Christmas Needs to Get More Materialistic

This is the best Christmas sermon I've ever heard: it was preached by the Rev. Sam Wells, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University . It's entitled "Christmas Needs to Get More Materialistic," and the Scripture text is John 1:1-14 . You can get the text of the sermon here.

My favorite part, where he really hits it home:

This is Christianity: not some set of disembodied ideals and noble values, but the life shaped around the logic of God in a human form, at Christmas found in a tiny crying baby, on Good Friday found in a naked man hanging on a cross, on Easter Day found in the wonder of a man defeating death and opening the gates of glory. And this is what we find difficult about Christianity: not its sense of the spiritual, not its sense of inner logic and its appeal to a personal God, for who could be against such reassuring things; no, what we find difficult about Christianity is its materialism, its claim that God took human, material form and lived and died and rose again clothed in and surrounded by the sheer material stuff of ordinary life. A God who is watching us from a distance is a God we can keep at a distance. A God who takes human form is a God that comes up close and personal, a God so close to us we can never escape his grace.