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Wednesday, December 25 - Birth

This sermon was preached on Christmas Day, Wednesday, December 25 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 62:6-12, Titus 3:4-7, Luke 2:(1-7)8-20, and Psalm 97.

 The way I thought about Christmas completely changed for me when I watched my sister give birth to my nephew in November of last year. I’ll spare you the details but I will say this: watching one human you love give birth to another human being is an incredibly sacred experience. No one had warned me, though, for the moment right after my nephew arrived. He was blue and unmoving when they placed him on my sister’s belly and I swear my heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe until he did, slowly stirring into life. In that moment, I felt how just thin the veil is between life and death, how much we all just hang in the balance.

Now this will not come as surprise any of the parents here. My nephew had only been in the world for a few heartbeats. The only thing he’d at this point done was exist. Yet already I loved him more than I could have imagined loving another person. And I couldn’t help but wonder, in that moment, is this how God feels at every birth of every human being? Loving each one of us just for living?

Christmas is more than just a birth, if you can say a birth is ever just a birth. On Christmas, it was God who came into the world, weak and blue. It was God who was loved, so deeply loved, by the young mother that took him into her arms, by the new father who chose to adopt him as his own. God’s ultimate humility on Christmas has nothing to do with mangers and straw and oxen. It is the humility of allowing oneself to be loved for nothing but the fact of one’s existence. Incapable of anything but breath and the reception of love.


The miracle of the Christian faith is that God loves us so much that he gave his only son for us. The miracle of Christmas is that God loves us so much that he let himself be loved as humans are loved. Emptied himself to become the weakest, the most vulnerable, among us. A tiny newborn just being to stir.


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