Luke 2.1-20 Christmas morning 2025
I know I would have been hopeless. Late at night is never a good time for me: I can’t function much beyond 9.00pm. Outdoors life sat around a campfire? Nope. A log fire in the front room is infinitely preferable and no amount of toasted marshmallows will make me an ‘outdoors kind of guy’. As for the ‘making of haste’ and the charge down the hill into Bethlehem. Sorry. I’ll just come along at my own pace if that’s OK with you. I’ll poddle along as quickly as I can and catch up with you at the stable door.
It was good of you to wait. Hadn’t we better knock before we go in?
And so here we finally are. The shepherds are at the door asking to see the newborn baby. Out of breath, somewhat dishevelled they enter one by one, there’s not a lot of room. They exchange knowing glances and the story falls out of them. Sheep, angels, the Messiah, a Saviour, the Lord. These are the first visitors but others will come. Others will travel down the years to see for themselves. Kings, wise men (yes) but in years to come people will leave their work, leave their homes to come and see, just to be in His presence.
For us all, and for the shepherds on that night, His birth is an invitation and a question.
The other day I stumbled across some words written by CS Lewis of Narnia fame. Writing of beauty he says:
We do not want merely to see beauty…we want something that can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it…. At present (he continues) we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door….But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.’
CS Lewis: The weight of glory.
The shepherds come through the door and they ‘kneel before the manger throne’. That night was their Narnia moment. No fur coats in a wardrobe for them to push through but a latch to lift on a stable door. No fauns or beavers, giants or wicked witches but a new world. A world of meaning hidden in plain sight.
For too long we have existed on an arid diet of modernism that has said that there is nothing beyond what we can see or measure, test or replicate. What rot. Ask an artist, speak to a musician, a dancer or a poet. Faith speaks the language of the arts and poetry. It tries to express the inexpressible. It reaches to inhabit the things of which it speaks. The painter reaches into the depth of the world they are painting. The dancer becomes the dance. The musician inhabits the piece they play and is carried along by it. The poet finds that words come to her from another place, outside of her own imagination. Faith wants to be part of the hidden story, to understand the open secret of God’s involvement with His world. Faith believes there is meaning and purpose in the created world because it reaches for a Creator. Some however, only know Him by His absence. Their hearts tell them ‘there must be more’ and they invent different ways of seeking that ‘more’ in hope of making sense of the miracle we call ‘Life’.
We all seek Him but we look in the wrong places. Augustine of Hippo wrote of his faith journey:
Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new.
Too late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!
In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you.
The angels’ message was an invitation to become part of God’s story – and the shepherds’ run into Bethlehem showed they accepted that invitation. But then they had a decision: this child…is this child ‘heaven in ordinary’? This child lying in the manger? There is a particularity, an exclusiveness about the claim that is offensive. This child, not another. And yet…everything pointed towards this baby being the one of whom the angels had spoken: could they trust the intimations of the divine granted to them?
We want to believe but God does not make it easy for us. What is needed to enter this new world is a step of faith: a commitment of self. We might all warm to the carol that prays, ‘O that we were there’. At Christmas we all try to find our way into the story only to abandon it when the going gets tough. Through childhood nativity plays to imagined scenes on Christmas Cards, in schmalzy carols and children’s story book re-tellings populated by grumpy innkeepers and friendly animals we are brought to the edge of faith. Can I believe? This child? But we must step in through the door for our lives to be changed.
How does a person come into this new world where God is Present? There are many ways but we offer one today. An old-style altar call. An invitation to come to the communion rail with the faith you have and to welcome Christ into your heart by receiving the bread and wine of His presence with us.
Remember that quote from CS Lewis: we want to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it…. That’s on offer. For if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation and silently, the wondrous gift is given and received.
We behold His glory, full of grace and truth.