Date: December 24, 2025

Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; Luke 2:1-14

Preacher: Sermon by Fr. Travis O'Brian

Christmas Eve Midnight Mass 

            We gather here, on this night, in this place, together: family, friends, strangers, to hear again and to celebrate – and maybe even to be changed by – a story, the story of the birth, long ago, in a far-away land, in a world very much different than our own, of a child.  It would be difficult to over-estimate the historical repercussions of this story, this birth, this child – how succeeding generations, for over two millennia, have absorbed this story both privately in their inmost hearts, and collectively in our ethical expectations, our values and our hopes as a society.  No king or tyrant, no empire or even technology has shaped the world, has influenced history, as profoundly as the story that begins with this story of the birth of this child.  We return to it again and again, unable, it seems, to let it go completely.  It has a hold on our imagination that we can’t seem quite to get to the bottom of or to be finally finished with. 

            Why?  Why do we keep coming back to this story?  What attraction does it continue to hold for us?  What can there still be to learn from it after all these centuries?  I believe that we return, year after year, generation after generation, because in it we catch a word which reminds us of something.  Even if we can’t quite make out what that “something” is – we nevertheless sense that something is being said, maybe in a language we don’t quite understand, yet something is being suggested of a different way, a different possibility: that things don’t have to be the way they are; that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is.  The story calls us to listen closely because in its telling we sense that somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve missed something terribly important; that we’ve misunderstood something, that we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere without noticing.

            When we look to the stories which our world provides for us to steer by, the roadmaps we’re given to help us navigate where we are going, they are, to more and more of us I think, to be of less and less help.  I’m sure that’s why we are undergoing so much political turmoil currently.  People are looking around, wondering how we’ve come to where we are; feeling that where we find ourselves is not the destination we were promised.  And so, the blaming begins, the finger-pointing; and increasingly radical solutions are insisted upon – solutions that speak of disappointment and anger and even bewilderment.  And our collective anxiety ramps up further as we begin to suspect that these solutions only mire us ever more profoundly in the problems we hoped they would resolve.  It’s all very confusing.  And we begin to sense, many of us, that continuing to follow the plot-lines of the world will never finally lead us out of the dead-end we suspect is before us.

            I believe we keep returning to the story we’ve gathered around tonight – the story of the long journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, of their finding no room for them on their arrival, of the birth of Mary’s firstborn son in a stable, the story of the shepherds and of the angel and of the rejoicing of heaven on a dark night of the world – I believe we keep returning to this story because we sense it contains, somehow, a hint of new possibility, the promise of a different future for the world.  We sense this story suggests a different map, a different road, a way through the anxiety and confusing labyrinth of our world – a story astir with joy in a future vastly unlike the future we fear is now bearing down upon us.

            At the heart of this story is the greatest of all mysteries: that Love came down from heaven.  The Love that sets in being the sky and the earth, the Love that stirs us to care and to give ourselves to one another, was born to us in that baby.  At the heart of the story is the mystery that God, whose first and last name is Love, joined His life to ours in that tiny, dependent, new life which Mary laid in the manger, so that our life might be joined to His – the life, that is, of Love itself.  In the most important ways, it is a very simple story: even a child can understand it.  But what is simple, is also difficult; and the world makes it into something else, and even the story of Love gets turned into a plotline of power.  Haven’t we noted already how profoundly this story has influenced history?  And what else does “power” mean, but ability to determine the future and shape the world?  Isn’t this what we always seek to do?  With our politics and economic platforms, our ideologies and technologies – what do we seek, but to determine the future, shape the world, transform our reality by works of power?

            Is Love not a power, then?  But in the story, Love works according to a different order, a different law, than every other power.  For Love’s power shows itself, not by degrees of world-determining strength, but by degrees of world-transforming vulnerability.  God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son – God made Himself vulnerable that is, and permitted the powers of the world power over Him.  With this insight, the details of the story come into relief.  Imagine Mary, an unwed teenager, pregnant – how vulnerable she was.  Imagine Joseph, finding his wife-to-be pregnant, and not by him – how vulnerable he made himself, trusting that what is impossible was yet true.  Imagine now, Mary so close to term, at the whim of a foreign despot having to make that long, four-day journey to Bethlehem – for they are a vulnerable, colonized people caught in the net of the powers of history.  They arrive as strangers into the town, only to find there is no place for them there – no place in the world, in the circle of human society, and so they seek a place among the animals. There, in the stable, Mary gives birth.  A fifteen year-old, with no other women, no mother to attend her, only a likely very bewildered Joseph.  And the tiny child that is born to them they wrap in rags and lay down to sleep in the feed-trough of the animals.  And then the angels sing . . .

            My friends, if the world seeks to save itself marching the roads of power, this story suggests an utterly different road, a road that journeys along Love’s way, the way of vulnerability, even the way of the Cross.  Where the world is busy inventing stories of future glory determined by power, we are finding that story less and less trustworthy, less believable.  It is time then – it’s always been time – to turn again to the story that brought us together here tonight, to the Christmas story.  For this story reminds us that there is another way, God’s way, Love’s way.  I believe that only this story speaks truly of the hope we seek, the hope we need truly to live; the story of a future we cannot determine for ourselves, but must love and trust as Mary and Joseph trusted, no matter how vulnerable it made them.  For the message of hope is this: that Love came down and dwelt among us, that God made Himself so weak, so vulnerable for us – so we might know that in the weakness the world most fears, precisely there, along that way, is where our true hope lies. Amen.