December 7, 2025 – Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40.1-8
John 1.1-5, 10-14
Jesus, God ncarnate
(The Missing i)
Second Sunday of Advent
On this Second Sunday of Advent, it is time to see how well we know our Christmas carols and hymns, so I’m going to give you part of a well-known hymn and see if you can tell me the next line. We’ll begin with the second verse of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and it might help if you sing it to yourself in your head while I speak the words. “Christ by highest heaven adored, Christ the everlasting Lord! Late in time behold him come, offspring of the virgin’s womb.” What comes next? “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased on earth with us to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.” OK, next one, from the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” “Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning, Jesus to thee be all glory given.” Next line? “Word of the Father/Eternal, now in flesh appearing.” Incidentally, did you know there is a verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” that hardly ever gets sung? Only one hymnal in my collection contains that verse – I’ll get to that in a little while. But one more hymn, and this is an easy one. What is the first line of the first verse of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel?” “O Come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” Very good. And now, for extra credit, what does the word Emmanuel mean? Yes, from Matthew’s story of the nativity, quoting the prophet Isaiah: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’” I would also offer you extra extra credit if you could say what ties all those hymn verses together, but that’s my job this morning.
About a month ago I realized 2025 was an anniversary year for something pivotal in the history of Christianity. 1700 years ago Emperor Constantine convened a council of the church’s bishops to hammer out a confession of faith that would standardize, or codify, what the church believes. The year was 325 CE, the council was held in the bustling city of Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, and the result was the foundational confession of faith you and I know as the Nicene Creed. To an even greater extent than the more familiar Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed established what it meant to be Christian for centuries to come, and congregations across the world would recite the creed as an important part of their weekly worship. I have included the creed in the bulletin on the back of the poinsettia order form: “We believe in One God the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” Now, as a Congregational church, we are not a creedal church, or a confessional church, we are a covenantal church, so it is rare that we include a Confession of faith in our services. But if you grew up Roman Catholic, or Lutheran, or Presbyterian, or Orthodox, you very likely recited one of the church’s historic creeds every Sunday morning. We said the Apostle’s Creed weekly in my first church in Calumet, because we were Presbyterian as well as Congregational. And to be completely transparent, I raised more than a few congregational eyebrows when I introduced the use of the creed in my church in Bridgewater. As I’ve told you before, I’ve done a good deal of research on the development, history and use of the creeds of Christianity. And one of the things I learned about the use of creeds in church, the affirmations of faith, it is that they are a double-edged sword. They are intended to help us remember who we are and what we believe, and in many ways they help transmit the faith of the church from one generation to the next. But as much as they help tell who we are, they also, by extension, tell us who we are not. That is, they build a fence around the church: if you believe the official tenets of the church as laid out in the creeds, you’re on the inside. If you do not, you’re on the outs.
In our imaginations, if we were to picture the world’s bishops gathering in Nicaea to discuss and formulate the official doctrine of the church, we might envision a group of solemn old men, dressed in their finest ecclesiastical regalia, engaged in the more arcane points of theological minutia, debating about the finer points of Christian theology. And, in part, we would be correct. But it is also true that each bishop came from his own little churchly fiefdom, each had a territory to protect, and each brought his own ideas of what the church should and should not believe, and friends, no two bishops agreed on very much. It’s like the old joke about the rabbis: if you put two rabbis in a room you’ll get at least three different opinions. Instead of a dignified gathering of deeply spiritual leaders, think more of the congregational meetings of old when we would have fiery debates over such important theological matters as the color of the new church carpet, or the portrait of Jesus donated by the revered dowager Lady So-and-So whose niece is threatening to leave the church and take the dear lady’s bequests with her if we do not place said portrait directly above the cross. We have all been to these congregational meetings, but they pale in comparison to the church’s early councils, Nicaea included. Staid theological debates turned into fisticuffs as each bishop sought to protect his own theological and geographical turf. And with the Nicene Creed in particular there was one clause, in fact one word, in fact, one letter in one word, that caused such a fierce battle, such a deep fissure in Christianity that it still exists today.
