Christmas Eve sermon 2025 “On track to Christmas” Luke 2:1-20 and Matthew 2:1-12
Thank you to everyone involved in the play “On track to Christmas” and keeping all the preparations ‘on track’! You would all be relieved to finally made it to Christmas Eve.
How about you? Are you on track to Christmas?
Three days ago, Australia won the ashes in record time, but the real victory was winning the battle in untangling and setting up the Christmas lights, wasn’t it? If that wasn’t stressful enough, how did you go with the gift shopping frenzy? Nothing like driving for an eternity through the carpark, racking up more laps than the Adelaide 500 to find a space. Did you get cards out to everyone on your list and parcels boxed up before the Australia Post deadline? How are the preparations for the long-distance trip to celebrate Christmas with family—car serviced, fuelled up, luggage repacked four times to get the boot to close? Have you got your decorations displayed and the table all set? Do you still have some last-minute gift-tag writing, and a final few presents to wrap? Did you get everything on your grocery list? Don’t forget to get the ice on the way home, and that extra pot of cream—because you’ve still got to whip some for the Pav! And, as Paul Kelly sings in his iconic song—who’s going to make the gravy?
Perhaps you’re feeling more than a little stressed in the dash to get Christmas on track. Are you relieved to be finally arriving at the destination of Christmas 2025?
No matter how relieved we are to be arriving at Christmas, we can’t come close to the relief Joseph and Mary must have felt as the lights of Bethlehem twinkled into view on that first Christmas night. They had been on a long and arduous journey. Both had planned simple, straightforward paths for their working class, family life together: Joseph was going to be a humble carpenter and family man, and Mary was going to be his bride and the mother of their children.
But when the angel came to Mary and announced that the Holy Spirit would come to her and she would conceive and bear a son who would be called ‘Son of the Most High’, God had turned their plans upside down. All that Joseph knows is that he’s not the father. We might imagine him, shocked and stunned, trying to process what on earth is going on: “Yeah, right Mary—an angel visited you. Sure, the Holy Spirit got you pregnant. What a likely story! I loved you Mary, I trusted you, I’ve been faithful to you…” Heart pounding, lump in the throat, sick in the stomach feeling rises in Mary as the words come like a hammer blow: “the wedding’s off!”
In the culture of the day, unfaithfulness was a matter punishable by death. No matter how compassionate Joseph tries to be in doing this on the quiet, sooner or later people would have found out. Divorce meant the lives of Mary and the baby were at great risk. So against the backdrop of these human plans which threaten to derail Christmas, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” God intervenes—Christmas is back on track.
People give all kinds of answers to the question: “What does Christmas mean for you?” Some say Christmas is a time for family, a time to be better people. Christmas is just a fairy story to spread some good cheer and boost morale. Christmas isn’t really real, God isn’t really real, if you look at all the terror, disaster, and evil in the world.
We don’t need to go searching for examples of evil, as we all saw and heard the news reports of the horror at Bondi last week. While on the surface this presented as a terrorist attack of hatred against the Jewish race, at a deeper level, in the name of a rival god and religion, it is an attack on God himself and his good order, and the preciousness of all human life he has created.
Yet this despicable act is the extreme on the one spectrum of sin. It shares the same starting point as the infant throwing a tantrum at the supermarket, children teasing and taunting in the school playground, disrespect of parents and teachers, the undermining of authority, workplace bullying, adults engaging in street fights and road rage. That starting point was the Devil’s temptation to Adam and Eve to turn aside from God and be their own authority—their own ruler—like King Herod. Herod said he wanted to worship the One who has been born King of the Jews. But it is only lip service. Herod viewed Jesus as a threat to his throne, so he wanted to find Jesus, to kill him. When Herod was tricked, he decreed all male infants in Bethlehem be eliminated to remove Jesus.
Having no rival to our throne is ultimately what sin is, in all its various forms. Mere humans create God in our own image and redefine his moral standards, calling evil ‘good’ and good ‘evil’ (Isaiah 5:20). Through one man this condition entered the world, and death through sin (Romans 5:12). Sin is a real power, a destructive power, passed on from one generation to the next, binding the human will, so that the good we want to do we cannot do (Romans 7). We couldn’t blame God if he screwed up the watercolour canvas of his world and tossed it in the rubbish. But rather than throw out, God comes to restore, even to make new: God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son to save us. As flesh gives birth to flesh, we all, in our natural human condition, are under the power of sin, death and hell from the time our mother conceived us. Everyone, that is, except Mary’s son.
