"Making the Unknown Known" - Sermon for 1st Sunday after Christmas Day, 12-28-25

It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18).

How does one make known the unknowable? We use metaphor, simile, and symbol. This is like that, stands for that, is close to describing that. The better artists and writers help us in this way to make concrete that which is abstract, tangible that which is incorporeal, permanent that which is ephemeral.

God is the best, the superlative artist and writer, the creator who used the eternal Word, God the Son, to paint and sculpt and draw and compose all that is, seen and unseen.

Throughout the first testament, the scriptures that predate the birth of Jesus, God spoke to and through patriarchs and prophets to make God’s love and justice and judgment known. The word that God spoke was the Word – later to be made flesh – God the Son, carried on the breath of God the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity.

The metaphor and simile and symbol of the first testament carried the reality of God’s deep desire for us for the time that God had allotted it. But when the fulness of time had come, St. Paul wrote, God sent his Son (Galatians 4:4). A second, New Testament was God’s necessary plan to make God’s own self known to us. The Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14), St. John wrote, because of God’s love for the world (John 3:16). To make known the unknowable, God became one of us, fully human in Jesus, while at the same time remaining fully divine, never missing a beat of the Father’s heart.

We are incapable of fully knowing God. I expect that, even in that heavenly country, there will remain aspects of God that are simply unknowable. We will be in closer communion with the Holy Trinity, but we will not become part of the Holy Trinity.

For now, we do the best we can with what we have. A brain to reason. Five senses, tuned, more or less, to present reality. The trove of tradition given us in liturgy and sacrament. The truth contained in both testaments, the new fulfilling – but not abrogating – the old. The second making clearer what the first could not because, unlike the first, God’s very self comes as a human being, concrete and corporeal.

Throughout the year, the liturgies of the Church, through God the Son, make known aspects of the Father. The long season of Ordinary Time that relates the stories of Jesus’s teachings and miracles, makes known God’s desire for us to understand God better, and to welcome us back into closer community through healing and feeding. Pentecost empowers us, with the Holy Spirit, to renew God’s creation. Easter reminds us that life and love triumph over death and despair. In Holy Week we remember the Son’s sacrificial love, surrendering his life and giving us his Body and Blood. Lent helps us focus not only on where we have gone astray, but just how fervently God searches for us to bring us back home. Epiphany affirms that God’s love knows no borders. Advent prepares us for the New Age.

But now we find ourselves in the Season of the Incarnation, the Twelve Days of Christmas – or forty, if we want to prolong the celebration. We rehearse annually the story of the baby born of Mary and protected by Joseph; birthed in darkness; announced by angels; worshipped by shepherds; sought by sages; feared by a king; named and circumcised; presented in the temple as an infant; found there as a youth. And today we learn once again that all this was God’s plan from the beginning: life and light, grace and power, and the gift of our adoption as God’s own children.

How is the unknowable made known to us? We speak of and follow Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We celebrate the liturgies and sacraments of the Church: Jesus’s gift to us that teaches us to speak, and strengthens us to follow. We find Jesus where he said he would be: in the hungry and thirsty, the sick and the imprisoned, the homeless and the hopeless.

And we live by faith. We don’t have to know it all. We can’t. This assurance is my gift to you today. Merry Christmas!

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

1^st after Christmas Day – December 28, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Making the Unknown Known”