Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

Luke 2:1-20

The Rev’d Charles Everson

Church of the Atonement

December 24, 2025

At Christmas, people come to church for all sorts of reasons. Some of you are here because this is simply what you do on Christmas Eve. Some of you are here because someone you love asked you to come. Some of you are here because you couldn’t imagine being anywhere else tonight. And some of you are here even though you’re not entirely sure why.

But beneath all of that – beneath the family drama…and the amazing music and the candles (and the incense) and the beauty – there is something very simple drawing us here. And that is hunger. Not the kind of hunger you feel when dinner is late, but a deeper hunger. A hunger for peace. A hunger for meaning. A hunger for God.

And the Christmas story we hear tonight begins, quite intentionally, at a place of hunger.

Luke tells us that Mary gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.  For good reason, we glorify the manger in our hymnody and art.  If you haven’t had a chance to check out the glorious manger scene that Rick and others helped create right over here, please check it out after communion or after the service. We glorify it and often forget that a manger is a simple feeding trough, where food is put so that animals may eat.

Luke is remarkably restrained in how he tells this story. He gives us very few details. And that means the details he does give us matter. Before angels sing, before shepherds arrive, before anyone speaks a word, the Son of God is placed where creatures are fed.

This is how God chooses to enter the world.

Jesus is born in Bethlehem, a city whose name means “house of bread” in Hebrew. The Bread of Life is born in the house of bread, and he is laid where food belongs. And the way this gift is given matters just as much as the gift itself.

Even the way the child is treated tells us something important. Mary wraps him in swaddling clothes. She does not simply place him down. She handles his body with reverence, with attention, with care. From the very beginning, God is teaching us something about how his presence is to be received – not grasped, not rushed, but approached with humility and tenderness.

The Church often speaks of Christmas as the feast of God becoming visible – in her prayers and especially in her hymns. In our closing hymn, we will sing, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity,” confessing that at Christmas, the invisible God makes himself visible in human flesh. And that is true. But it is not the whole truth. Christmas is also the feast of God becoming receivable.

God does not come into the world merely to be worshipped by humanity. God comes to give himself wholly to us. He does not wait for confidence or certainty or spiritual strength, but gives himself first, knowing exactly who we are and how we get to this moment in our lives.

And this is good news for you and me, because many of us come here tonight not feeling especially strong in our faith. Some of us are tired. Some are grieving. Some are distracted. Some are not sure what we believe at all. And Christmas does not demand that we arrive with perfect understanding or perfect devotion.

Animals eat without explanation. Shepherds come without preparation. God does not wait for us to get everything right before giving himself. The manger does not ask questions. It simply holds the gift.

Christians have always wanted to remember that manger in concrete ways. From the earliest centuries, pilgrims in Bethlehem were shown the place of Christ’s birth and the manger itself. By the fourth century, Christians were already venerating it – not as a magical object, but as a witness to the astonishing claim that God really took flesh and was laid down in a real feeding trough.

Even today, fragments traditionally associated with the manger are kept beneath the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome – not because the Church claims with scientific certainty to know their origins, but because the Church has always wanted to say this: the Incarnation happened in real matter, in real poverty, in a real place where God gave himself to be received.

The way God gives himself in the manger prepares us for how he will continue to give himself to the Church.

The altar does not replace Bethlehem. It continues it. The feeding trough becomes the altar. The child laid down in humility becomes the Christ who gives himself still. The same body – now risen, ascended, and glorified – is offered again, quietly, faithfully, week after week. What begins in the manger continues at the altar: the same Christ, the same self-giving, the same humility.

In a few moments, we will do what Christians have done since the earliest days of the Church. We will go to where Christ places himself. We will not come because we are worthy. We will not come because we understand everything there is to know about God. We will come because we are hungry, and because God has chosen to feed us.

Tonight, the God who once lay in a feeding trough places himself again before his people. The manger was God’s first altar. And on this most holy night, the same Christ feeds us still. Amen.