Now What?

Christmas has a way of arriving with great fanfare and then leaving us very quickly with silence.

The carols fade. The decorations come down. The world moves on. And yet the Church, stubborn and wise, insists that Christmas is not a single day but a season, a span of time meant not just for celebration, but for dwelling. For staying with what has come into the world long enough to begin to notice how it changes us.

I know my own Christmas celebrations were delightful, even if coming upon me suddenly and leaving too quickly. I was left this year with that familiar feeling of letdown afterward, that question: now what? What does it mean to live after the Word has taken on flesh? How does the incarnation reshape ordinary days, human bodies, relationships, and the way we understand God’s nearness?

The sermon I preached this first Sunday after Christmas lingers in that place of bewilderment we often feel after a season of anticipation or after a big celebration has passed, and we wonder what comes next.

I invite you to listen or to read slowly. Let the images settle. And as you do, consider not only what Christmas means, but how it continues—quietly, persistently—in you.

I invite you to consider, as you move through this week:

• John speaks of becoming children of God, not through striving or effort, but through receiving. What might it look like for you to live from belonging rather than fear or performance?

• The image of microchimerism suggests that lives joined together are never quite separate again. How does this image deepen your understanding of the incarnation?

• If Christmas is not something to finish, but a life to grow into, what might God be inviting you to trust, release, or receive in this season?

Sermon: Now What?

Church of the Nativity

1st Sunday After Christmas, Year A

December 28, 2025

John 1:1-18, Galatians 3:23-25

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Good morning, and a happy Christmastide to you. The carols we sing this morning, the manger we passed on the way in, and the massive Christmas tree still standing in the corner all attest to the fact that it is still, indeed, Christmas. The Church, in her wisdom, insists that Christmas is not just a day but a season—twelve days, in fact—time set aside not simply to celebrate, but to dwell with what has come into the world.

And yet the world around us is already boxing Christmas up and putting it in the attic. After a month of buildup—decorating and baking, parties and shopping, wrapping and unwrapping—the frenzy has passed. The spectacle is over, and the assumption is that now we can return to our ordinary lives.

But we know that isn’t quite true. Christmas is not the end of something. It is only the beginning. We spent the season of Advent preparing, waiting, and yearning for Christ to come. And now he’s here. Which leaves us with the question that always follows a long season of anticipation: now what?

The buildup to Christ’s birth is full of preparation and expectation, much like the time leading up to any other birth. If you have ever welcomed a child, grandchild, or even a niece or nephew into the world, you know how much energy goes into getting ready. There are books to read and clothes to buy, a room to prepare. You gather gadgets you are sure you will need and others you later realize you never did. You plan for labor and delivery, for the ride home, making sure the car seat is buckled in just right, sometimes requiring what feels like a degree in engineering.

And then the moment arrives. The child is born. You leave the hospital carrying this tiny human being, and somewhere between the exit doors and the car, the question rises up: now what? How on earth do I figure out what comes next?

You ask that question because in those first days, you realize something important: all the preparation in the world cannot tell you what life will actually be like once this new life has arrived. You do not yet understand what this child will require of you or how your days will be reshaped. What you do know, with absolute certainty, is that something irrevocable has happened. The future, whatever it holds, will unfold differently than it would have otherwise.

I remember holding my firstborn, Nadia, during one of the rare quiet moments amid the chaos of those early days. The house had finally gone still. The lists, the advice, the well-meaning instructions had all fallen away. I was sitting in the rocking chair in her room, the same chair my own mother had rocked me in, when I held one of her tiny fingers in mine and realized it was scarcely larger than a matchstick.

I was struck not only by how fragile she was, but by how completely unprepared I still felt. She was utterly dependent and suddenly entrusted to me. I realized everything had changed forever, and I just sat and wept in awe of it all. All the frenzy had passed; all the preparation was over. Now, I had a new life to live as a mother. And I sat for a long time with that realization in the quiet of the night.

Christmas, it turns out, invites us into something very much like that moment. Now that the Word has taken on flesh, what does that mean for ordinary days, for human bodies, for lives lived amid uncertainty and change? Now is the moment to slow down, to listen more carefully, and to ask a deeper question than we usually allow ourselves during celebration: now what?

