Homily December 28, 2025, Rev. Holly Cardone

The Word Made Flesh

First Sunday after Christmas

December 27, 2025

I believe in a parking-space God. I believe God shows up in the body of my little dog, who completely loses her mind with joy when I walk through the door. I believe God works through people in all kinds of ways, to remind us that we matter, that hope really can change lives, and that a single act of kindness toward a stranger can change everything.

Writer and former pastor Rob Bell in his book What Is the Bible? says that when we reduce Jesus to “master teacher, inspiration for social justice, or profound mystic with deep insights into the infinite,” all of which are true, we still miss something essential. Bell writes that repeatedly Jesus insists he is doing something far more elemental than that. He keeps claiming that something new is happening in the world, and that it is happening through him.

This is how the Gospel of John describes it, in what is really a poem:

“In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

All things came into being through him,

and without him not one thing came into being.

What came into being was life,

and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overcome it.”

John begins exactly where Genesis begins: “In the beginning.” Before anything existed, before stars and oceans and human beings, there was the Word. The Greek word John uses is Logos. Logos means more than “word.” It means meaning. Order. Wisdom. Creative power. Light. Life. Love.

Before creation, Logos was with God. Logos was God. And then, this is the amazing thing, Logos takes on flesh. Light, life, and love take on a human body in the person of Jesus.

Bell describes this moment as heaven and earth coming together, the divine and the human occupying the same space at the same time. The church has a word for this: the Incarnation. God with us. Not hovering above us. Not watching from a distance. But embodied.

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language says it like this:

“The Word was first,

the Word present to God,

God present to the Word.

The Word was God,

in readiness for God from day one.

Everything was created through him;

Nothing, not one thing!

came into being without him.

What came into existence was Life,

and the Life was Light to live by.

The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;

the darkness couldn’t put it out.”

And then he says:

The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.

Moved into the neighborhood. Not the gated community. Not the palace.

The neighborhood, ordinary, complicated and human.

The Incarnation raises enormous questions. What does it mean to be human? Are we merely a collection of bones and blood, organs and systems? Or are we more than that? Bell invites us to consider that perhaps something divine, something infinite and eternal, resides within us as well. Are we just dust? Or are we also spirit? I believe we are spirit.

Made in God’s image. If the divine and the human could coexist in Jesus, then maybe, just maybe, the divine and the human coexist in us, too.

God dwells not only in sanctuaries and sacred texts, but in the natural world, the animal world, and the universe itself. God is present in what we can see, taste, touch, and smell. The divine expresses itself through art and poetry, music and film, writing and theater, through human creativity that holds the full range of human experience and brings heaven and earth together.

And yet, it doesn’t take much scrolling through the news to fall into despair. There is no shortage of darkness. Violence, war, displacement, grief. We still ask, “Where is God in all of this?”

You won’t often read headlines about heaven and earth quietly colliding to transform the world in small, ordinary ways. But I am certain that on the ground, in refugee camps, in hospitals and shelters, the divine is incarnate in people showing up for one another. In those who tend the wounded. In those who refuse to give up on peace. In those who choose compassion when despair would be easier. In those who speak out against oppression and marginalization of people.

This is what Christmas, and the season after Christmas, proclaims: that God works in and through human beings to bring something new into the world. That the true light still shines. That the darkness does not get the final word.

There may not actually be a parking-space God. I know that. But there is a God, the source of light, life, and love, who shows up where two or three are gathered. A God who shows up in a newborn baby. In the wild joy of a dog greeting her person. In the friend who calls at exactly the right moment. In the stranger who shows kindness when you thought you couldn’t survive another day of grief.

Logos, light, life, and love, became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.

Look around.

The Word made flesh is sitting right next to you.

Amen.