Series

What Aladdin Can Teach Us About the Incarnation 

Dec 25, 2024   •   John 1:1-14 

Christ Jesus, break into our hearts today as you have broken into the world as a child born in a manger. Amen. 

Merry Christmas! It is so good to be with you all this morning and to celebrate this feast day, The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the second-most important celebration on the church calendar, second only to Easter. And we call it the Christ-mass or Christmas. And I have a confession that may sound odd coming from a priest. Because my confession is that this is the first time I have ever been to church on Christmas Day. The church where I grew up and often returned to with my family in adulthood did not have a Christmas Day service. I usually spent December 25th opening presents, eating cinnamon rolls, and dozing as The Christmas Story, the movie, played on repeat in the background. Maybe that’s what you have planned for the remainder of this day. If so, I can say that it is a very good plan. 

As a priest, I am excited to forge a new tradition of the Christmas Day service! I did take vows to administer the sacraments. But fear not—Christmastide lasts 12 days, and I am sure plenty of dozing is in my future.

At the heart of the celebration of Christmas is the extraordinary doctrine of the incarnation, that God took on human form and lived among us. The Gospel we hear today is just astonishing, and it’s one of my favorite pieces of scripture. It’s worth thinking for a moment about how odd it is. Most of the stories we hear in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the kind of scenes that we could easily set in a play. Characters meet, talk, have arguments, travel from place to place, are healed, et cetera. You can imagine the script, the characters, the action. 

But where is the script for “In the beginning was the Word”? And why is Word capitalized? Who are the characters, what’s the action taking place? To extend a metaphor, this isn’t a scene in a play; this is the construction of the theater on which all plays are set. I think it’s that unusual, cosmic quality that makes this passage speak to us so deeply. 

These words pull us back, all the way back, to the account of creation in Genesis, to another book of the Bible that starts with the words “in the beginning.” And then we hear in verse three, “All things came into being through him.” And you might very understandably scratch your head and say, “him?” I thought we were talking about the Word! 

This account of creation through the Word brings to mind the words of the Eucharistic prayer I will say in just a moment: “At your command, all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.” But we hear that this all happened through him/the Word. And then, critically, toward the end of this passage, we get this line in John’s prologue that unlocks the whole thing. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” 

The Word who was with God at creation was Jesus. And Jesus didn’t just come to dwell among us; he came as a human infant, the most vulnerable, most beloved, most helpless of all creatures. You probably know the story as it unfolds in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and you may have even seen it acted out. 

Yesterday, we had our annual tradition of the St. Mark’s Christmas pageant with the children of the congregation reenacting for us the proclamation of the angels to the shepherds, the innkeeper with no room, the pregnant mother awaiting the delivery who will bring about deliverance. This is the part of the story that can be acted out with characters, and I’m betting there’s still some hay on the floor from doing just that. But it struck me as I watched the pageant how intimate the connection between a mother and child is, perhaps the most intimate, the closest of any two-person relationship, so small. And indeed, these are two who had shared a body. That extraordinary intimacy is contrasted with the extraordinary immensity of the Word, the Word who was with God and who is God, and through whom all things were created. 

It reminds me of that scene in the 1992 Disney classic Aladdin. Hopefully, many of us have seen Aladdin, and if you haven’t, definitely watch that instead of A Christmas Story today. It’s Robin Williams at his best. But Aladdin’s genie in the lamp explains how he came to be a genie in a lamp. He also says that he has “PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER” in an “itty bitty living space.” 

On the one hand, Jesus is that Word, that phenomenal cosmic power that transcends all time, place, and any constraints we wish to put on him. But on the other hand, he was also once a screaming baby born in a manger waiting for the comfort of his mother. And that contrast encapsulates the doctrine of the incarnation. I had a professor in seminary who would say something like that and then follow it with “Hmm, meditate on these things.” I never quite knew if I was meditating correctly on these things. If I were, they might not remind me of the genie from Aladdin. But I would invite you, sometime over these next 12 days, to find a quiet place and time to turn toward God, who is both utterly transcendent and as tangible, as physical, as vulnerable as a baby in a manger.

I love the hoopla of Christmas—the trees, presents, food, parties, etc. Look, I am wearing ornament earrings. So I’m definitely not going to say don’t lean into that. We need that joy, celebration, and release.

But I think what I want to say is this: the reason this season merits any of that is that we have a God who desires to be with us. Emmanuel means God with us, and he took on all the fragility of our human nature. And that is worth celebrating.