Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on Sunday, January 4, 2026
A mom is tucking in her daughter at night, and she gives her daughter a really warm, comforting hug and says, “God is with you always. You don’t need to be afraid.” And then she leaves the room like normal.
And this kiddo waits a bit and then calls out, “Mom, I’m scared.”
And so the mom comes into her room again and gives her a hug and maybe a stuffed animal and says, “It’s okay. God is with you. Now float off to dreamland.”
And then this happens yet again. And finally the mom thinks, “Okay, this is the last time.” And so the mom goes in and tucks the kiddo in and again says, “God is with you.”
And the kid says, “Yes, I know that, but I need someone with skin on.”
This is a story that writer Ann Lamott tells. She says that she actually tells this story to her children’s Sunday school. And it’s one that I’m going to tell, too, because this little girl, I think, summarizes what the profound poet John seems to be talking about in chapter 1 of our gospel.
And if your mind wanders during sermons, mine does too. It’s okay. I hope you at least jot down this important cry from that girl: I need someone with skin on. I need God to become flesh and dwell among me.
John is a really swirly, cerebral writer. One of my friends described him as a tortured poet, and he kind of writes in this discombobulated, philosophical way that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to clear interpretation. Some of the other gospels are pretty straightforward. And John is one of those poets that’s like:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.
Are you following? This more swirly way of writing is hard to interpret, and that’s okay. And if it feels a little elusive to you, you are not alone. That’s why we wrestle with this stuff together.
And moments like this—especially after the last week in December, which for me is sort of like John’s writing—it’s confusing and swirly. There’s a lack of structure to the past week. I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of clarity about it. How do I fill my time?
But maybe this text is actually the perfect way to begin this new year. So I’m out here with a lantern, searching for the liberating message in this kind of loopy introduction to the Gospel of John. And I kind of wonder what sticks out to you.
Maybe for you, you’ve always loved the language grace upon grace. Isn’t that so lovely? Let’s go get tattoos. [laughter] Grace upon grace.
Maybe you love the language the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. That’s a longer tattoo, but we could put it somewhere.
This morning, though, I’m struck by these liberating words: The Word became flesh and lived among us. Because as many theologians have pointed out, and as John states in verse 18, no one’s ever seen God. It’s Jesus who actually has made God known. We’ve seen God’s glory, John writes, through Jesus.
All we know about God, we know because of Jesus, who is God with skin on. It’s like God wanted to reveal to us the character of who he or she is. And so perhaps the best way to do that for us broken and beautiful human beings was to show up and send someone like us.
We learn from John that when God lives among us, it’s not always good for God. We pretend like we don’t know him. We don’t accept him. We reject and defile him. And yes, we end up crucifying him.
Listen to this beautiful, beautiful writing from Thomas Merton:
Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those for whom there is no room either.
His place is with those who do not belong. His place is with those who are rejected by power because they are deemed too weak. Those who are discredited, those who are denied the status of persons, who are tortured, who are exterminated— with those for whom there is no room.
Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst— with those for whom there is no room. Christ is present in the world. His place is with those who do not belong.
So the God with skin on, the gift that we call the incarnation, means that when we feel rejected, when we feel weak, when we feel unaccepted, uninvited, like we don’t belong, we just might be a little bit closer, church, to experiencing the person of Jesus—and therefore the character and divinity of God.
And in the beginning was the Word. This also reveals to us something about God. That phrase harkens back to Genesis 1: In the beginning. And we learn that God created the heavens and the earth. And the Trinity was already at work. When we read “in the beginning, God created,” the Hebrew for God is already talking about this trinitarian divine dance— that God is in relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit from the jump.
“He was in the beginning with God,” John writes.
So what we learn is that our creator is already relational, is already interdependent—excuse me—and is already showing us that we cannot do this alone. That even God needs relationship in order to create and in order to flourish.
Maybe you identify with Jesus, who knows something about not feeling known. Or maybe you actually do feel a deep sense of belonging right now in your life— a deep relationship with those around you, a deep acceptance. And if so, I’m jumping a little bit now to what we read about John the Baptist in this passage.
John could have pointed the light at himself and said, “I’m pretty awesome for being Jesus’s cousin and showing you all the way. I’m pretty cool for baptizing the Son of God.” But instead, he testifies to the light so that everybody will believe.
How selfless and interesting that John the Baptist says, “I’m just a voice crying out in the wilderness. I’m not worthy to even untie Jesus’s sandals. He who is coming after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”
So some of us feel that rejection like Jesus. And some of us are the ones who are supposed to be the inviters and the light-pointers like John. It’s like he wants us to know that God is not some guy in the sky. God is the best among-us dweller that there ever was.
But here’s the catch. It’s so nice to imagine God showing up as Jesus, with us and fleshed. But it is hard to like the skin that we are in—especially in a new year, when we receive yet again this onslaught of messages from a now trillion-dollar industry telling us that we can be healthier, we should be skinnier, we should be stronger, we should be more beautiful, more youthful-looking, we need to get back in the gym and lose that weight and hide those blemishes.
If we only try a little harder, maybe God would love us more. And maybe the world would too.
In other words, we’ve got to chase after our worthiness and our body’s perfection every January first until, inevitably—at least for me—I end up kind of disappointed that I couldn’t keep it all up. We inevitably burn out and maybe revert back to a sense of shame for what we haven’t done, for who we haven’t become.
None of us can reach this unobtainable perfection that the world is selling us—quite literally trying to sell us.
Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “But our bodies bruise and they decay and they disappoint us and they sag insistently toward the earth. So why in the world would God not spare Godself the indignity of having things like sweat glands and the hiccups?”
Because in Jesus’s church, the physical life is the spiritual life, whether we like that or not. God could have come as some ethereal, elusive spirit, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. But God came as a poor carpenter with calloused hands and swollen feet. And his flesh is not perfect. And his promise is not to make ours perfect either.
But God does promise to be among us in our physical imperfections. God promises to be that mom in the story, whose eyes are probably puffy from a lack of sleep because her daughter keeps waking her up. Maybe she has a bloated stomach from heaping holiday food on her plate. Maybe her back really hurts from picking up her daughter all the time, or her feet are swollen from walking her in her stroller. Maybe she’s got graying hairs from years of love and care.
And that is God with skin on, if you can believe it. Can you believe it?
The portrayals of Jesus in stained glass and in the public sphere are so misleading. Where are the wounds? Where are the scars? Where is the life lived on his body? Surely if God is in flesh, we would reveal that to each other—and to ourselves.
So in this new year, we are challenged to look for the God who dwells among us, for the incarnation of the one who understands rejection and ridicule. We’re challenged to look for grace upon grace for these bodies that comfort kids and give long hugs and hold a hymnal and shake hands with strangers.
My New Year’s resolution—I made a list yesterday, and now I’m kind of, you know, believing in Jesus is annoying sometimes—so I had to make a new list today. And it’s really simple. It’s just to search for God with skin on who is in the most unlikely places.
And I just want to try my best to embody that freeing message that Steinbeck writes about in East of Eden. He says, “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
I don’t have to be perfect among you. I feel that from you. And you do not have to be perfect for me. And we don’t have to be perfect for the one who is among us.
Now that you know God came in a body—and now that I know that too—maybe we can give ourselves a little more grace to try and do the same. To dwell among others. To love our flesh just a little bit more. And to testify to the true light of the world that enlightens not just some of us, but enlightens all of us.
Amen.