The evangelist Luis Palau tells the story of a wealthy European family that decided to have their newborn baby baptized in their enormous mansion. Dozens of guests were invited, and they arrived dressed in the latest fashions. After depositing their elegant coats on a bed in an upstairs room, the guests were entertained like royalty. Soon the time came for the main event, the infant’s baptism. When the parents asked for the child, no one seemed to know his whereabouts. Panic spread quickly as they desperately searched for the baby. In a few minutes they found him. Where? Buried underneath all the coats, jackets and furs. The very object of the day’s celebration had been forgotten, neglected and nearly smothered.

How easy it is to lose track of the Christ child on this day. Many of us had family in for Christmas, and maybe you left behind a pile of wrapping paper this morning after opening presents. Let’s not lose the child we’ve come to worship under all the trappings. Let’s make him our focus. Just who is he, though, this Jesus? What child is this?

We’ll pick up on three metaphors from John’s Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews, which the early church believed were rich enough to speak of who Jesus is: first, the Word through whom all things were made and all things hold together; second, the Light that enlightens every person and drives away the darkness; and third, the Son who is the spitting image of his Father and makes us children of God with him.

Word, first. The poet Emily Dickinson—Dot Newsom’s favorite, by the way—said, A word is dead/ When it is said,/Some say./I say it just/Begins to live/That day.

To say that Jesus is the Word of God means that he is the agent of creation. As Dickinson says, when a word is spoken, it makes a world. We sometimes think a word is dead the instant it’s spoken, as if it’s a like a puff of smoke that dissipates the moment it leaves the lips. But think about how words really work.

When someone says “I do” at the altar, the world is altered forever. A new world is made then and there by the spoken word. It creates a new space in which two people will live. Similarly, when someone blesses you as a child—tells you that you are special—you become something more than you were the moment before. In The Help, the book about the social world of Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Kathryn Stockett puts the words into the mouth of the black maid, Aibileen. She tells the white child in her charge, whose mother is more interested in social status than in her child, You is kind. You is smart. You is important. And whether you read that in the book or heard thse lines in the movie, you knew when those words were spoken how powerful they were. You knew in your soul that what every child needs to hear are those words. You knew that words like those make a difference—that they make or break a child by whether they are spoken and heard … or not.

To say that Jesus is God’s Word through whom the world is made is to say that through him God has said to you and me that nothing that has come to be has come to be willy-nilly or without purpose. Even if God has allowed the world to make itself by the mechanism of evolution, there is a meaning in the midst of it that says to each of us and all of us: You is kind. You is smart. You is important. To say that Jesus is the Word through whom the world is made is to say that the world as a whole and your life within it makes sense, no matter how hard it is to make sense of it.

There’s a history to this word word that John draws upon and that Hebrews picks up on, too. In Genesis the Bible says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the means by which God make the world was by speaking it into existence. God said, Let there be light, and there was light. It all starts with God’s word. That word in the Hebrew is dabar, and it means both word and deed. In other words, when God speaks, God acts. You can’t say about God, Actions speak louder than words. With God, actions are words and words actions. When God speaks the word, that day the world begins to live, as Dickinson would put it.

But the Greeks also had a history of a word for word. The Greek word logos—from which we get logic—means more than just the act of speaking; it means also the power to reason and to understand. Logos means that there is order and reason in the world. It means that the world not only exists, but that it can be understood.

This is the basis of science. Science assumes an underlying order of things. We can understand the world because the world is by nature understandable. If you drop a grapefruit off your roof a hundred times and it falls to the ground every time, you can trust that that’s because that’s the way the world is. You can count on it being that way the 101^st time and the 1,001^st time, too.

So when John and the writer of the Hebrews say that the child Jesus, who is born to Mary in a stable in Bethlehem, is the Word who created the world and sustains it even now, they are saying that knowing who this child is gives us the greatest clue to the nature of Nature, the meaning of Meaning, and the truth of Truth. They are saying that to believe in him is a confirmation of reason, not a contradiction of it. To say that Jesus is the Word of God from before creation means that he is not bringing the world a new truth that must be accepted, but rather the Truth that has always been—the truth about who God is, who we are, and what the world is all about. Big, big, big. And all from the little, little, little child of Bethlehem.

