Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ. The text on which this morning's message is based comes from our Gospel lesson (John 1: 1-18) read earlier.

"In the beginning." Genesis 1: 1; In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Verse 3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." God spoke, and his Word created heaven and earth, light, and water and land and grass and trees and sun and moon and whales and birds and cattle and every creature. God spoke a Word: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them". God spoke a Word and Adam and Eve were created, perfect in a perfect world.

"In the beginning."

God speaks and things happen, from the very beginning. But from nearly the very beginning, God's words have been ignored or distrusted by his people. God told Adam this one warning: "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die". Adam failed to emphatically pass that word of warning onto Eve in the beginning and Eve then was tempted to cross God's Word, plummeting all of us into rebellion against God and his Word, into sin.

"In the beginning" John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

With these words the Apostle John would have us see a renewed message from Genesis 1. In Genesis, God is our creator and for that we can be thankful. But now God has gone beyond our creation, to our re-creation. In Genesis God created a perfect world from nothing. Now here in John we begin to see how God is re-creating a sinful world again into his perfect creation. In this re-creation of humankind, God again used His Word, but this time His word was even more tangible, incarnate is the fancy theological word we use to say that the Word, Jesus Christ, became flesh and dwelt among us.

In his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey tells how this "Word became flesh" truth came to him. Yancey raises tropical saltwater fish, a task that requires owning a portable chemical laboratory just to keep all the nitrate and ammonium levels correct. He said "I pump in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filter the water through glass fibers and charcoal and expose it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow looms above the tank, they dive for cover into the nearest shell. My fish show me only one emotion: fear. Although I open the lid and drop in food on a regular schedule, 3 times a day, they respond to each visit as a sure sign of my desire to torture them." Yancey realized that to the fish, he was like a god, too large and foreign. His actions were incomprehensible and menacing. They saw his acts of mercy as cruelty, his attempts at healing as destruction. So, he concluded, "To change their perceptions would require a form of incarnation, of flesh-changing. I would have to become and fish and 'speak' to them in a language they could understand."

From our epistle text: "(Hebrews 1:1) In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but now in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son". In the beginning, God did create us. As with Yancey and his fish, God still sustains us despite our living in a world bent on collapsing in on itself. We would all avoid God, fearful of his greatness, had he not revealed Himself to us, first through his prophets, but now in these last days through His Son. Jesus Christ reveals God to us by becoming His tangible mouthpiece, the Word made flesh. In Jesus God reveals His great love for us, a love that was a costly love, a love willing to sacrifice. God created the heavens and the earth and us by His Word, but now to recreate us and bring us back to him would require not just God in a human form talking to us, but God in a human form showing us a sacrificial love.

Years ago, a widow was taking her baby across the mountains to visit a relative when she was caught in a terrible snowstorm. The next day her body was found, almost stripped of clothing. The searchers assumed the worst for the baby as well. But to their great surprise the baby was found nearby in a sheltering nook, safe and sound, wrapped in the clothes the mother had taken from her own body to save her child. Years later the son of the pastor who conducted her funeral was preaching in Glasgow, Scotland. He included this story of the mother's sacrificial love for her child, which he had heard from his father. A few days later the younger pastor was summoned to the home of a dying man. The man told him that he was not a churchgoer, but then said, "The other day as I passed the church and heard the joyful singing, I slipped in out of the cold and sat in the back. Then I heard you tell the story of the mother and her son."

The man paused, sobbed, and choked as he said, "I am the son. I have never forgotten my mother's love, but I never saw the love of Jesus in giving himself for me until I heard your sermon. My mother did not die in vain. Her prayers for me are now answered." (from Edit-O-Earl, Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year Baptism)

We are blessed because this Word of God has revealed himself to us before we are lying at death's door. We know and trust that He has clothed himself in human flesh, and then gave up his life for us. He has called us to trust in His sacrificial love for us. We who believe in him now, he gives the right to become the children of God – children born not of natural descent, but born of God through Baptism and the Word.

We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father full of grace and truth.

Thanks be to God for this Word made flesh, this babe the Son of Mary.

The grace and peace of the incarnate Christ, the Word made flesh, dwell with us at this Christmas time. Amen.