Christmas Eve 2025

Here's the homily for Christmas Eve, a short message to follow the traditional Protestant liturgy of five lessons and carols.

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Read. (Or see below.)

The Magi went to Jerusalem. They assumed a new king among the Jews would have been born there. It was the capital city, after all.

And it was an impressive city. For so small a nation (amidst so big an empire) they’d done well in building this city. The Temple was impressive, its courts and palace impressive. They’d stood for five hundred years and then, destroyed when Babylon came along, they were built again, and would stand for another 500 years.

So, of course a new king would have been born there.

The thing is, they were wrong.

I wonder about their arrival in the city.

We imagine them as three in number, but that’s just because the story remembers them as bringing three sorts of gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

As for the gifts, these should be more evocative than actual in our minds. Gold would have been fit for a king. Frankincense would have been fit for a priest, the sort of simmering perfume found at or near the Temple altar. Myrrh would have been fit for a sacrificial animal, something to anoint and thereby sanctify the one about to die. None are gifts good for a baby, so all should be taken as pointing in a different direction—king and God and sacrifice, goes the beloved Christmas carol. But what I’m getting at here is that, just because they were three in type doesn’t mean that only three people brought them.

It would have been a bigger group, a caravan.

And it would have been an opulent group. Magi weren’t people who’d have blended in, especially not among this nation of people. Judeans would have cast a type from which Magi would have departed, opulently, colorfully, magnificently departed.

I’ve supposed this was why the people of Jerusalem were afraid, for the story does note that Herod was afraid and “all Jerusalem with him.” So, I’ve supposed it’s this, that this band of foreigners wandering their streets was so overt in their foreignness, flamboyantly not from here, frighteningly so.

I have at other times supposed it was because they’d come from the East. The Judeans would have feared anyone coming from the East. Really, this whole city had had a long history of frights from that direction. Empires bent on takeover came from the East: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. It’s like they were born where the sun breaks forth every morning, which at least (the sun) stays where it should, in the sky.

But the real reason the people of the city were afraid, I’d bet this time round, is because Herod himself had become afraid, and there’s nothing as frightening as a frightened king, especially one so frightening in his own right. Herod was brutal and damaged and had all the power in the world; but now he had good reason to suspect his power might be taken from him. A new king born: this couldn’t be good news to the current regime. And tyrants don’t exit the stage quietly. They’ll rip the scenery down as they go. They’ll take everything down with them, rather lord over hell than let beauty be without them.

He would send for his own experts.

These Magi knew what they knew by some mysterious means, some indeed magical means. They knew about this epochal event for having studied the night sky, for that’s what Magi knew, the night sky, the creation and its wondrous cosmology. They studied the sky, mapped it out, might even have used lenses like Ptolemy might have too.

By contrast, what the Jews knew were their own scriptures, their ancient texts of wisdom and insight. So, Herod would send for them, and they would come and tell him that, actually, awkwardly, there was to be born a king at some point, but he wouldn’t be born in Jerusalem. He would be born in Bethlehem, a backwater town whose greatest thing to boast about had happened a millennium earlier, David born there, David a shepherd to become (surprisingly!) king born there way back in the day. It was there that history would repeat itself—or would return to itself, a beginning again where events of a thousand years had torn it off course.

This obscure fact buried in one of minor prophets, a small scroll that some random scribe might have remembered given a moment’s reflection, Herod now knew in general what the Magi would be sent to search for in specifics. Where exactly? Where, for Herod was just curious, just interested in going himself likewise to pay homage.

That the Magi went,

and searched,

and found,

and paid their own homage:

that they were then warned in a dream not to go back to Herod but to return to their own home yet by another road, which they did: this is an act of political subversion.

And it would hold for a time.

Herod would be forestalled.

The baby would be safe. This baby would be safe. As for the others of Bethelehem, according to the story? Not so much. Herod would have all of them killed in order to get to the one.

And maybe the Magi would never have complied. Foreigners, they weren’t interested in local politics, they didn’t want to find themselves ensnared in something they had no interest in. Or maybe they would have complied, elites watching out for one another, but they were moved by their moment among the rude things of this world. Maybe they were moved, transfigured by being in the plain presence of the holy: a stable, some livestock, their shepherds, a peasant girl and her exhausted body at having given birth and her attendant betrothed who was guided by his own dreams, something deep of intuition that high reason can’t quite reach. And a baby.

A baby.

