God’s Best Gift

Christmas Eve – 25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

‘Let the heavens rejoice. Let the earth be glad. ‘The mountains and hills burst into song. ‘The trees of the wood shout for joy and clap their hands’ (Psalm 96:11-12 & Isaiah 55:12). “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11). 13.8 billion years ago God created the heavens and much later formed humankind in the divine image. Earth and cosmos resonate as with music as the Word, which was with God, and the Word that was God…brings all things into to being through Christ. Without Christ nothing comes to be (John 1:1, 3).
On this night, this holy night, we tell the old, old story of union with God, union with one another, and union with creation. Immanuel, ‘God with us,” incarnation, is God’s best gift. The Spirit of God is poured to fill all things with beauty, wisdom, and grace. “To be alive in the adventure of Jesus is to kneel at the manger and gaze upon that little baby who is radiant with so much promise for our world today.” (Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho Books, 2014), 79–80.)

“On Christmas Eve, we celebrate a new beginning. We welcome the dawning of a new light. A new day begins with sunrise. A new year begins with lengthening days. A new life begins with infant eyes taking in their first view of a world bathed in light. And a new era in human history began when God’s light came shining into our world through Jesus.” (McLaren)
“What do we mean when we say Jesus is the light? Just as a glow on the eastern horizon tells us that a long night is almost over, Jesus’ birth signals the beginning of the end for the dark night of fear, hostility, violence, and greed that has descended on our world. Jesus’ birth signals the start of a new day, a new way, a new understanding of what it means to be alive.” (McLaren)

“Aliveness, he will teach, is a gift available to all by God’s grace. It flows not from taking, but giving, not from fear but from faith, not from conflict but from reconciliation, not from domination but from service. It isn’t found in the outward trappings of religion—rules and rituals, controversies and scruples, temples and traditions. No, it springs up from our innermost being like a fountain of living water. It intoxicates us like the best wine ever and so turns life from a disappointment into a banquet. This new light of aliveness and love opens us up to rethink everything—to go back and become like little children again. Then we can rediscover the world with a fresh, childlike wonder—seeing the world in a new light, the light of Christ.” (McLaren)

‘When Christians hear the word “incarnation,” most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But the first incarnation, God’s best gift, was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything. The incarnation, then, is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader and ubiquitous event in which God is encountered in other human beings, and on a mountain, or in a blade of grass, and in a bird in flight.’ Seeing in this way reframes, reenergizes, and broadens our religious beliefs, in a way that is urgently needed today. “It can offer us the deep and universal meaning that Western civilization seems to lack and long.” (Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, Christ in All Things, 12/22/25).  

Incarnation, God’s best gift, has the potential to enliven dialogue of mutual respect and learning between people of different religions. God’s gift can bring to life deep felt connection and reverence with the land and its creatures. God’s gift is the basis upon which democracy becomes possible. Belief in God-given universal equality and dignity enables citizens to reason together across political differences for the common good.

This Christmas story is powerful gospel medicine. 20th century, English author, philosopher, Christian apologist, poet, journalist and magazine editor, G. K. Chesterton reminds us that, ‘our religion is not the church we belong to, but the cosmos we live inside of’ (G. K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions (John Lane, 1920), p. 215). The universe revealed in Christ Jesus is filled with aliveness. What kind of universe do you inhabit? Once we recognize that the entire physical world around us, all creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world is transformed. It becomes a home, safe and enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. It is a place to encounter the risen infant Christ in everyone, in every place, including the face of a friend, a neighbor, a stranger, even our enemies.

Jesuit priest, scientist, and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), taught that ‘God is incarnate in matter, in flesh, in all of creation, in the cosmos…We are all together “carried in the one world-womb; yet each of us is our own little microcosm in which the incarnation, God’s best gift, is wrought independently with degrees of intensity, and shades that are incommunicable.’ (Ursula King, Christ in All Things: Exploring Spirituality with Teilhard de Chardin (Orbis Books, 1997), 64–65; Hymn of the Universe, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harper and Row, 1965), 24, 28.)

Enchantment came naturally to our forebears in faith and to indigenous peoples. Re-enchantment born of incarnation is urgently needed to restore civilization to health and balance. See! Everything sparkles with the fullness and presence of God. Matter is not empty, but everything speaks of the One Life. Spirit and nature. Sacred and secular. Body and soul. Light and darkness. Insider and outsider. Saints and sinners. Life and death. In Christ these dualisms vanish. God is in with and under it all.

Scripture says, ‘Mary treasured the words people said about Jesus and pondered them in her heart’ (Luke 2:19). We wonder at these things too. Wherever two are three are gathered in Jesus’ name, we are midwives to the aliveness of grace God is bringing into being.

Poet and liturgical artist, Jan Richardson, writes beautifully about the mystery of faith in a poem entitled, “How The Light Comes”:

I cannot tell you how the light comes.
What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining.
That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us.
That it loves searching out what is hidden, what is lost, what is forgotten or in peril or in pain.

That it has a fondness for the body, for finding its way toward the flesh, for tracing the edges of form, for shining forth through the eye, the hand, the heart.

I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does.

That it will.
That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.

And so, may we this day turn ourselves toward it.
May we lift our faces to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes.
May we open and open more and open still to the blessed light
that comes.

(How The Light Comes, Jan Richardson, printed in Circle of Grace, p.59)