Ash Wednesday, Year A
December 25, 2025
Isaiah 62:6-12; Psalm 97; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Day, Christmas II, Year A
December 25, 2025
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“God Calls Us to Honor the Incarnation: God With Us”
The Rev. Kathleen Murray, Rector
Historic Beckford Parish, Mt. Jackson & Woodstock
Christmas Day, Christmas II, Year A
December 25, 2025
Luke does not begin this story with wonder. He begins it with power.
A decree is issued by Caesar Augustus. People are ordered to move. Names are registered. Bodies are counted. The mechanics of empire are already turning before the child is ever born. Luke wants us to know exactly what kind of world Jesus enters, because Christmas is not God arriving in neutral territory. It is God being born under authority that does not recognize him.
Mary and Joseph are not traveling because they want to. They are traveling because someone far away has decided they must. Luke names the officials and the structures not as background detail, but as context. Jesus is born while the world is being run by people who do not notice him.
There is no room for them. That line is not sentimental. It is descriptive. When systems are full and priorities are fixed, there is no room. So the child is born where animals eat, wrapped in whatever cloth is available, dependent from the first moment on the care of others. Luke does not explain this. He lets it stand.
Then the angels appear—not to Caesar or anyone whose name will be recorded in history, but to shepherds working the night shift, people who live on the margins and are not considered reliable witnesses. Luke is not being quaint. He is being precise.
“Do not be afraid,” the angel says, which usually means fear makes sense. The announcement itself is careful: good news of great joy for all the people. Not a promise that the world has changed overnight. Not a declaration that Rome is finished. It is news about a child born today, whose meaning will unfold over time.
The shepherds go to see for themselves. They are not told what to think or how to feel. They are invited to look. And they find exactly what they were told: a baby, wrapped in cloth, lying in a feeding trough. No glow. No embellishment. Just a child, where children should not have to be.
They leave changed, not because everything is fixed, but because they have seen something that cannot be unseen. They tell the story. Mary does not. Mary treasures and ponders. Luke gives us both responses, and neither is dismissed.
Then Luke does something almost jarring. He tells us the shepherds return to their fields. The work continues. The world does not pause to accommodate the miracle.
Here is the part we often miss: the presence of God does not remove people from the world as it is. It changes how they see within it.
In December of 1943, a German fighter pilot named Franz Stigler intercepted a badly damaged American bomber over Germany. The aircraft was barely flying. Its crew was wounded. It posed no threat. Stigler had every authority—every expectation—to finish the job. Instead, he flew alongside the plane, saw the terrified men inside, and made a decision that violated orders but honored their humanity. He let them go. The war did not end. The system did not change. But something had been seen, and it could not be unseen.
That is the kind of moment Luke is describing.
What has changed in Bethlehem is not the system, but where God is.
God is no longer outside or above the world Luke has described. God is inside it. Born under decree. Laid where there is no room. Dependent on the care of people with very little control.
That matters, because once God has entered the world this way, human life can never again be dismissed as beneath God’s attention.
Christmas Day does not ask us to hold on to last night’s feeling. It asks us to look again at the world we already live in and to notice where God has chosen to be present.
The child is here. The system has not changed. But God has decided to stay.
And once God has chosen to stay, the rest of the story