Sermon | Clarke Mortensen, Seminarian | December 28, 2025

Christmas 1: 12/28/25

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

Last summer, I was working as a hospital chaplain as part of my seminary education. The first thing I’d do on arriving at the office was boot up the computer to pull up my patient lists for the day and read through everyone’s charts so that I could go into their rooms prepared. I’d write down their religion (or lack thereof), and if that was blank, I knew it was my job to find it out and put it on the chart. I’d also note their marital status, major medical conditions, and especially anything like dementia, notes from previous chaplain visits, or anything else that might help me know what I was walking into.

So going into this patient’s room, all I knew about her was that she was in her 80s, that she was Catholic, and that she had some medical conditions that nobody who goes to divinity school is equipped to understand. I knocked on the door and greeted her, but she didn’t seem to have a lot of energy. Since the chaplains are some of the only people that patients have the power to say no to, I was always very sensitive to when someone seemed like they didn’t want to talk. After a minute or so, I was getting the sense that this woman didn’t really want me there. She was giving me kind of short, blunt responses without much elaboration. So I said, “Well, thanks for chatting with me. I hope you have a great rest of your day.” But when I got up and started heading to the door, she said, “Where you going? You leaving already, Clarke?”

That caught me off guard because in the very short time we’d been talking, I didn’t think she liked me very much. I thought maybe she would prefer to talk to the Catholic priests who worked there, or maybe, as it frequently happened, she was listed as Catholic but wasn’t practicing anymore and didn’t want to talk to a chaplain at all. The charts I’d read and the first bits of conversation hardly told me anything about who this woman really was. All they did was give me a shallow, abstract picture of a patient like any other. But after she stopped me, I turned back and asked, “Do you want me to stay?” It turned out she did really want to talk, so I sat back down, and we talked.

 I worry sometimes that reading the Bible can be like reading God’s charts. It tells us all the relevant details, but we still have to encounter God for ourselves in order to truly know him. We can build up ideas about who God is until something stops us by saying, “Where you going? You leaving already?” But how do we encounter a God that can seem elusive and distant?

If we ever had any illusion that God is an abstraction, Jesus dispels it. The Word came to us not as a set of philosophical ideas or principles to follow, but as the person of Jesus. But so much time has passed that this problem has cropped up again. Because we’re so removed from the time when Jesus physically lived with us, we can fall into the same trap, thinking that God is far away and inaccessible. Just as my patient was an 80-year-old Catholic woman with medical conditions, the wholeness of God’s character gets reduced to facts about God. God is an idea we argue about over Thanksgiving dinner. God is a distant and silent authority we appeal to when we need a justification for how we vote, protest, or spend our money.

John tells us that “the world did not know him.” Well, the world all too often still doesn’t know him, because we think we’re dealing with a set of theological ideas when we are really dealing with a flesh-and-blood person. Too often, the person of Jesus gets reduced to a vehicle for achieving salvation. His death and resurrection are seen as a matter of divine logistics that are necessary for redeeming us and nothing more.

But if we are going to have a relationship with God (and believe me, God wants that), we have to do more than read Jesus’ charts. We have to think about what it means for God to become incarnate in a human body. Now there are plenty of things that this means, and no shortage of people willing to tell you just exactly what they think. Today, though I want to talk about just one. We know God is all-knowing, but when it comes to human experience, we crave to be known on a different level, one that requires sharing in our experience.

This is what God does through Jesus. Jesus can’t be an abstraction because we can’t. We’re much messier than that. In Jesus, God became flesh—skin, ligaments, and tendons wrapped over bones. The eternal Word became a human being who would fall down and scrape his knees. He got hungry and drowsy. When his friend died, he wept, and when he was crucified, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus understands every kind of pain: the physical pain of torture, the emotional pain of loss, and the spiritual pain of feeling abandoned by God. There is nothing you can go through that God does not understand on the same tangible, visceral level that you do.

The essence of this Good News is that you are not alone. It may sound trite, but I want you to think about what that really means. God doesn’t just read your charts, memorize the pertinent facts, and call it good. Jesus meets us right in the middle of the mess.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” This means that Jesus lives in all the places that we do: in the snow-covered sleeping bag and in the hospital bed. And every time we forget that he’s right here and fall into the temptation of turning God into an idea, we ought to hear a voice saying, “Where you going? You leaving already?”