Christmas Eve, 2025

There was a church much like our own: vibrant, with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm around the Christmas holiday. Just like we did this past Saturday, they decided to organize and stage a Christmas pageant in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. The pageant script the directors chose told the classic rendering we often hear of the nativity story, with Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem without anywhere to stay. There, right at the climactic moment in the search for an inn—after repeated refusals—they are told again that there is no room. Without missing a beat, a young voice from the back of the audience yells out, "You should have booked online before coming!"

That is so indicative of our journey this time of year, isn't it? In a secular sense, so much of what we do this season requires an incredible amount of planning and waiting. The weeks and months we put into coordinating schedules, making travel arrangements, buying presents, cleaning houses, preparing meals, and choosing outfits—it's all about the forethought. And then we wait. We wait for this night and this time. I think, too, of the incredible work that Rachel and Tom have put into selecting and preparing the wonderful music you hear tonight; the weeks and months the vocal and bell choirs have put into practicing their pieces; the weeks that we as the altar team have put into cleaning and setting the space, practicing our readings, and preparing ourselves for this service. To all of us, we wait. We wait with anticipation for this very hour.

I also think about the longer arcs of waiting. I recently read a story about a man who very well may have the most interesting job in the whole country. His name is Eric Posey, and he is the head gardener of the Rockefeller Center in New York City. In that role, he is responsible for selecting each year's Christmas tree for the world-famous display in Rockefeller Plaza. This is not just about planning each year's season, but in a sense, it's a lifespan pursuit. Eric spends years cataloging and tracking potential evergreen candidates up and down the eastern seaboard. Every year, he waits. He waits until just that right moment for just that right tree to be selected. It is a beautiful example of this interplay between planning and waiting, anticipation and arrival.

And yet, sometimes in our lives—many times in the course of human history—we land in a place of ambiguity. We may plan everything to a T only for things to go awry. We may look forward with great anticipation for moments or experiences that never come to fruition. We may have our whole lives planned out, only for a wrench to be thrown into the system that throws us into a state of despair and desperation. For 2,000 years now, from our ancestors in the faith down to our very own lives today, we have heard the repeated admonition of Jesus in our context in Advent to stay awake and be prepared for his return. And yet in all those centuries, in all that planning, in all that alertness, we still wait.

But that is not so very new. That was the experience of those in Jesus' time, too. For millennia, they had been planning for and anticipating the arrival of the Messiah. Centuries upon centuries of faithful Israelites had planned and longed for the arrival of that moment—the arrival of the moment that we re-experience this very night. And like so much of life, no amount of planning and longing quite prepared the people of Bethlehem for what happened within their midst. Sometimes our plans just don't go the way we think they will, and we are faced with the question of what to do when that happens.

This provides a final wrinkle in the story: the very nature of the manger scene itself. As Western Christians, with our centuries of images of A-framed mangers and stories of rejection and desperation, we often miss the fact that none of that is actually in the text. If you go back and you read the narrative again, St. Luke simply says that Jesus was born in the manger because there was no room in the inn. As the incredible New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey has noted, in first-century Judea, the "inn" was the community space where out-of-town travelers would stay, whereas the manger was actually a part of individual people's homes.

The Judean hill country is a semi-arid desert land, and it gets very cold at night, especially in the winter months. So, homes were built in such a way as to maximize the benefit of the residual body heat that the family’s livestock would produce. This meant that mangers were unfinished entryways or lower parts of private residences, and very often the warmest part of the home.

For Jesus to have been born in a manger means that a family had taken Mary and Joseph in as an act of hospitality and care. It makes all the sense in the world that a newborn baby would be nestled among the livestock for warmth and comfort. The response the people of Bethlehem had to an unplanned development was not frustration or despair, but hospitality and generosity.

So tonight, friends, as we come into this night of Christ's birth and in our own cultural context wrestle with the complexities of the unplanned, the chaotic, and the uncertain—those unexpected wrenches thrown into our neatly planned out systems—may we find in our faith our own wellsprings of welcome and hospitality. May we, even when things don't go exactly as we thought they would, find the charity and strength to be a people of generosity, of embrace, and of hope. And ultimately, wherever we are in our journey, however difficult the uncertainties of the age prove to be, may we in welcoming the Christ child this night experience the hospitality of a God who welcomes us into his house and into his kingdom of new and everlasting light. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.