I am not sure everyone who put up a Christmas tree is a Christian. And they certainly don't need to be. On the other hand, I bet most people who still have their tree up are Christians. Because for the secular world, Christmas is over and not a moment too soon. The glamour and the glitz are gone. Everyone can relax. But for Christians, Christmas is not over, it abides with us this Sunday as well. Not only it is still Christmas today, it is now Christmas for the professionals not the amateurs, for the natives not the tourists. Today there are no easily understood and unforgettable accounts of the stable and manger, and all those rightly beloved animals, shepherds, and angels and all with glory streaming from heaven afar. Now it is words, not images, thought, not sight. Now it is the majestic theological precision of the Prologue of John and the pre-existence of the Christ and the issuing of the divine Logos. Granted, it is tougher, but just as important. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory ... full of grace and truth." On a Sunday such as this, when the world has largely forgotten about Christmas, the Church then decides that it is now time for us to get down the real work. We focussed on the birth of the child, a Savior, the Savior granted, but still a child, with all those enduringly endearing aspects, a tableau that has captured the imagination, devotion, and affection of everyone, even heathens, ever since. But then a following Sunday for serious Christians, when we are called to consider, without benefit of the rightly beloved images of shepherds and angles, stables and mangers what it is precisely and profoundly that are we talking about. And that is the Incarnation, the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the unique, supreme, historical moment definable in space and time when God became Man. Unless there is the Incarnation, and unless that is true, and as we proclaim it, then the rest of our faith is of no account. Here is a point often overlooked by the refurbishers of our faith: you cannot just aver daintily and vaguely that God somehow, sort of, entered the more-or-less human realm. How you believe that and how you express that and how you understand that is also a critical part of the total truth and the power of our faith in Jesus, our belief in God. One of the most prevalent misapprehensions about the Incarnation is that Jesus can be understood as only appearing to be human, I mean this kind of human, having slipped into skin, put on flesh as if it in the sense of some garment put on, some appearance assumed, some costume worn by God so as not to alarm or frighten us, the better graciously to move among us in an unthreatening and comprehensible way. It is none of that. The flesh of the Incarnation is genuine, it is human, it is this very business. Whatever it is, the Incarnation is at least God's gracious intention to be one of us, not like us, encouraging as that might be, not with us, comforting as that might be, but one of us - not simply revealing himself to us, communicating his love to us, demonstrating it, proving it - but becoming one of us - not similar, identical. Even to the final point of also feeling estranged from God, overlooked by God. "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?", uttered from the cross was not a phony, pretended, similarity to the plight of humans who can feel such a desolation, it is a real issue for the Incarnate God himself. Any other explanation makes a mockery of the honesty and authenticity of our Lord on the cross. "No one has seen God, the Son has made him known." This all we have, this is all we know of God, this is all we have seen, comprehended, beheld, this and nothing else, he and he alone has made himself known, he is the supreme, ultimate, final, sufficient perfect, absolute, self-communication of God to all creation. A friend of mine once complained "Have you ever noticed how most baby Jesuses in all those mangers we all have and see all around us look less like one-day-old babies and more like kids about 4 years old? They don't look like the 'Baby Jesus', they look like the 'Boy Jesus' - that is, if they look like Jesus at all, and who knows that?" Do the babies in our Nativity scenes look like a newborns, an hour or two old? Hardly. Does that look like Jesus? Indeed, who knows? An unanswerable question. But the question we are really wrestling with is, not does that child look like Jesus, do the painting, the statues, icons, or the wooden figures above most altars look like Jesus, but does Jesus look like God. Does the actual child in the manger, does the real man on the cross, does the Jesus in Scripture, does the Christ of the Church, does the Savior of our personal lives, look like God? The Incarnation says - absolutely. And not just like. He who has seen the Son has seen the Father. He and the Father are one. No one has seen God, the Son has made him known. In Jesus we see perfect God and perfect Man, what God is when we are not misunderstanding him, and what we are, when we are not misrepresenting our selves. Jesus - that is what God is like, indeed that is how God is, is God, that is God, graciously and perfectly self-disclosed, revealed, shown, identified for us by his own self-expression. Since the Incarnation is of God, it must be intelligible and intellectually desirable, but it must also be of some use. It must make a difference in our lives. It must be the stuff to go on, not merely material to mull over. Is the Doctrine of the Incarnation just some complicated and intimidating truth -- powerful and amazing, but on the whole pretty unrelated to real concerns and weekday worries? What difference does the Incarnation make? Chief among the results of the Incarnation is that now no one need explain or complain to God over what it is like to be a human. He himself became human, was incarnate, lived and died as one of us, not like one of us, as one of us. The Incarnation was not God's decision to come have a look-see, to get an up-close, first hand idea, through inspection, of just what was going on in a deranged creation. It was to redeem that sad creation, to begin again, to start over, right this time, to wipe the slate clean, to give us all another chance. It is the Incarnation that establishes that there is new and unending life after death. It is the Incarnation that establishes that there will be comfort after long, aching times of grief. It is the Incarnation that establishes that there is someone to love, by whom you will be loved. It is above all the Incarnation that establishes, indeed guarantees, that you are not and cannot be unloved or unworthy of love, that there is one who does not regard you as unlovable, by whom you will never be discredited or discarded, in whose eyes you can never finally disappoint, that you are not and can never be alone, or unwanted. It is because of the Incarnation, and I believe only because of the Incarnation, that we need no longer, can no longer, regard God as unknowable, our ourselves as unlikable. The Incarnation answers finally and fully two ultimate and agonizing questions for humanity: Who can know what God is like? You. You can. Who in his right mind would ever choose to be like me, want to be like me? God. God would and did and was. In the Incarnation.