sermons
All Of Us
A Short Biography of God
Steve Watson
Dec 07, 2025
Recently, I saw a commercial for life insurance on my social media feed, and I haven’t been able to stop watching it.
Weird, right?
I do not like commercials. My son Zeke and I have been watching a TV show together in the evenings this fall, and with all the ads for weight loss, and new cars and new trucks, and everything else they are trying to sell us, I find myself talking back to them out loud.
I’m trying to resist their lure and trying to make a point to my son too, as I say things like – that’s not true, you’re lying to us. And saying, no thank you, we don’t need you. And go away!
I’m tired of living in an economy that grows by stirring discontent, and I’m tired of a Christmas season that wants us chasing false promises and larger debts, so I talk back to the ads.
But if advertising was done the Thai Life Insurance way, maybe things would be different. The ad I’ve been watching again has been around for a decade. It’s called Unsung Hero.
In it, we meet this man, who we watch going about his daily life, but doing so with unusual attention and care.
Water streams onto his head out of a gutter, and he moves a pot with dying flowers underneath. A street vendor struggles to get her cart over the curb, and he helps. A stray dog approaches him and he offers a scrap of his lunch. He gives a buck to a mom and child who are begging, offers his seat to someone else on the bus, drops fruit off at his elderly neighbor’s house.
And the ad asks us:
what does he get out of all this?
It says:
He gets nothing. He won’t be richer or more famous.
But then we watch as the days go by, and he keeps his routine of small kindness ups. The flowers in the pot come back to life. The dog follows him home. The child he once saw begging turns up instead in a new school uniform.
And the voice-over tells us:
What he does receive are emotions. He witnesses happiness. Reaches a deeper understanding. Feels the love. Receives what money can’t buy. A world made more beautiful.
A world more beautiful.
Friends, this may be a life insurance ad. It may be some gentle social encouragement for a kinder, more attentive life. And there’s room for that in this pre-Christmas advent season. Take care of your loved ones. Live a life of love.
But in this season where we remember the birth of Jesus and the revelation of God in Christ, we’re invited to reset our beliefs and doubts and expectations about what God is like, and I think this commercial isn’t bad as a short biography of God.
And that’s the topic of my sermon today. A very short biography of God, three chapters. We’ll be helped by a text that anchors this year’s Advent devotional guide our team has prepared for you, called All of Us. The anchor scripture in this year’s guide is the prologue to the gospel of John. I’ll read a bit of it to get us going.
John 1:1-5, 14 (Common English Bible)
In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
3 Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.
What came into being4 through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.5 The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.14 The Word became flesh
and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory,
glory like that of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
A very short biography of God, in three chapters.
Chapter I: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
Three and a half years ago, our family of five sat down in our seats at the Apple Cinema down the street from here to watch this new film – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
In our choices of entertainment and food, our family tries to rock a fair bit of Asian pride. And this film was a big deal in Asian-American cultural history, particularly in Chinese-American cultural history, so we were going to be there.
Three hours later, some of us were like – what just happened? What in the world did we just experience? The film is a lot, all at once. Dimension bending Sci-fi, action, coming of age story, wacky and bawdy sex comedy, an immigrant family heart-wrenching drama – this film is all of those things and more. And for some of us, it was hard to get our heads around, kind of everywhere all at once.
And then for others of us, it just hit the core. Best movie ever. Like this is everything.
These words – everything, everywhere, all at once – are a good phrase to capture the Christian doctrine of omnipresence and the Christmas story of radical incarnation as well.
The gospel of John re-writes the Bible’s first page of creation, saying God has a word to share with the universe.
That word is not just the intentions and actions of God. Like God saying:
Let there be light,
and the dense energy and particles of the big bang explode into the matter that makes our stars. That’s a word of God, but there’s more.
The word of God is also not just the Bible. The Bible is this long and rich, incredibly complicated human account of God’s story with us. And it’s a place where God so often speaks, just as we so often mishear and mistake God as well. So that’s a word of God, but there’s more.