John’s Gospel takes up that question, though not in the way we might expect. John offers us no birth story to linger over—no angels or shepherds to help us imagine the scene. He does not begin with the vulnerability of an infant in a manger, but with the vastness of eternity. Instead of taking us to Bethlehem, John draws us back before time itself, as if to say that if we want to understand what comes next, we must first understand who this child truly is.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

These lines are among the most familiar in all of Scripture, and among the most theologically dense. John was the last gospel written. Penned around 100 AD, the followers of Christ had spread into the gentile world, and the gospel was being contextualized in a world shaped by Greek philosophy, a world deeply interested in meaning, order, and reason. Into that world, John chooses his opening word very carefully: Logos - the Word.

For John’s hearers, Logos was familiar. It was an ancient Greek philosophical concept that spoke of a cosmic order governing the universe. This wasn’t some divine being but a rational order, a fundamental law of the universe. Think of it as deep logic behind reality, the reason the cosmos held together rather than dissolving into chaos. It was powerful and eternal, but distant. It did not love. It wasn’t personal. It certainly did not enter history.

And John takes that concept and turns it completely inside out. He tells us that the Logos was not simply with God but was God. That all things came into being through this Word. And then he makes the most radical claim of all: the Word became flesh.

The wisdom that holds the universe together is not abstract. It is personal, he says. It is loving. It is God’s own self, now made known in Jesus. When we look at Jesus, we are not seeing a softened version of the Old Testament God or a kinder revision of a harsh deity. Jesus does not change God. Jesus reveals God.

Which means the incarnation is not an interruption in God’s story. It is the story. The child born at Christmas is the one through whom the universe itself came into being.

John is insistent here. God did not merely step inside flesh for a time or wear humanity like a costume to be removed. The Word became flesh—fully, completely, and permanently—and in doing so, God joined God’s own life to ours in a way that cannot be undone.

This is where the “now what?” of Christmas begins to come into focus. The incarnation is not merely an event to be remembered, but a reality that continues to unfold. God has not visited humanity and then withdrawn. God has bound God’s future to human flesh, to human history, to ordinary lives lived day by day.

John tells us that in this fleshly, vulnerable presence, we have seen God’s glory, not a glory defined by dominance or control, but by intimacy and nearness. Grace, here, is not something dispensed from a distance. It is shared life. The Word becomes flesh, and God stays.

Almost quietly, John names what this makes possible for us: “To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God.” Not servants trying to earn approval. Not spiritual laborers striving to get it right. But children, born not of human effort or will, but of God.

This is the quiet revolution of Christmas. We are no longer defined by striving or fear, but by belonging. In Christ, we do not approach God from the outside. We already belong from within.

I read an article this week in The Atlantic describing a mystery modern science is only beginning to understand. Scientists are discovering how a process called microchimerism affects us all.  During pregnancy, cells cross the placenta in both directions. Fetal cells migrate into the mother’s body—into her heart, lungs, liver, even her brain—where they can remain for decades, sometimes for a lifetime. They adapt. They take on the work of the tissue they inhabit. They become part of the body that receives them.

And the exchange goes both ways; the mother's cells enter the embryo. Which means none of us is ever only ourselves. Many of us quite literally carry pieces of one another, woven into who we are. A mother, long after her child has grown, is never without him. And he is never without her.

Christmas tells us that God has done something like this with us. In Jesus, God has not simply drawn near or brushed past our humanity. God has joined God’s own life to ours, not symbolically, but truly. God carries our humanity forever. And we, astonishingly, carry God’s life within us.

So when John tells us that the light shines in the darkness, he is not saying the darkness disappears. He is saying the light shines within it. God is present in our bodies, our ordinary days, our unfinished healing, our quiet longing.

So where does that leave us now? After a child is born, nothing goes back to the way it was before. Not because everything is suddenly clear or easy, but because a relationship has begun that cannot be undone. Life reorganizes itself around that presence.

In Jesus, God has entered into a relationship that continues. God stays—growing with us, accompanying us, shaping our lives from the inside out. Like an adopted child learning, over time, to trust the permanence of love, we grow into this identity slowly, sometimes haltingly, discovering again and again that we are held.

So the question after Christmas is not what must we do next? It is how will we live in this relationship now that it has begun? Will we make room for God in the ordinary rhythms of our days? Will we trust that grace is already at work, even when we do not yet know the future? Will we allow ourselves to be formed by love rather than fear?

Christmas is not something we leave behind, like wrapping paper discarded or holiday decorations stored away until next year. It is a life we are learning to live into.

The child born in Bethlehem grows. The relationship continues. And we are invited—day by day—to grow with him. That’s what happens now.

Amen.