Youth Sermon and Recording of Adult Sermon for January 5, 2026

Yesterday was a great day at church.  My sermon for adults went well, and more on that in a moment.  I was pleased with my youth sermon, which really pleased me, since I find the Gospel for the second Sunday of Christmas, John 1:  1-18, to be a tough one for adults and youth alike.

For the youth sermon, I talked about our experience playing Charades with my family, and I suggested we do a version of that for our youth time together.  I said, "Now don't worry.  I'm not going to make you act."  I suggested that we look at the church, so beautifully decorated for Christmas, and think about how we might act out "Jesus," if we had to act it out so that people would guess we were talking about Jesus.

One girl pointed to the top of the Chrismon tree, which is a crown in our congregation.  We also talked about the cross and the baby in a manger and bread and wine.  Because it's the one time that we have real flowers in the church (the poinsettias), I also talked about the Eastern Orthodox idea that we know and understand God, and therefore Jesus, in any part of creation or the natural world, like the poinsettias.

Then I got to the Gospel--would we act out "Word" for Jesus?  Are they similar?  I talked about the Greek idea of Logos, the way that Logos or Word or Jesus would be order instead of chaos.  It was a theme from my adult sermon too.

Overall, the youth sermon went well, as did the adult sermon, which talked about Logos and Legos and Pythagoras and order out of chaos, the words I prefer for light and darkness in the John passage, and I don't think that substitution does damage to the text.

I was glad that the recording of the sermon worked yesterday, even more so since my spouse stayed home to keep his cold germs to himself.  Some of the ideas in the sermon, like Pythagoras and the connection to Legos, came from him, and I'm glad that he could see it.

You can view the recording of the sermon here on my YouTube channel.  If you'd like to read along, the manuscript is in this post on my theology blog.