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.