Christmas Eve Sermon 2025

As I considered what to talk about today, my mind kept returning to the notion of resilience, which as I understand it, is the ability to encounter adversity while responding in a way that encourages recovery and repair. While this may resonate particularly in these days, when the news is filled with chaos, loss, incompetence and cruelty, we recognize, of course, that adversity is not a modern occurance. It is part of the human condition. We encounter it in personal terms, we encounter it in social and political terms, we encounter it in spiritual terms, and we always have.

This was as true in Jesus’ day as it is in ours. And what we celebrate here today is a God named Immanuel -  meaning God with us. Into an experience of adversity long ago - a personal yet universal experience - God decided to be with us.

And of course, we can argue that God has always been with us, and that is certainly true. What brings us to celebrate today though, the thing that is so remarkable and poignant about the Christmas story, is that God decided to be human with us in our adversity. Human spiritual story-telling is filled with wonderful visions of the Divine being with us in lots of different ways. But, the Christmas story tells us of a God becoming vulnerable, a God growing cell by cell in the womb of a marginalized young woman, a God who grew up in the context of a brutal empire, a God who learned and changed and loved and sacrificed.

The point of the incarnation of God as Jesus was to be in our experience with us, not to erase it, and not to overcome it from the outside looking in. The point was to experience the adversity of the human condition and help us understand that—even so—God is always leading us towards life and resurrection. The point was to help teach us about resilience, the essential truth that adversity does to get to have the last word, God does, and if we believe that, then the work of resilience, restoration and repair, can continue to have meaning, and can continue to give us hope.

God did this for us by walking through our experience, every bit of it, honoring the specificity of it, the surprise of it, the exhaustion of it, the ache of it, the beauty of it. This is the gift of Christmas.

In the words of author Stephanie Duncan Smith:

The incarnation always brings good news, but it never minimizes the realness of our pain. Advent declares the hope that a light is coming, but it first declares the truth that the world right now is so very dark.(1)

Resilience isn’t actually found in pretending that adversity doesn’t exist. That’s just denial, that’s toxic boot-strapping, and that keeps us stuck, exhausted, and alone. The key to the incarnation is that it fully declares the truth of the darkness, the brokenness, the disconnection, the disappointment but then goes on to also declare the coming of the light. This is the true boldness of faith. Not assent to various religious formations but bone-deep understanding and trust that God made a universe that will consistently unfold and bring forth light, love, growth, compassion, connection and thriving for all God’s creatures. God entered into the experience of human life to show us this. 

And so resilience is a practice that rests on the belief that we are not alone in adversity and that our efforts toward restoration and repair really mean something, that they join together with God’s purposes to create an increasingly beautiful and compassionate world. It is a practice that involves saying yes, as Mary did, to a greater purpose, yes to bringing light into the world. If we are to be inspired by the Christmas story, let it be that in our experience of darkness, of hurt, of fear, we choose to respond with grace, recover in compassion, restore with hope, and repair with intention. Jesus is the light of the world, and this light came to us through birth, and a human life. God with us, all the way through. Amen.



(1) Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway (Convergent Books, 2024), 50-51.