Tag: Christmas

Sermon for the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

“The Miracle of Christmas”

This sermon was originally preached at Saint Stephen’s Church in Sherman, Texas, on December 24, 2025.

Christ the Lord is born for us! O come, let us adore him.

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

The birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a miracle and a mystery, shrouded in hushed awe and wonder.

At Christmas we celebrate the miracle of the Incarnation: that the eternal God took upon himself our nature and became human. The Almighty God entered our time and space, assumed our flesh, and was born of a human mother.

God becoming human is the ultimate paradox. God is invisible, unapproachable, almighty, unchanging— all the things we’re not. But in the Incarnation the eternal Word of God becomes what we are— visible, vulnerable, subject to change and suffering— the Infinite God made manifest in this infant child.

But it’s not just the paradox at the heart of Christmas that’s astounding, but that the Incarnation could have been so much different. It could have gone down way differently.

If God were of a different character, of a different spirit, how different his Incarnation could have been! If God were a tyrant, if He was evil or malicious, how unfortunate his arrival on earth would be! But as it is, the birth of Christ is a sign of how good and trustworthy God really is.

He comes not as a fierce man of war, threatening all things living with death, but as a newly born babe, bringing the hope of rebirth and life into the entire realm of death.1

He comes not as a harbinger of destruction, but as a Sign of the good things to come, whose life will be the proof of God’s lovingkindness to all creation.

He comes not at first with a message, filling our ears with all the things we know and know not, but as a wordless infant, wrapped in the hushed silence of the cave.

Christmas reveals to us something about the God we believe in.

The God we believe in and worship is revealed to us in this holy Child— through him we know that God is good and lovely and worthy of our trust. And all the details of the Nativity point to this. Every detail of St. Luke’s account of the birth of Christ point to his humility.

The incarnate Word of God is born, not in a distinguished city like Rome or Athens or even Jerusalem, but in humble Bethlehem, little among the clans of Judah.

Christ is born, not in a regal palace, but in a cave where animals sleep for the night. He is laid, not in a solid gold crib designed for a king, but in a manger, the feeding trough of beasts.

The message of his birth is proclaimed first of all not to the eminent but to the shepherds, that most humble of professions.

And the newborn babe lies in the manger, in the silence of that holy night, among the ox, the ass, and the sheep, at harmony with not only his most holy mother and his righteous adoptive father, but with the animals and with all of nature.

Every detail of Our Lord’s Nativity points to his great humility: that he willingly embraced poverty and smallness, that his entrance into our world was not welcomed with regal fanfare and anxiety but with simplicity and joy.

Christmas is a celebration of everything that is good and lovely and gracious in our world. The highest joys of the human experience— family, love, celebration, nature —are not “beneath” God but are taken up by him in the Incarnation. He ennobles them by filling them with himself. The Word of God, by being born into this world, sanctifies and elevates, at once, motherhood, family, human love, and the bonds that tie together strangers over a shared celebration. Everyone is touched by this miracle: the Holy Family, the shepherds, the angels, even the animals who are silent witnesses to the great miracle. And the Magi have been summoned by the Star and are making their way, representing as they do all the nations of whom Christ is the hope.

Christmas should stir up in us a feeling of awe, of love, of gratitude. There is an atmosphere to Christmas, one that cannot be explained or put into words, a feeling that even secular culture seems to catch, despite aggressive commercialization and silliness. Even for those who don’t believe in the Incarnation, the Christmas season can bring feelings of warmth, of generosity, of “peace and goodwill toward men.”

And why not? Christmas is a celebration of all that is lovely and pure, and so it naturally stirs up in us the tenderness which belongs to the better side of our nature.

When Mary held the infant Christ in her arms, when she laid him upon her knees, she didn’t have to force herself to love him. She just loved him. He was eminently loveable. Here he was, the fruit of her womb, the fulfillment of that miraculous dispatch from the Angel Gabriel. Her eyes met his, and in her heart welled up all the affection which one person can feel for another. She didn’t have to make a calculation, she didn’t have to come up with a reason for loving Christ— her love was natural, warm, it sprung up within her.2

That’s how God wants us to love Him— not with rigid formulas or by jumping through religious hoops, but through simple, unpretentious love that arises warmly from the heart.

God did not become incarnate as an Idea. The Word did not become Information. The Word became flesh. The Word became this Holy Child, who is to be loved with warmth and gratitude.

But Christ is born for us, the eternal God becomes one of us, not simply because it is lovely, but for a purpose. God becomes incarnate in Christ so that we might be saved. He becomes poor that we might become rich. He shares in our humanity that we might share in his divinity. He becomes what we are so that we might become what He is.3

The birth of Our Lord is the everlasting sign that God loves us, that He wants to be with us, that He is not distant and apathetic but very near and very concerned with each of us. He has united our human nature to his divinity, that through him we might be filled with the life of God.

Did you know that God loves you and He wants to fill you with His life? Did you know that? He wants you for himself. And he calls you to lay aside sin and every weight and to leave off from every path that leads to death and embrace his Son, who will lead you back to the Father, back to our true home.

Let us embrace the newborn Christ with love. Let us take him up in our arms and feel all the warmth and goodwill this holy day inspires within us. Christ is born, and we too are reborn. Let us go even unto Bethlehem, with the angels, with the shepherds, with the Wise Men, with the Holy Family, and adore this Child who is the Sign of God’s everlasting love for us. Amen.

