Christmas Eve 2025

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It goes without saying that this is one of the days of the year when churches can expect to be the most packed, filled with faces familiar, once familiar and unfamiliar. Christmas, the birth of Christ, the advent of the Incarnation, the eternal Word made human flesh. It is as inextricably linked with Easter as a cornerstone of the story we spend our entire year telling, foundational to all that we believe, all that we gather in this place for. These two events, Incarnation and Resurrection, don’t mean anything without each other and the rest of it means nothing without them.

In this tradition, as in many others, our worship is shaped by liturgy. Prayers, many drawn from the words of scripture, many of them forms of prayers prayed since the beginnings of Christian faith, connecting us with all who pray them around the world and all who have prayed them throughout time. They are grounding and comforting rhythms by which to order our spiritual lives. But they also bear the possibility of growing distant, overly familiar. Sometimes I will be at home praying Evening Prayer or at the Altar celebrating the Eucharist and a line or an image, something I repeat weekly if not daily, will catch me off guard as if it were brand new.

It will give me chills, or move me to tears, or fill me with a firm, quiet hope.

While this is not an experience that can be predicted or manufactured, I think this is what we are looking for when we come to church on Christmas. Even the most irreligious among us are so used to seeing those three figures, mother, father, and child in the stable, a star above, in plastic, neon, or porcelain, that we barely notice. How do we position ourselves to be struck by this familiar image in all its power?

Last Christmas was only my second as a priest. I lived (and thankfully still do even now) close enough to my family to take part in their celebrations, then there was Midnight Mass at 11:00pm, where I served as deacon, followed by a reception, then I was the celebrant at a noon Mass on Christmas day. So then I drive out about 30 minutes to my aunt and uncle’s house for Christmas dinner and I eat…a lot. And these are good Southern Baptists so I’ve not had a drop to drink, mind you, but I go sprawl out on the carpet after dinner. And I am lying there next to Lincoln, my cousin’s son, who is about five months old at this point. And I’m talking to him and playing with his little toys, but I’m looking at him and thinking about how small and new he still is, how he can barely move anywhere on his own. He depends on others for absolutely every need. He is immensely vulnerable.

And I started to get a little emotional. This was the moment when this holiday, this event, this idea I had spent the past two days celebrating hit me like it was brand new. That Jesus, through whom all things were made, eternal Word of the Father, entered not merely into human existence, but that he did so with such utmost vulnerability, such utter dependence on Mary and Joseph, whom he was entrusted to. It is difficult to be vulnerable, even as adults. It is a hard world, and not a kind one. No less now than when Christ was born. Yet he chose to enter into it willingly, chose out of love to begin life here as each of us do: with no choice about whether or not to be vulnerable, to be dependent.

It became so much realer to me in that moment, simultaneously easier and more difficult to wrap my head around. This great Mystery of Faith deepened. Philosopher Josef Pieper says that the full sense of the word “mystery” is this: “[that it is] neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark. Rather, mystery means that a reality cannot be comprehended because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible.” The Incarnation of Christ is not an inaccessible mystery. It is not opaque and obscure.

It is an inexhaustible mystery, a mystery that we will never run out of things to discover about, to meditate upon, to express to each other. These Mysteries of our faith are not locked doors, but flowing wellsprings.

So amidst all that the winter holidays bring into our lives, let us take some time this Christmas (and Christmas does last until January 6th, so you've got time) to sit with this Mystery, to see the ordinariness of our lives, of ourselves, of others, especially children, with a renewed sense of wonder. But also to deepen our wonder at the reality that the eternal Son entered into the most vulnerable aspects of our ordinariness. And in this contemplation let us entrust ourselves in utter dependence to him, just as he once entrusted himself to us.

Amen.