Audio file of 10:00am Holy Communion service, Christmas Morn
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 10:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Christmas Morn.
Day: December 25, 2025
Sermon for Christmas Morn
“Now it came to pass in those days … the days [that] were accomplished
that she should be delivered”.
What days? The days in which “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed”, as Luke tells us, alluding to matters of politics and power, but, even more as he tells us, “and so it was, that while they [meaning Mary and Joseph], were there [in Bethlehem], the days were accomplished that she should be delivered”. Such is the miracle of birth but as the Christmas Gospel makes clear this is the greater miracle of the birth of Christ, the babe who is Christ the Lord.
All this is the miracle of Christmas which reveals to us the miracle of God making himself known to us in the commonplace and contingent realities of human experience. Not so as to be collapsed into our world and the limitations of our thinking and living but to reveal to us the wonder of God’s will for our humanity, here so wonderfully expressed in the angel’s word to the shepherds. “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people”. What is that good tidings of great joy? The birth in Bethlehem, the city of David, of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”.
So much contained in so few words. “All wonders in one sight”, as the poet Richard Crashaw writes, “eternity shut in a span,/ summer in winter; day in night; /heaven in earth, God in man”.
It begins with words which seem like a fable or a fairy tale. “Now it came to pass in those days”. But then, more concretely yet poetically, “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.” We will learn in the mysteries of Christmastide from Paul in Galatians, that “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law”. And why? “To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons”. Even more, “because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” So much made, it seems, out of so little, yet it is all the muchness of God, on the one hand, and something more, wondrously more for us, on the other hand.
The Nativity of Our Lord
The collect for today, the Nativity of our Lord, or the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: Hebrews 1:1-12
The Gospel: St. John 1:1-14
Artwork: Bartolo di Fredi, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1374. Tempera on panel, The Cloisters Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.