we balance ourselves out with manger-heavy hymns. We have both a view to the heavens and then a view to the world, to the manger, to our incarnate God come to earth.

That balance is mirrored in our Gospel today, in the poetry of John chapter 1. John 1 serves so many purposes that it’s hard to wrap our heads around all of it; we could spend an entire season just discussing this one chapter. We do read this Gospel every single year on the Sunday after Christmas, so we do get annual chances to revisit it. Last year, I essentially preached, “This is a complicated and deep and important passage, go home and read it repeatedly this week, sit with it... contemplate Christ’s coming to earth.” I won’t say I was tired after my first Christmas as a priest, but I did leave the sermon in your hands. This year, I want to point out a few specific things, putting a little teacher hat on really quickly.

First, this gospel, unlike the others, it starts with “In the beginning.” John intended to mirror the beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures, of Genesis, here, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” “In the beginning was the Word.” Like Genesis, this is the poetic story, a theological story, that begins the story of a new creation for these first-century believers, making real claims about who God is, who Jesus is. John grounds them in and connects Jesus within the tradition of the Jewish people, reconnecting them with a faith they might have felt like they were leaving behind, as many of their fellow Jews did not see Jesus as their Messiah, they even killed him. Those broken relationships had to be difficult, but John helps early Christians see that this faith is a continuation of their Jewish one, because The Word was with God, and all things came into being through him. Jesus is not just a man; Jesus is transcendent.

So too first century Christians have lost their temple, the physical location and focus of their faith. Since the time of David and the ark of the covenant, Jews had a physical location where they believed God dwelled, and since the end of the Babylonian exile, that had been in their second temple in Jerusalem. This small community of believers that Jesus is the Christ, they taught and believed that God had left that temple at the crucifixion, and that building, that building was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans; John wrote this gospel soon after that war, after the destruction of that temple. So, where is God now? John helps believers with this in his opening chapter, he reminds them, The Word became flesh and lived among us, and from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Jesus was not just in heaven, nor in any temple; Jesus was with them.

What we have then in this poetic, theological, important first chapter of the gospel of John is a balanced image of the transcendent and the immanent, the heavenly alongside the physical, the present. This is an image at the core of the Christian faith, this balance of the transcendent and the immanent, and John does not want us to miss it, we do not want to miss it this Christmas season. We celebrate that God has come to earth as one of us to be with us, we glory in baby Jesus in a manger, yes. Joy to the World.

But we make a mistake if we get lost in one side of this incarnation. If we land too heavily on the fact that God is with us, that Jesus was there at the beginning, that all things came into being through him... then we miss out on the fact that this baby had parents, was surrounded by animals, was a child and a teenager and a young adult, used the bathroom, had aches and pains, had friends and loved ones, that Jesus went through what we go through, that he taught, that he was tempted, that he lived and he died, just as we all will. If we focus solely on the transcendent part of Jesus, we miss the immanent.

Likewise, if we land too heavily on Jesus as human, as the Word made flesh who lived among us... then we miss out on the truth that Jesus was God, through whom all things came into being, the life who was the light of all people, the light that no darkness can overcome. We miss out on this true light, which enlightens everyone, coming into the world in a new, shocking, and unbelievable way, a vision of God from whom we receive grace upon grace. We miss out on the Trinity, on the holy, on the spiritual. If we focus solely on the immanent, as I would argue we often do in our particular tradition, our branch of the Jesus movement, then we miss the important, life-changing transcendent.

Today on the first Sunday after Christmas, I realize I’m using a lot of ten-dollar words, a lot of seminary sort of thought. Some of you probably came to sing these familiar carols and to see friends and to eat brunch. I get it, I love that part too. But the Gospel of John on the First Sunday of Christmas begs us to consider the balance of the transcendent and the immanent we have at Christmas, it begs us to realize we have no idea of who God is without this Son, “who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made God known” to us. And what we see is the light of the world, there from the very beginning, the transcendent and the heavenly, the beloved, come to earth as a baby, a human who lived and breathed and taught and died as one of us. The incarnation we celebrate at Christmas is a loving interplay of the two, something the world had never seen, has not seen since, and will not see again this side of heaven. Merry Christmas, indeed.

What does it mean for us today? What does this incarnation mean? I preached on Christmas Day that it means “God with us, not just for us,” and yes, that. I preached on Christmas Eve that it means we can have “childlike joy in the midst of a hopeless world, amid personal struggles,” and yes, that. But today, the incarnation means that we can see and worship and dwell in the transcendent, the heavenly, and also participate in it, in love, like Christ calls us to do.

Other faith traditions land on one side or the other of that divide, deeply spiritual or deeply humanist; but thanks to Christmas, we as twenty-first century Christians, we get to do both, for they are one and the same. We get to worship God, we are called to love God, to dwell in God’s presence, and we get to build God’s kingdom on earth, we are called to love our neighbor and show a different way of being to the world that needs it. And we get to do both because God came to this world, on Christmas. God did not run from this world, nor abandon this world, nor condemn this world, but God came to this world in love to be Emmanuel, God with us, to show us grace upon grace. To quote John directly, "the true light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world."

This morning, we sing to angels, spiritual beings we have no scientific explanation for in this modern, physical world. And we sing about a historic manger, asking “What child is this?” We balance the transcendent and the immanent, we balance the heavenly and the worldly, we balance the Godly and the human, just as Jesus Christ himself does at Christmas. And then, we sing in joy, Joy to the World, because our Savior has come to rule the world in truth and grace, making the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and the wonders of his love, the wonders of his love, the wonders of his unbelievable and world-changing love. May we all dwell in that love, in God's love, in both the transcendent and the immanent this Christmas season.

Amen.