The deepest and truest word of God, John says, is a person who is both a very part of God, and the communication and revelation of what God is like as well. The gospel of John says
Jesus is this Word of God.
That God wanted to have a word with us, and we got what God in sandals looks like. And it is not what just about anyone would have expected.
The word for this God in the body is incarnation. Not named after the flower but the Latin root for flesh. We hear it still when we eat carne asada – grilled flesh, grilled meat. Incarnation is God, but God made out of flesh and meat for a change.
When John says
“the word became flesh”
and dwelt among us, this is part of what he’s saying, that Jesus shows us what God is like when God is also a human, just like us.
But many theologians, myself included, read this phrase
“God became flesh”
and we think that while this is uniquely so, in a special way with Jesus, it’s more than that too. It speaks of God’s cosmic, universal proclivity to join with God’s creation. The carne, in Greek the sarx, the flesh here, isn’t only the flesh of Jesus, but all creation.
Some theologians cheekily call this doctrine promiscuous incarnation, that God loves to participate in the life of all that God is created. Not in an inappropriate, vows-breaking, sexy kind of promiscuous, but in a beautiful God can’t help loving everyone and everything, and God joins what God loves. God is omnipresent. Everything, everywhere, all at once.
Most of the time when humans have imagined God or the gods, they’ve imagined transcendence. God is above us, beyond us, bigger than us, possessive of some unique powers. We’d expect God to be different than us in some ways.
But the immanence, the closeness of God in the flesh, is surprising, that God is also intimately among us.
Last week I read a novel called Let Us Descend by Jasmyn Ward. It’s the journey of an enslaved woman in the early 1800s as she travels an external journey from Georgia to New Orleans and an interior journey toward an awareness of her profound worth and freedom.
The protagonist, Annis, says,
“My mama always said this world was seething with spirit. She was right.”
And in time she learns to communicate with a storm spirit her ancestors worshipped named Aza. And the god Aza says to her,
“I am with you, even when you cannot see me.” “I walked with your mama.”
Annas asks:
did you walk with her when she had to go to New Orleans to be sold?
And the spirit says,
“Yes, and before. Her whole life.” “I am with you even when you cannot see. Just as I was ever with her. Now I walk with you.”
What the spirit Aza whispers to Annis, the spirit of Jesus whispers to all creation. I am the Word of God made flesh, with you in everything, everywhere, always.
Chapter II: Man of Sorrows
When we saw God in sandals, it was not at all what we expected. We didn’t expect the nearness, the gentle omnipresence of God for sure. We also didn’t expect the gentleness and humility, God’s capacity not just for mighty deeds but for suffering and compassion.
John says that
Jesus, the Word of God, is the Life that is light for all people. Jesus is the glory of God full of grace and truth.
But he writes this of the man who was betrayed by his friend, who was tortured and executed as an enemy of the state, crucified naked in shame and defeat.
God who is present with profound feeling, with profound compassion.
This is part of why the unsung hero from the commercial I told you about reminds me of God.
Aristotle believed the creator God was the unmoved mover. He posited that as the first cause behind all things, God is the source of all motion and action and feeling but can not be acted upon, can not be moved or influenced. The early Christian church, as they integrated their faith with the broader Graeco-Roman culture, adopted this view of God as the unmoved mover. It became the doctrine of impassibility, or impassivity. That God does not experience emotional changes or pain or suffering. God is not affected by external things, like you or me. This is the mainstream view of classical Christianity.
But when the glory of God took on flesh and dwelt among us, he sees the elder with the cart they cannot move, and he wants to help. The child without money for school supplies, the neighbor without company, the stray dog without food, God lives among us and is moved by all this. Jesus again and again, we are told, was moved with compassion at all he saw. This gave him one of his nicknames: man of sorrows.
The compassionate one.
Last week, in her sermon on all that God does in the darkness, Ivy showed a picture of a possum.
I saw it appear in front of me on the ipad, where I was hanging out during the sermon with our friends online, and I typed in the chat: Nasty.
Because that’s all I could think. Nasty little animal. I was disgusted.
