12/28/2025 The First Sunday After Christmas Day

Singing ChristmasWe have so many great Christmas hymns with such lively scores and carefully wrought lyrics. It is a good exercise to listen to the words for the poetry they offer as much as the theology they seek to impart. One very short well-known hymn was written by the English poet Christina Rossetti, the sister of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and friend and colleague of many in the late-19th century “Bloomsbury Group”. “Love came down at Christmas” has particular significance with the reading this Sunday of John 1:1-18 and particularly at verse 18: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”. The central significance of Christmas is that it asserts that in Jesus Christ we see God: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (v. 13). But what Rossetti captures is the essential and important way we see God, through love. At Christmas we are offered the very same kind of intimacy with God which Christ himself enjoyed. In Christ, through the Spirit, we can be part of the commerce of God’s love. Christmas reminds us, in this way, that relationship is everything. There is nothing more precious than our relationship with one another. In our simple, authentic care for another person we reflect God in the flesh. Love, therefore, is perhaps our most tangible evidence that the life of God has come down to us and is all around us. That is something to sing about!