Almost 20 years ago, I had three weeks in between graduating from college and heading off to seminary.   And one of those weeks I spent with my dad, canoeing the chain of 10,000 lakes in the vast, wild, and absolutely unpeopled Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada.  It was a sort of final “Father/Son” trip before I set sail into adulthood, full of sweet memories and moments, and one in particular I’ll never forget.

One night, in the pitch black, moonless dark, in the still calm of no wind on the water, we took our canoe into the middle of a lake.   We went out to see stars.  And there were thousands of them, above in the sky and below, reflecting off the water.  We were surrounded by them, even as if swimming in them.  They were pin pricks on a black canvas letting shine through some bigger light from beyond.  And we didn’t speak.   Eventually I laid down in the bottom the canoe, just to look up.  If I had held up a dime at arms length, I’d be covering up 15 million stars.  A few minutes later, my dad broke the silence with just a few words said softly:  “And to think, Jesus made all this.”

The Bible tells us “Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things were created through him and for him…in him all things hold together.”  (Colossians 1.15-17)

Yes, Dad said, as we were buoyed on a blanket strewn with bits of light, “Jesus made all this.”   The heavens, the earth, all that is in the earth, things we can see, things we can’t see, Jesus made it all.

St. John the beloved disciple, the Apostle, John who was with Jesus, John who said, ‘we were with him, we saw him with our own eyes, we heard him with our ears, we touched him with our very own hands’, this same John bears witness in his gospel, “the world was made through Jesus” (1.10), and “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (1.3)

Indeed, we look around, and maybe we see stars, maybe we see streets, maybe we see mountains, maybe we see buildings and bridges built over rivers, we see other people with our own eyes, and we can say, “And to think, Jesus, the Messiah of God and the man from Galilee, made all this.”   We can go one step further… “And to think, the One who made all this came.  He came to us.  He became one of us.  The Creator became his creation.   The Creator of it all became one of us.”

JB Phillips imagined a conversation between two angels, looking at the stars and planets from their perspective, from above them.

“I want you to watch that one particularly,” said the senior angel, pointing with his finger [at the earth].

“Well, it looks very small and rather dirty to me,” said the little angel. “What’s special about that one?”

“That,” replied his senior solemnly, “is the Visited Planet.”

“You mean that our great and glorious Prince, with all these wonders and splendors of His Creation, and millions more…went down in Person to this fifth-rate little ball? Why should He do a thing like that?”

“Strange as it may seem to us, He loves them. He went down to visit them, [became one of them], to lift them up to become like Him.”

Harry Reasoner was an reporter for CBS.  He said, “If Christmas is the anniversary of the Lord of the Universe in the form of a helpless baby, it’s quite a day.”

So it is.

There are four accounts chronicling the life of Jesus in the Bible, four gospels, four perspectives, like four men standing around a complex and beautiful sculpture, each writing what they see from the place they’re standing.   And John’s perspective is quite different.   He doesn’t write a simple, straightforward, short chronology of the life of Jesus like Mark does.  No, he’s more concerned about the themes of Jesus’s life, the meaning of Jesus more than the chronology of Jesus.   And in these first 18 verses, he’s telling us everything that that he’s going to unpack in the rest of the book.  What you see in these verses you find in the next 21 chapters:  Light, darkness, life, truth, witness, fullness, glory, grace, the world, the Word, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And very different from Matthew and Luke, John doesn’t offer a genealogy of the Son of God so as to highlight his humanness.   No, his account of Jesus’ lineage begins before the beginning of the human race.  John’s omits the human lineage of the Son of Man so as to highlight his divinity.   Jesus, The Word, is God, and God made everything.

And God came. 

A couple of weeks ago I was in Portland OR, and a man there was telling me about one of his earliest memories as a small boy.   He had asked his mom, “What is God like?”   She was a good teacher, and didn’t miss the moment.   She got up, went to the wall, pulled down a crucifix and handed it to her son, and said, “God looks like this.”     John 1.10 “He was in the world, yet the world did not know him. 11He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

Before I left on that trip, I wanted to give my own son something to chew til I got back, something meaty, something memorable, something about Advent.    So I said, “Liam, I want you to remember one thing and tell it to me when I get home:   This is what Christmas is all about.   Five words, one for each finger– God Became Man In Jesus.”    John 1.14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  Or as it’s put in the message, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood… and he was generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”

Oh the sweetness of the Incarnation!
God became Man in Jesus.
We are “the visited planet.”
The Creator becomes his own creation.
And why?
The Creator becomes his creation so that we could become like him.  The divine becomes human so that you and I can share in the divine.
Athanasius said in the 4th century, ‘God became man that man might become God.’
Augustine said in the 5th, “God wanted to be the Son of Man and he wanted men and women to be Sons of God.”
A thousand years later Martin Luther put it, “For the Word becomes flesh precisely so that the flesh may become word.”
Last century CS Lewis says it too “The Son of God became a man to enable men and women to become sons of God.”
Tonight we hear this, “And to think, God became man in Jesus.”  Oh the sweetness of Incarnation!

So what to do?   For today,  Nothing.   Just know it.  Receive it.  Believe it.  Feel the wonder of it.   See Jesus for who he is, God come to earth.  And be still, look at the stars, and know.    He came.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.”