Everything that happens in Jesus’ ministry happens after his baptism and his proclamation that he has been anointed to preach good news, all of it happens because the speaking of God’s word is how the world came into being and it is how it goes on.

From the very beginning, we are told, God has had something to say. And God’s speech, echoing through the cosmos brought entire worlds into being. And as John tells it: eventually God’s Word, when those worlds were ripe, was spoken into flesh, into the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

We have so very many expectations about Christmas. We expect Christmas to make us feel a certain way. All the good feelings; none of the bad. We expect Christmas to make everything right, to guarantee that everyone will be merry and bright. Of course, we’ve done Christmas so many times before, so we presume to know what we can reasonably expect from it. And also: What’s worth expecting. What might be too risky to expect. What to not even bother expecting.

Anyone who gets freaked out and scared off by John is unlikely to be able to handle the One who comes after him. So we are being given fair warning. And, though John and Jesus turn out to be quite different from each other, with quite different ideas of what God is all about, it is actually a good thing that we trip over John before getting to the manger, because John’s judgment precedes Jesus’ grace. They go together because those who know nothing of judgment need nothing of grace.

As is always the case with God, there is no easy, pretty, or short way to get to the manger. No star bathing us in warmth and light on the journey. In fact, just the opposite. In this season of Advent things literally get darker before the light shines.

From time immemorial, we humans have been swayed to-and-fro by worldly powers. These days, we have become beholden to the technocracy that both shapes our desires and sells us infinite promises of fulfilling them. We reserve our “spiritual lives” for God, of course, but just about everything else we hand over to the market.

You would think that Christians, we who believe in a God who in Jesus became human, a child of the universe and made from the dust of the earth—a God who became kin not just to humans, but to algae, tadpoles, skunks, bears, and blue jays—you would think we would have long been rooted in a theology of Creation, but at times we and our theology have become quite caught up in our own importance...

God, from our beginnings in the garden, knew that we would tend to be self-centered, need to put ourselves in God’s place. And God knew that would not go well for us and for God’s beloved creation and so warned us again and again.  But we have not listened; we have wandered far from Eden. And we live in an age when pretty much any academic discipline has more authority than, “Thus says the Lord.”

God created the rivers, oceans, lakes, and streams—incubators of life from the watery depths of the sea to the watery darkness of the womb. In the beginning it was over the water that God’s Spirit hovered bringing order from chaos. It was through water that God delivered the people Israel from slavery into freedom.

How in the world can and should we live our lives, with such specific and devastating threats looming over us? Threats that demand not just change in our personal habits of consumption, but swift and decisive global policy action, if we aren't already too far gone. What shall we do? Who can help us now?