And maybe this isn’t a big deal, I don’t know. But disgust is dangerous.
We have a president who this past week called a whole ethnic group in this country nasty. The exact word he used was: garbage. That which you throw away, dispose of, incinerate. Dangerous, death-dealing rhetoric.
And far, far from the way of Jesus.
This is why Donald Trump and so many other powerful people before him who have claimed the cause of Christianity can’t know or love Jesus. They can’t imagine a God who is not disgusted or afraid of difference, be it among humans or even among the whole range of animals on earth. They can’t imagine a god who would lose with us, not just win with us. They can’t conceive of a god who suffers in compassion.
The biography of the God revealed in Christ forever includes the nickname: Human of Sorrows. God’s love is a never-stopping, never abandoning, never giving up kind of love. It’s only with this love that we can live among each other and hear our real stories and see our true selves with compassion.
It’s only with this kind of love that we can inhabit the truths of our own lives, which are full of joys and sorrows, accomplishments and disappointments.
Our sorrows, friends, are not a sign of God’s absence, but a reminder of God’s presence. Our god who is everything, everywhere, all at once. And our God who is the human of sorrows.
Lastly, Chapter III: The Gardener
At the end of the gospel of John, the word becomes flesh, who has dwelt among us, is crucified. And when he is risen from the dead, the first thing he is called isn’t a savior, or an unsung hero, but a gardener.
His followers mistake him for a gardener. A beautiful symbol in this biography, this gospel of new creation.
Today is Grace’s and my 29th wedding anniversary.
I’m very lucky.
Grace is a very accomplished woman – she’s smart, she’s successful in her career with the government, has many talents. But one of the things I’ve always admired about her is that she’s a gardener. She’s made something green and beautiful and sustainable out of our tiny urban yard. And during the pandemic, she filled our house with little plants. I mean filled it.
Our living room has a Christmas tree in it, right now, a beautiful but dead tree we’re keeping in there for a month. But it also has dozens of live plants she maintains with little lamps on timers, and special food and watering schedules when she walks around and takes care of her little plant babies.
It’s another vision I have of God like the man in the Thai insurance video, Grace walking around and taking care of her plant babies, talking to them like God is always invisibly singing over all creation, wooing us toward the good, the true, the beautiful, saying:
Live, my darlings, live!
I think trying to be a hero is overrated. I was talking with a couple folks in our community recently who are very heroic. I mean that, I admire them. They have striven to be and do so many wonderful things. But trying to be a hero, a savior, a fixer of all things seems like it’s awfully tiring.
None of us was really meant to be a hero, larger than life. But I think we’re all meant to join God in being caregivers. Creatures who are increasingly free and whole and alive ourselves, who offer care and the chance at better life to the other creatures we encounter.
This is the biography of God. In our advent devotional guide, All of Us, this week, we peaked into the little story of Jonah in the Bible, where God is talking about a particular city that the character Jonah both fears and resents. And it’s relatable, because most of us come to hate or resent that which we fear, but God doesn’t have that register, just won’t go there.
God looks at the city, and God’s like,
there are a hundred and twenty thousand people there who don’t know their right hand from their left.
They’re fools, no common sense, they’ve lost their way, and to that God doesn’t say: nasty. Doesn’t call them garbage. Doesn’t fear or hate them. God loves them. Things: what special food do they need, what watering schedule? Who can I send to walk around and talk to them? And God says,
there are just as many animals there, and I feel the same way about all of them as well.
There is no one and nothing that God can’t stop loving.
All matter matters to God.
The Word became flesh and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Or as the late pastor Eugene Peterson paraphrased:
The word became flesh and blood, moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our eyes, glory one of a kind, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.
This is the biography of God.
- Everything, everywhere, all at one.
- Human of sorrows.
- And alive as a gardener among us.
There is no place where God is not. God has joined all flesh. And in every part of creation – every part, the fullness of God is there to receive.
The whole universe is God’s neighborhood.
And each of our neighborhoods is God’s whole universe.