The gospel of John does not have a Christmas story. John has nothing to say about the baby Jesus or the shepherds or the angel choirs or any of that. But John does have that soaring hymn-like introduction that tells us everything we need to know about who Jesus is. The words are familiar:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 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.”
For John, the story of Jesus is the story of the incarnation, of God becoming human, or Emmanuel. It is what you and I celebrate every Advent and Christmas. The Bible is filled with incarnational language, with John’s being the foundation: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” It is that same Word of whom Isaiah wrote, “The Word of our God will stand forever.” In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” In the middle of John’s gospel, though this verse is in some dispute, Jesus tells his listeners, “I and the Creator are one.” And in the words of the Nicene Creed, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ… God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God… of one being with the Father… [who] was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” The simultaneous humanity and divinity of Jesus are such an ingrained part of our understanding of him, that we celebrate it every Christmas without thinking very much about it.
But not every one of those bishops gathered in Nicaea in 325 agreed. In fact there were two very different ideas about Jesus at that table, two theologies that were so opposed to one another that the bishops came to blows over it. On the one side were those who believed Jesus to be wholly and exclusively divine; on the other, those who believed him to be wholly and exclusively human. During the Council, a bishop named Arius, from the region of Alexandria, in Egypt, was the most vocal proponent of Jesus’ being fully and exclusively human. At one point he was challenged to a fight by the Bishop of Myra, who believed just the opposite, and whose name I’ll tell you in a minute. The two got into a fight, and the Bishop of Myra smacked the Bishop of Alexandria across the face and the two had to be separated before the other bishops piled on like a football scrum. Was Jesus God incarnate, or was he merely a man appointed by God to do God’s work? The bishops thought it was worth fighting over, it turned out to be the essential question of the Council. And it all boiled down to one word that I’ve highlighted in the Creed you have in the insert – the word is translated into English, as one Being. Was Jesus of one being or substance with God? Was he God incarnate? Or was Jesus only of similar being or substance with God? The Greek word for one being, or one substance, is homoousia, homo meaning same and ousia meaning being or substance. This is what one side, mostly the bishops of the western churches argued. The bishops from the eastern churches argued Jesus was of a similar being with God, but not the same. That Greek word is homoiousia, homoi meaning similar, and again, ousia meaning substance. Friends, there is one letter of difference between these two differing major theologies that met in Nicaea, between homoousia and homoiousia, and that is the letter i. The divide between the bishops, the gulf between the eastern and western churches of early Christianity, the issue that led the bishops into pugilism, was motivated by that one Greek iota, the letter i. In fact, when you hear the phrase, “there is not an iota of difference between the two,” this is where it comes from. And at the end of the day, the bishops voted to drop the i and declare that Jesus was of the same substance and being as God, not just similar but the same, that Jesus was God incarnate, and you and I maintain that theology to this day when we celebrate his nativity. “In the beginning was the Word…. and the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
This is what we sing in all those Christmas hymns we began with this morning. Listen again to the verses I asked you to name. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased on earth with us to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.” “Word of the Father/Eternal, now in flesh appearing.” “O Come, O come Emmanuel [God with us], and ransom captive Israel.” And that missing verse from “O Come, All Ye Faithful?” It is a near-direct quote from the Nicene Creed: “God from God, light from light eternal, lo! He abhors not the virgin’s womb, only begotten Son of the Father, O Come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord!” While it would be going too far to say that exactly 1700 years ago the Council of Nicaea gave us the Christmas you and I celebrate today, neither would it be very far off.
Oh, and the bishop who smacked Arius across the chops at the Council and nearly instigated a riot, all in defense of the divinity of Jesus? That would be Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, or Saint Nicholas, to you. Yes, that Saint Nicholas.
Ho ho ho!