He is also the Light of life. Now, at Christmastime, drive through any neighborhood and you will see houses—other than mine, lazy curmudgeon that I am, don’t you know?!—decorated with white and/or colored lights. Why? Well, maybe to impress the neighbors. But underneath that is another claim about Jesus: he is the light of the world, the one who enlightens every person and drives away the ever-threatening darkness.

Before the power of electricity was harnessed and the light bulb invented, the world lived much of the time in complete darkness. It was easy to see how an idea like Jesus being the light of the world would be appealing. Whether he’s like the sun that drives away the darkness at the break of dawn or the oil that keeps a lamp lit in the nighttime, people would have known instantly how potent that image of Christ was. The world is illuminated by his presence, and by his light we can see it as it is and find a safe path to follow so that we will not stumble in sin or fall off the edge we are living on.

By him our minds are also enlightened so that we may come out of the darkness of ignorance and know the truth that sets us free. Here again, like the metaphor of the Word, Jesus as the light of the world tells us that God fills every person and every inch of creation with God’s presence. Jesus is the light who enlightens every person. Sometimes we think Jesus  enlightens only those who acknowledge him, that only when we receive him are we among the enlightened. And whenever the church has said this sort of thing, it has made us an arrogant bunch—as if only Christians can see the truth of anything or have any sense of God. But to say that Jesus is the light who enlightens every person is to say just the opposite: namely, that whatever discoveries we make are really first revelations. Christ is the revealer of any truth and every truth that anyone comes to know. So when we bear witness to Jesus as the light of the world, we are not bringing the light to others; we are, like John the Baptist, simply testifying to the light that he himself already is. We are pointing to the source of knowledge—that is, to why anyone knows what they know.

The Rev. Harry H. Pritchett, Jr., once told about the worst nativity pageant in the church where he grew up. The youth group was staging a manger scene. Pritchett was chosen to play Joseph, and his future wife, Allison, was Mary. They did their parts as piously as possible. When it came time for the shepherds to enter, the choir was singing “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” and the shepherds in flannel bathrobes and toweled headgear proceeded to the altar steps. Young Pritchett and Allison both managed to gaze solemnly at the straw, which contained a naked light bulb. Suddenly, one of the shepherds broke the sacred script. With his back to the congregation, he said in a very loud whisper for all the cast to hear, Well, Joe, when you gonna pass out cigars?

The holy mood gave way to raucous laughter. The chief angel, standing on a chair behind them shook so hard she fell off her chair and rolled over on the floor, holding her stomach. The strains of “Silent Night” couldn’t cover the uncontrolled snorts of the main characters. Their good-sported youth advisor said, The only thing that didn’t go to pieces was the light bulb in the manger, it never went out. Harry Pritchett thought to himself later, that’s a nice image—the light in the manger never goes out, regardless of any mess we may make of things.

Finally, Jesus is the Son of God, the perfect reflection of God, the mirror image of the creator of all things, and the exact imprint of the Father in heaven.

In my household right now we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a child. My daughter Cameron is going to give birth this week sometime, Thursday at the latest. And as with big sister Finley, this boy or girl—we don’t know what yet—will be subjected to a steady stream of look-alike comments. Oh, she looks just like Cameron …. or Garrett, or more likely … me. This is the way genes work. Every child is unique, but every child bears marks of the family from which he or she comes—some more than others.

To say that Jesus is the Son of God and the exact imprint of God’s nature is to say that if you want to know the character of God, look to Jesus. Jesus is a God look-alike. My father is in the pew today. And if you want to know what I will look like in 30 years, you can get a pretty good idea by looking at him now. But if you want to know what God is like, you can know for certain by looking to Jesus. He is, as John puts it, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. That is, he is his father’s pride and joy.

But there’s one more thing about his being God’s Son that matters most to us: he has the power to make us children of God, too. He has the ability to transform us into the image of God so that we also take on the likeness of God. By receiving him, by believing in him, we become members of God’s family and begin to take on the look that we were meant to have all along. We have our character restored to its original intention.

I have sometimes marvelled at how often adopted children begin over time to look like their adopting parents. It’s interesting how nurture affects nature over time. The beautiful thing about believing in Jesus is that we don’t thereby become aliens to our true selves; we instead recover the power to become our true selves and to be again the glory of our heavenly Father.

What child is this? Word, Light, and Son. More than that really, but that is more than enough for today. Merry Christmas.