There’s something so pressingly real about a baby. Its fleshy wordlessness. Its mewing cries: the sound of resilience. When a baby cries, you know they’ve got what it takes. They’ve got some fight in them. They can speak up, speak out. A crying baby can be torment to those nearby, those charged with taking care. It should also be reassuring. A baby with no cry is all the more helpless.

Did the Magi feel a little foolish at their worship here? Did they feel dismayed that the royal line had fallen so far, ran now through dust and dung—first disgusted, then confused, then moved to awe, moved to love?

Did they feel to have been found holding their lenses the wrong way round? They’d been with a studying eye on what’s big, momentous. But this whole story of God-with-us would have us as if turn the telescope wrong way round. We start with what’s big. In every moment of the story, we start with what’s big, but our attention keeps getting turned to what is small, so small.

Augustus is emperor, he is in faraway, important, powerful Rome; and he puts forth a decree and everyone within his reign must act, must move; and the story just a few verses later has us in Nazareth, in tiny Bethlehem, in a smaller still stable, a peasant girl and the savior of the world.

Herod is king in mighty Jerusalem; and he can order around scribes and share an audience with foreign dignitaries, and he can dictate the slaughter of children, which he will soon do, but just a few verses out of his palace we’re back at that manger where a cow noses in and a sheep nibbles around what hay sticks out from under the swaddling cloth that binds this baby warm and safe.

The Word reigns eternal, the Word as from God and the Word that is God, but then the word becomes flesh, and not just any flesh but this flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus who would never have bestowed on him anything the world would purport as power, Nazareth as not even Jerusalem, and still less Rome.

It’s as if the whole world this whole time has been looking through the telescope the wrong way, searching for what’s so big we can hardly see it, when what we should rather be focusing on is close and small, the things of the naked eye.

The Christmas story turns the telescope wrong way round.

The Christian confession turns the telescope wrong way round.

We’re in an attention economy. Things are vying for our attention, for us to pay to them our attention, pay to them our homage which (homage) is our attention, our worship—worth-shipe being the old English for when we make something valuable for our paying our precious attention to it.

And it would be unwise to remove our attention from much of what’s going on. Democracy dies in darkness, declares one of our major newspapers—declares it ironically, turns out, as its editorial point of view seems to have new preference for darkness. Nonetheless, if we value our country, if we value our society, we must pay attention to what’s going on, the dismantling of things from USAID to the East Wing of the White House and everything in between. But never to turn our attention away from such things is its own sort of darkness. Never to pay our attention to what is right in front of us, nakedly before us to be seen with the naked eye, things plain and simple, things delightful and surprising, things of friendship and parenting, things of community and actual presence, things indeed of true worth: we end up the poorer for it.

Christmas is a holiday with political implications. For all the magic we might be after when it comes to this season, Christmas is an event whose merriment is also a means, of renewal, of resistance, of a turning on its head the hierarchy of worldly order. What joy might fill this season in all the moments of connection and mutual giving are the means by which this tired old world is changed, this beloved, beastly, gently breathing world is made again as at its simple origin and fulfilled at its loving end, ever an angelic singing when all is said and done: “Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Gracious God, you who’ve come to be amidst creation and who thus calls to our consciousness what we are as well, mere people, wondrous people: help us to love.

There is so much in this world that seems not of love. We continue in our warring madness, our wonton wastefulness, our consuming of your creation with little care and still less caution. We wither amidst our machines and suffer loneliness for what connectivity they promise and even thinly provide. Our bodies bear the brunt of this withering, this loneliness.

This Christmas eve, renew in us hope; rejuvenate among us good will and a pouring forth of grace. Restore us to your justice and help us to pursue it in life, and with our lives, as it abides in everlasting to everlasting. Help us to see the promise and power of your presence in the sweetness of a baby, the vulnerability shown forth and the care evoked.

On this holiday that so often stirs in us nostalgia, a hazy remembering of what never quite was, stir also within us and among us resilience in our receiving and pursuing what is yet to come, a way of abundance and ebullient joy which is for all the world—this world, in all its parts and particles and wondrous, dynamic entirety, this world which you so love.

Truly, on this holiday that lends itself to looking back, help us also to look forward, in fortitude, in faithful good will and stout good purpose. Empowered by the Holy Spirit within us and among us and ever going before us, help us to enact your reign, manifest your kingdom, that the whole world might echo back your glorious strain, “Peace on earth. Good will toward all people, all creatures of your making! Alleluia; alleluia!” Amen.