Entangled States

At the end of the Gospel we hear on Christmas Eve, we are told that Mary pondered these things in her heart.

She did not rush to explain them.
She did not try to resolve all the questions.
She held them—patiently, prayerfully—allowing their meaning to unfold over time.

That may be the most faithful response available to us right now.

Rather than rushing ahead to the next obligation, the next resolution, the next task, what if we allowed ourselves to linger?

What if we treated these days not as a wind-down, but as an invitation?

An invitation to reflect.
To remember.
To notice.

To allow the memories of what has been, the realities of what is, and the hopes of what may yet be to gather within us.

To look again for the light we might have missed.

To let the Holy Spirit work quietly within us—healing what is wounded, softening what has grown hard, rekindling what has dimmed.

Because when the light fills us, it does not stop with us.

It becomes visible to others.

Not in grand gestures or dramatic displays, but in patience.
In kindness.
In attentiveness.
In the simple, faithful presence of people who know they are not alone.

Christmas is all around us.

The Word is still dwelling among us.
The light is still shining.

The question is not whether God is present.

The question is whether we will take the time to see.

And perhaps, in seeing, help others see as well.

Christmas is all around us. Perhaps we can help others see it too by letting it fill us with its blessings this week.

You can view the whole sermon here.

An excerpt from my sermon linked below:

Christmas has a way of feeling as though it exists outside of time. The music, the ritual, the familiarity can give the impression that we are stepping into something eternal. And in a sense, we are. But at the heart of this celebration is not an idea or a feeling. It is an event. Something that happened on a particular night, in a particular place, to particular people.

That is one of the great paradoxes of the Incarnation.

Christmas is ordinary and cosmic at the same time. Accessible and overwhelming. Intimate and vast. God does not arrive with spectacle or force. God comes as a child, born to Mary, entrusted to Joseph, laid in a feeding trough. And yet that birth as the Lamb of God is announced by angels. It is proclaimed as good news for all people. It bends history around itself.

The eternal enters time—not to escape it, but to dwell within it.

Clinging to that truth, to that experience, to those layered emotions, is, I think, at the heart of why we keep Christmas at all. Why we return to it year after year. Why we go to the trouble of the rituals and the music and the decorations.

Because keeping Christmas—keeping it well, as Ebenezer Scrooge famously learned to do—gives us strength for the rest of the year. It gives us a way to meet the worries and pressures we carry, not by denying them, but by placing them in a larger story.

There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings that I find myself returning to often. Sam and Frodo are nearing the end of their long and dangerous journey. They are in Mordor—a blasted, lifeless land of ash and rock. They are hiding in a ditch, exhausted, hungry, frightened, and convinced that they will not survive what remains of their task.

And in that moment, Sam looks up. Through the smoke and the gloom, he sees the stars—high above them, distant, clear, untouched by the devastation below. And the sight of them fills him with comfort. Because it reminds him that no matter how terrible the present moment is, there are still things of enduring beauty. Things that cannot be reached or ruined by the darkness they are passing through.

Professor Tolkien knew something about darkness. He had lived through the trench warfare of the First World War. That scene has always felt less like fantasy to me and more like memory—translated into story. A testimony that even in the worst places, beauty and hope can still break through.

For me, Christmas is like those stars.

The tree. The music. The warmth and the light. The Christmas star itself. They are not escapism. They are reminders. They point beyond themselves to something eternal and unchanging in the midst of lives that are always changing.

Christmas tells us, year after year, that God has not remained distant from us. God has not observed our struggles from afar. God has come among us. Born of Mary. Cared for by Joseph. His birth witnessed in the town of David. Proclaimed by angels. Received by shepherds—people accustomed to darkness and night.

The highest and the lowest are drawn together at the manger. Heaven and earth, Angels and Shepherds meet there. Glory and vulnerability sit side by side. The Lamb of God enters human history—not to conquer by force, but to save through love.

And that matters—especially when we feel stretched thin. Especially when the future feels uncertain. Especially when the world seems louder and harsher than we remember it being before.

