There is a poignancy in hearing the Prologue from John’s Gospel a second time so soon after Christmas Day. Although we are only on the fourth day of Christmas, the rest of the world seems to be moving on. Presents have been opened. Visiting loved ones have returned to their homes. Meals shared after the Christmas feast appear paltry and rather sad.
The rest of the world doesn’t seem to know how to move on. Some shops are still closed even as people take down their Christmas trees far too prematurely. The streets are quieter than they should be, and the mad rush of the secular Christmas season has faded, and those of us living in its afterglow may feel the sad denouement. It’s like a performer trying to make sense of the day after a major recital, having worked for months on a program, performed it, and then been forced to leave it behind and take up some new thing. If you are feeling a bit sad right now, you are not alone.
There is perhaps some wisdom, then, in returning to the opening words of John’s Gospel in this post-Christmas Day haze. We are better poised to hear the words afresh, even more realistically. It is meet and right that, on Christmas Day, we want to bask in the profundity of the eternal Word becoming flesh in Christ and dwelling among us. It is meet and right that we should rejoice that the God of all creation entered creation as a human, becoming like us so that we might become like God.
But today, we need to hear another side of this story. The Christmas story gives us one of the most wonderful stories imaginable, as well as one of the saddest ones. It’s very hard to hear the sorrow of the story on Christmas Eve and Day. But after the Christmas guests have gone, after the turkey has been eaten, and after the climax of weeks of preparation, we might be ready for—even needful of—spending some time with the sadness of this story.
On Christmas Eve, St. Luke portrayed something of the heartbreak in the details of Jesus’s birth because there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn. Jesus was born in a manger. Jesus was born to a homeless family on the move, and as we’ll find out next week, the Holy Family will travel on to Egypt before returning to Nazareth. All is not well in the local context of Jesus’s birth. But, of course, on Christmas Eve, our minds and hearts are rightly fixed on other things. We know that the baby is born, and the shepherds rejoice. And this is good news for us.
But in returning to John’s Prologue again today, our Christmas high has diminished. We have returned to the ordinariness of our lives, and we must face the heart-wrenching fact that from the beginning, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. At the height of secular Christmastide, as the eggnog was lavishly poured out and the family gathered for the feast, we easily excused ourselves for turning a blind eye to the one sleeping on the streets. We chose to forget the temporary tent encampments of opioid addicts on the streets of Kensington, just miles from our door. We couldn’t bear the thought of our solitary neighbor who had no family and was warming up a frozen dinner on Christmas Day while we were popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. But days after the feast, when some of the sadness of our own lives has returned and when we can no longer ignore this harsh reality, we may want to spend some more time with John’s Prologue. Today, of all days, we need to hear it.
And John gives it to us straight. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. These are words that should make us weep. This is far more than a family trying to find a place for a birth. This is homelessness on an epic scale. When we hear John’s version of the divine homelessness in his Prologue, we know how the story will unfold, and that’s what makes it so sad. We know that a world that is full of lies will reject Truth himself. We know that our Savior will come among us in perfect love and will give and give and give everything he has until finally he gives his life on a cross. And yet, he doesn’t die with resentment or vowing vengeance. He dies with words of forgiveness on his lips, changing something in the energy of this world for all time.
Reflecting on John’s Prologue today, we read it with all those who have experienced rejection. We read it with those who have no homes and who have no families. We read it with those who spent Christmas alone, shivering in their cold homes, and even now are still alone. We read it with those in prison who received no visitors and with those who dread this secular season from its start just after Thanksgiving until sundown on Christmas Day. We read it with those who have lost loved ones around this time of year, and we read it with those who are depressed and on the brink of utter despair.
And suddenly, we find ourselves at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, suffering from a bit of chronological vertigo. We are looking at a man who gave everything and is now giving his life for an ungrateful people who preferred their own sin to his love. We hear him giving voice to the words he had prayed over the course of his life in the synagogue, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And we weep with him. It seems like there is an unfathomable gulf between the Father and the Son. Where is the Spirit binding them all in one?
We must stay there for a time as we recognize that this man, dying on the cross, came to his own home, and his own people, his kith and kin, received him not. He knocked on their doors, and they slammed them in his face. He still comes, knocking on the doors of the cold hearts of humankind, who prefer their own sinful comfort to the uncomfortable grace of his life-changing power.
This story is too much. It is too sad. The homelessness of the Son with nowhere to go and rest and with nowhere to lay his head is overwhelming. We are confronted with that chasm of anguish between the Son and his Father on the cross.
But today, although the words are the same ones we heard on Christmas Day, a new, surprising move is made. We are not hearing the same old story. There is some real wisdom in the choice of Scripture readings for Christmas Day and today. We hear this primal story in its fullness, with grace upon grace opening it up for us, because the story goes on. John assures us that the story does not end with a homeless Savior, wandering the earth with nowhere to rest. The story doesn’t end with the Son dying on the cross and leaving unalterable sadness behind. The story goes on because John tells us that the Son who was rejected by his own people now abides in the bosom of his Father. He always was in the bosom of the Father, and he always shall be.
This may be good news for the Son of God, but what about for us? We may be reassured that Christ has a home with the Father after all. We may be comforted that the perceived separation between Father and Son on the cross is no separation at all, because the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit were all there bound together in love in that moment of anguish.
But what about us? What about those who have no homes? What about the perpetually lonely? What about the persecuted and the poor and the starving? What about those of us in this church today who are grieving? Is there good news for us?
To find our good news, we would have to jump ahead to the Last Supper, which seems a bit odd on this day, but there we shall go. St. John himself is at the side of our Lord, resting his head close to the chest of Jesus in a moment of searing betrayal by Judas. And suddenly, we have found our good news. It has been worth waiting for. John the Beloved Disciple points the way for us. The Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head has made the entire world his home, even the pockets of betrayal. And although the world rejected him and still rejects him, he persists in coming to us, like a shepherd going after the lost sheep. The slaughtered lamb becomes the Shepherd of the sheep. He invites us to recline next to him, to rest our head on his chest.
The story may be complete, but it is not yet over, for our Lord will continue to knock on the doors of our hearts, begging us to let him in. And when we do, all our weariness, sadness, loneliness, and forsakenness will be handed over to him because he will transform it. We will draw close to him as he has drawn close to us. We will hear his heartbeat, and in doing so, we will hear the heartbeat of God. And in that moment, we will have found our true home.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas Day
December 28, 2025