Sermon for Sunday, January 4, 2026

January 4, 2026

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


John 1: 1-18



In today’s Gospel, we get our third and final Nativity story. Two weeks ago, in our reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we saw the story from Joseph’s perspective, a man who was about to disentangle himself from his betrothed who was pregnant with a child that was not his. On Christmas Eve, in our reading from the Gospel of Luke, we heard the story from the perspective of those who are displaced: the young couple traveling to their ancestral hometown with no room for them and the shepherds, away from human society, who are first to hear the Good News of the birth of the Messiah.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus comes onto the scene fully formed, ready to start his ministry. In some ways, the Gospel of John is similar. In today’s reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus is fully formed too, part of the Divine, coming down and moving into the neighborhood, as Eugene Peterson translates this text in the Message version of the Bible.

In all of the Gospels, we see God come to us in human form and transform every day lives. The Gospel of John does give us a Nativity story, although we might not recognize it in the same way as the ones that revolve around a baby. The Gospel of John is the most Greek of the Nativity stories. We might not think of Pythagoras, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, when we read today’s Gospel, but maybe we should.

I know that at this point, many of us are trying to remember the Pythagorean Theorem from a long ago Geometry class, but that’s not the aspect of Pythagoras that I’m referencing. About five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Pythagoras said that to fully understand the essence of a thing, we need to be able to quantify it—it needs to stand apart from other items, and we need to be able to define it with our senses. He went further and said that until we can recognize it as a unique thing, it doesn’t exist at all. We could see the beginning of the Gospel of John in the same way—in order for humans to understand God fully, Jesus must come us as a separate part of the deity.

Although he was secretive about his work, Pythagoras was not a lonely philosopher, coming up with ideas on his own. He founded communities of learning, and much of what we know about him, comes to us through the work of others. In reading about these Greek learning communities that he created, I was reminded of early Christian groups kept the words of Jesus alive, words that come to us through the Gospels. In finding out that it was Pythagoras’ wife that helped preserve his ideas and pass them along, again, I was struck by the early church, by the women who might not have had leadership positions, but without whom, we might have never had the faith we celebrate.

There are other aspects of Greek culture in the Gospel of John. This Gospel calls Jesus “The Word,” but it’s a poor substitution for the Greek word, “Logos,” the original name of Jesus in the Gospel of John.

Logos has a more profound Greek meaning than one word in English can convey. Logos has connection to reasoning, to making mathematical calculations, to telling a story in narrative form. Logos also includes the animating spirit behind the words, the numbers, the calculations, and the narratives. Above all, it’s a word that conveys a making order out of chaos.

I thought of this idea of order out of chaos many times during my Christmas break, but none more so than when I was at an activity room at a resort near Williamsburg. The room was full of toys and games, anything a child could want. Of course, the child would have to track down all the various parts that were scattered all over the room. As I stepped on a Lego, I thought of how close the words are: Legos and Lagos. I thought of creation as a vast Lego set, the kind that could be used to make anything. But without a plan, there’s only chaos, chaos in tiny pieces that find their way to feet. With a plan, a person can make buildings or planes or planets out of a bunch of Legos. Without a vision or a set of instructions, most of us would be reduced to toddler status, not sure of how the parts fit together or ways to move from tiny pieces to unified whole.

Those of us who have been alive any amount of years could offer any number of similar metaphors: home repair projects, quilt designs, recipes, a strategy to win a football game. Life is easier if we get organized before we start. The project has a better chance of completion if we stay focused and follow the directions. We see this idea throughout today’s Gospel. The Gospel writer uses the idea of light coming out of darkness, but it might be a more accurate translation to use these words: Order was created out of chaos, and the chaos did not overcome it.

By using the word Logos for Jesus, the writer of the Gospel of John echoes back to robust Jewish thought. We get a glimpse of it in today’s Psalm, that the way God orders the world is through words. It’s a concept as old as Genesis—God speaks, and there’s life and a new creation. Today’s Gospel is both Genesis story and Nativity story—it’s the story of the beginning, and in the seeds of the beginning, we have a glimpse of its completion. Of course, as anyone who has renovated a house or built a Lego structure knows, the project is never really complete. Today’s Gospel gives us a sense of that incompleteness that begins in fulfillment. And if we spend time thinking about that idea, that the beginning contains both the end and a new beginning, we get a window into the mystical aspect of the Gospel of John.

But the mystical aspect has very practical applications.

In a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know what is true, today’s Gospel reading continues to be achingly relevant. In a world where so many words are being generated and preserved, both by humans and by computer intelligences, it can feel hard to insist that words have relevance and meaning. But it’s a truth that most of us know in our deepest core.

Words become flesh every day. We begin to shape our existence by talking about the reality we hope to experience. For example, we see this dynamic in every New Year’s Resolution we’ve ever made. And even if we’re not successful, we’ve shaped a different reality just by trying. If you’re already feeling like a failure, because it’s January 4 and you’ve broken your New Years Resolution, take heart—psychologists tell us that it takes a certain amount of attempts before we can change our behavior, our beliefs, our ways of being human.

It’s not just our individual selves that are shaped by words and ideas. Our relationships are too. We shape our relationships through our words which then might lead to deeds, which is another way of talking about flesh.

For example, If we treat people with patience and care, we will shape the flesh of our relationships into something different. Alternately, if we're rude and nasty to people, they will respond with rudeness and cruelty--we've shaped the flesh of the world into a place where we don't want to live. We create chaos, instead of a firm foundation—or worse, we take a firm foundation and transform it into chaos.

Try this simple experience for a week: say please and thank you more often. Say it to your spouse who does a chore that they’ve always done. Say it to every person you meet in the grocery store or other retail spaces. Write to the people in charge of institutions that matter to you, but from a posture of please and thank you. You will likely find yourself transformed by this practice. It’s possible to transform others too and well worth a try.

I’ve been reading many year end reviews of the year we just ended, 2025, and many of them comment on how much harder the world seems. And yet, if we think about the world that Jesus enters, our world is no more brutal or ugly than that of the Roman empire. Then and now, we have rulers looking out for their own interests, invading other countries, trampling the downtrodden even further. Then and now, we have displaced people on the move. Then and now, we have people from every walk of life facing challenges that seem insurmountable.

But hear again the words from Ephesians, words that promise us that we have an inheritance. Listen again to the words of the Gospel of John, words that tell us that God creates Logos order out of the spilled Legos character of the world. Remember the promise of every Gospel text, that Divine messengers can break through, in the form of hopes and dreams or angels and stars. Each and every day, remember that God has not abandoned us to rehabilitate the world on our own; God invites us to a partnership in a new creation, one that is both now and not yet, one that will not be overcome by chaos and shadow.