So my hope for you, this Christmas, is a simple one.

I hope you find a moment—perhaps with a cup of cocoa or eggnog, perhaps with your favorite Christmas music playing softly in the background—to sit beside a Christmas tree. Or a candle. Or a manger scene. And in that moment, I hope you allow yourself to simply be present.

Let the memories come—both joyful and bittersweet. Let the emotions surface without needing to explain or resolve them, just experience them. Let yourself remember that some things endure. That God has entered the world. That God is still present among us.

The light shines in the darkness. And the darkness does not overcome it.

More here at this link.

The portion of the Gospel according to Matthew we read this day tells the story of Jesus’ birth in a way that is, at first glance, surprisingly restrained. There are no shepherds here, no angels filling the sky with song, no frantic journey to Bethlehem. Instead, Matthew gives us a quiet, almost domestic scene, focused not on Mary, but on Joseph.

Joseph, we are told, is a righteous man. And his righteousness shows itself not in rigid rule-keeping, but in mercy. When he discovers that Mary is pregnant, and knows the child is not his, he resolves to dismiss her quietly. He chooses the path that protects her dignity, even at cost to himself.

It is only after he has made that decision, after he has acted according to the best light he has, that God intervenes. An angel appears to him in a dream and says two things that change everything.

First: Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.

Second: You are to name the child.

That second instruction matters more than it may first appear. In the ancient world, to name a child was not a sentimental gesture. It was a legal and social act. By naming Jesus, Joseph is commanded to claim him as his own. The angel is, in effect, telling Joseph to adopt this child—to bring him fully into the house and lineage of David.

Joseph does not speak a single word in Matthew’s Gospel. But he listens. He wakes from sleep and does exactly what he has been told. He takes Mary as his wife. And he names the child Jesus.

At one level this would be plenty to understand, but there’s so much more. In particular what it means that God has come as God has done. That’s the rest of the sermon below.

You can view the sermon directly by using this link.

We arrive this week at a kind of turn toward Christmas. Advent has its own pace — measured, expectant, leaning toward the horizon — but today the season deepens and brightens at the same time. This Sunday has a name all its own: Gaudete Sunday. The Sunday when we rejoice. The Sunday of the rose candle — if your Advent wreath includes such a thing. It is the liturgical hint that the long night is shading toward morning, that even in our waiting, joy is breaking in.

And this particular joy comes because the character of the season’s proclamation changes. Earlier in Advent we were listening for what will be—the future God is drawing toward us, the world as God intends it. But today the Gospel turns us toward what was and now is. We are invited to remember the promises made long before us, promises entrusted to prophets who lived and died without seeing their fulfillment. And we are invited to notice that God has kept those promises in the most ordinary of places and in the most ordinary of ways — so ordinary, in fact, that even the prophets themselves could scarcely have imagined it.

We are recalling the extraordinary work of God, wrapped in the ordinary. That is the Christian mystery we are preparing to celebrate. And it is a mystery that we witness again and again in Salvation History, and one that plays out still in our own day.

Into this shift of emphasis steps John the Baptist—no longer thundering from the riverbank, but speaking now with a quieter, plaintive tone. There is a bittersweetness folded into John’s question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John is asking for reassurance. He is asking, from his prison cell, whether this long-awaited moment is truly at hand.

It must have been hard for him to believe it. Hard to imagine that in his day—under Roman occupation with Herod, the cruel client King ostensibly ruling over Israel at the leave of the Emperor, with the grinding realities of poverty and violence and dashed hopes — this was the moment God had chosen to act. Hard to imagine that the One the prophets longed for was already present among them, right there in the moment John voices his question, healing and reconciling, teaching and restoring. Hard to imagine that God’s work was unfolding not through spectacle or power, but through mercy given to the poor, sight restored to the blind, and hope rekindled in the hearts of ordinary people.

More (and a reference to Godel’s Theorem) in the sermon below.

You can view the sermon directly here.