The child promised to Mary would not be conceived in the normal way. Joseph could not be the child’s father, for his father is the Father in heaven. While this child is born of Mary, he is God’s own Son. God himself had to step into our world to save us. He had to become one of us to save us. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, the Son of God would miraculously enter the world as a human being, just like us—except he would be the Holy One. This plan of God’s was foretold hundreds of years prior by the prophet Isaiah: “Behold the virgin will conceive and will bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel which means ‘God with us.’” (Isaiah 7:14).
Jesus would be God with us, travelling from Bethlehem to Galilee, to Caesarea Phillippi to Bethany in his ministry of bringing grace from heaven in the lives of ordinary people, by proclaiming the Good News and bringing freedom to those captive to sickness, death, and the power of the devil. He showed divine favour to those who knew they were unworthy and knew that Jesus was their only hope for forgiveness and peace. He travelled to the Upper Room, then to the Mount of Olives where he was put to death on a Cross to triumph over death and hell and bring life to the world. He travelled from the tomb as the risen, living Lord, walking along the Emmaus Road, before his ascension into heaven. He accompanied his apostles and ministered to his church throughout the empire, as the people met together devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer.
The saying goes that we can be certain about two things in life: death and taxes. I think we can expand that to four. The first three are evil, death and taxes.
The fourth is Jesus. Jesus is real! He is a statistic, accounted for by officials on Bethlehem’s register of births, deaths and marriages! Of all the times for Jesus to be born it was during a census. That’s why Joseph and Mary travel there. When they finally arrive, Bethlehem is far from the dreamy peaceful place sketched on many Christmas cards. There is a hustle and bustle greater than Westfield Marion as people from all over the land converge. And guess what? There is no room left in the inn. No room for Joseph and Mary. No room for Jesus…so symbolic—for in so many places…so many hearts—there is still no room for him today. They are turned out to a manger, surrounded by animals and their waste. This too is telling…the Holy One in the midst of mess; Jesus coming into a dark world, a world we messed up—bringing blessing and favour from heaven to all who would turn to him, even the lowliest folk, like shepherds, who were often despised and distrusted. But it is to these whom God reveals the Good News: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ, the Lord.”
In a sermon for Christmas Day, Martin Luther said: “How is it possible for [anyone] to hear of greater joy than that Christ is given to [them] as [their] own? He does not only say ‘Christ is born’, but he makes his birth our own by saying, ‘to you a Saviour’. Therefore the Gospel does not only teach the history concerning Christ; but it enables all who believe it to receive it as their own…of what benefit would it be to me if Christ had been born a thousand times, and it would daily be sung into my ears in a most lovely manner if I were never to hear that he was born for me and was to be my very own?”
People often plan to come to Jesus after they’ve got their life on track—after graduation, or partying, or dating, or setting up their career, or building their home or getting the kids through school sports, or college, or uni. After the business is sold. After overseas travel. After the house renovations. After retirement…then I’ll think about going to the manger. But the message from heaven is that God has given you Jesus now; today. “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”
So…have you arrived at your destination? Are you on track to Christmas…or on track to Christ? Christmas Day will be gone soon enough, followed a day of recovery as we laze on the couch watching the Boxing Day Test and we’ll soon have the Poms 4-0. By the end of the week, the left-over ham and turkey for lunch and dinner sandwiches will finally be finished. In a few weeks, the Christmas lights, which took hours to unravel, will be shoved in a tangled ball with the tree and its decorations, back in that dusty box in the shed—along with the nativity display, with the angels, shepherds, wise men and animals…and finally the baby Jesus.
But Jesus is God with us in our world, everyday. Jesus came to change people’s lives, as God comes into the world and into the hearts of his people, re-routing their journey to travel with him in new directions, blessing us in completely unexpected ways, just like Mary and Joseph who left behind the life they had planned, and walked with God. Like the shepherds, leaving their flocks behind, to see the salvation they had heard about. The wise men (who were magicians and looked to the stars for guidance), leaving behind what they had trusted in, kneeling before Jesus and giving him their costly gifts, because they had found true life, true wisdom.
Will you search for the Christ-child, like the shepherds and wise men, and find him, God with us, truly present here each week, and kneel before him and worship him? Will you allow him to program the GPS of your life direction? Will you look to him to drive the bus, carefully listening to him in his word, on your journey through life in this world to the next?
God so loved the world that he would give his own Son that all who call on the name of Jesus would be children of God together with him. Do not be afraid, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. All the people includes you. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you, he is Christ the Lord. Amen.
Pastor Tim Ebbs
St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Glenelg
Christmas Eve, 2025