1 St. Philaret of Moscow

2 Fr. Austin Ferrer, THE CROWN OF THE YEAR: Weekly Paragraphs for the Holy Sacrament

3 Saying attributed to several Church Fathers.

Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2024

“Something New”

This sermon was originally preached at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on December 24, 2024.

“Christ is born! Let us glorify him. Christ has come down from heaven– let us go to meet him. Christ is at last on the earth– let us be exalted.”1

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

The birth of a child is a time of great excitement and joy, but of course also of anxiety and pain. Childbirth is one of those experiences where the line between life and death is indeed very thin. But when the baby has been born, after it’s been cleaned and placed in the mother’s arms, and eyes meet eyes for the first time… when the family sends out texts letting everyone know “mom and baby are doing well”— when things finally start to quiet down… all can begin to appreciate the miracle that a child has been born.

Something new has come into the world— someone new. This person wasn’t here before and now they are, and the world is different because of this. The birth of any child adds something to the world, something that wasn’t there before, and so the world is a different place. And what a child adds to the world is not just one more number to the global population, not just “one more mouth to feed,” but a whole world of possibilities.

The child that is born will, hopefully, grow up and bring all sorts of things to bear on the world. That child will create, will shape the world around them. Conversations will take place that never would have if this child hadn’t been born. Relationships will come into being. There will be events that will occur that would not have happened if this child hadn’t been born.

And that is the miracle of life, that every day we are creating the world around us through what we say and do. Of course, the older we get, the possibilities of what we can do with our lives become ever smaller. We come to see our limitations– that we can’t do all things and be all things in the short time we have on this earth. But a newborn baby has his whole life ahead of him. He is all possibility. So the birth of a child is a time of great hope, a time when we look forward to what he might become and bring into the world.

And if this is true for every child who is born, how much more is it true of the birth of Christ! To say that Christ is born is to say that the world has changed, forever, and it cannot go back. Before the birth of Christ, God was not incarnate in the world as a human being, and after the birth of Christ, He is. The Word of God has taken our human nature from the most exemplary member of our race, the Virgin Mother, and He has been born into the world like each of us is born into the world. God now has a human face, a human body. He can be present in the world the way we are. He can interact with others face to face. God has become one of us and dwells among us.

This is truly miraculous! It is indeed one of the greatest events in the history of humankind! And it may be easy to pass over the birth of Christ without truly appreciating its wonder. Familiarity with the Christmas story might dull our spiritual senses so that we do not feel the awe we should.

Because this event was awesome, in the true sense of that word, for everyone involved in the Nativity of Our Lord. Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels… all are in amazement that the divine Word of God has been conceived in the womb of a Virgin and has now been born on earth. The Angels sing their hymn of praise, the shepherds adore on bended knee, the ox and donkey bow their heads in reverence, and the Blessed Mother, face to face with her son and her God, treasures all these things in their heart.

What hope they must have felt. Here is a child, a newborn baby, a world of possibilities. And not only the normal possibilities that could be true of any newborn babe. Because this Holy Child is God incarnate. What possibilities! What sort of a life could this child lead? What miracles could he bring into the world? If God became a human and lived one life in our world, what sort of things would he do? Of course, the answer to that question is the Life of Christ, in all its fathomless beauty.

What the birth of Christ adds to the world is the proof that God has not abandoned us. That despite our sin, despite all our selfishness and folly, God still wants to be with us and share His life with us.

And the birth of Christ is proof of this, it’s not just words. We can say, “Well, God is good, God loves us, God wants to be with us,” but the Nativity is not just words, it’s the proof. There is the Christ Child, there is the proof of God’s desire to be with us, in flesh and blood and truth. Not just words spoken into the air, but the Word made flesh.

Christmas is the Good News that God is good, that He loves us, that He desires to be with us— and in Jesus, He is with us. He begins to be with us by being born for us. The whole life of this Holy Child unfolds in front of him— a life full of possibilities. And we, beloved, have the privilege of walking with Christ through the Events of his life, week by week in the Church.

And let me be so bold to say: If this is one of the two times a year you come to church—if you come to church on Christmas and on Easter— please join us every Sunday and holy day you can. The Life of Christ is the greatest thing that ever happened, and we get to walk through it, week by week. We start with his birth, then the events of his holy childhood, his baptism, his temptation and ministry, all the way through to his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

Christmas is not the end of the Christ story; it’s just the beginning! We say, Christ is born, and it’s not like he was born and then nothing happened. A lot of things happened, and they’re all wonderful. So join us, and we will experience the beauty and truth of Christ together, week by week, in Scripture and sacrament and song.

This is the Joy of Christmas— it is a night filled with possibilities, with hope for the future, with the delight of knowing that God has more in store for us than we could ever imagine. Something new has come into the world— “newer than everything new, the only new thing under the sun,”2 God-made-man. This Holy Child– the son of the Virgin Mary, adored by shepherds and hymned by angels– this Child has been born, and the world will never be the same. He has his whole life ahead of him, and with that life he will bring redemption to humankind and lead us all back to the God who made us.

And we who receive Christ become the children of God and know the endless possibilities of life with God. Christ is born, and we will never be the same, for we have known the mystery of the Light that shines in the darkness, that no darkness can overcome— the mystery of the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth. Amen.

Endnotes

1 Sermon on the Nativity of Christ, St. Gregory of Nazianzus.

2 St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.