December 21, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
Matthew 1:18-25 18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. 20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23 “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” 24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife 25 but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
This has been a terrible week. It’s the week before Christmas, and we’d like to see everything go well… but not this week, not in our world.
On December 13, a lone gunman attacked and killed two students at Brown University, right down the road from here, and right across the Seekonk River from my home. Eleven students were shot, two of them died. On Friday,, after a search that was haunted by mindless attacks from outsiders, the perpetrator was found dead in New Hampshire.
On December 14, a terrorist opened fire on a crowd of Jews at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, who were there at the beach celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. Fifteen people were shot dead, including a 10 year old girl. A brave Muslim man tackled one of the shooters, saving lives – but he was hit by the other shooter and is still in the hospital.
Also on December 14, popular, well-respected film maker and actor, Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their home by their son.
Each of these terrible events was haunted by people who deliberately spread lies about the event, the people involved, to make it seem – at least in the Brown University shooting that the Providence mayor, being gay, was incompetent, that the Providence police chief, being an immigrant, was also incompetent, and that the president of Brown University was not just incompetent, but maliciously incompetent.
And that doesn’t even count the regular stresses and anxieties of the season.
Will we have enough cookies?
Will the sauerbraten turn out well or be a bust?
Will that relative, you know the one, keep their mouth shut, or start ranting?
If I have to hear one more harangue about how an American Teddy Bear is superior to an English Paddington Bear, I will scream… right?
And there’s more: Is my job in jeopardy? How am I going to make the car payment? Can anyone help me get to my medical appointment? What will that test show? Does my beloved have dementia?
And here it is, just a few days before Christmas, and how are we to be merry, surrounded as we are by so much stress?
Isn’t Christmas all about the joy of a new baby, about the hope he embodies? It’s when we sing all those joyous carols – Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing – right?
Isn’t Christmas all about the joy of a new baby, about the hope he embodies? It’s when we sing all those joyous carols – Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing – right?
Well, yes, … but… we also sing quiet ones, songs that go under the joy to recognize the reality of why we’re so joyous in spite of all that’s awful in our world. Songs that help us remember that all is not sweetness and light, that much of the time we struggle – and that we’re not failures because it’s happening that way. Christmas re-calibrates our picture of life, adjusts the frame so we can see what’s really happening, instead of living inside a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Songs like O Little Town of Bethlehem, remind us of life’s dark streets, and a world of sin. The author, Bishop Phillips Brooks, of Boston, knew about the stresses of real life – he’d been a pastor in a number of churches. Or “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”’s third verse, helps us see the realities of life’s crushing load, calling on us to rest by the weary road and hear the angels sing.
Here’s the bottom line. Christ isn’t coming as a baby to make the best better. Christ comes, comes as a baby, in the dire-est of circumstances, to a poor struggling family with no money, no power, no anything much at all, to bring us to God’s unending love, even in the worst of times. It’s not about sugary icing; it’s about satisfying, life-sustaining, nutritious meals.
This morning’s Gospel reading, from Matthew, is a testimony to that truth. It’s one of three different ways of telling the story of the birth of Jesus. We’ll hear the other two on Christmas Eve – the beautiful words from Luke, and then the totally metaphorical words that begin the Gospel of John. In their differences, they remind us that the story of Jesus is not about facts of his birth, but about the truth of his coming.
What matters most to us is not when or if there were Wisemen, but the truth, the reality, that God came to earth, to live as a human being.
I don’t know but maybe the most important part of the traditional set of birth stories isn’t that, not long after the birth, Jesus and his parents have to take off for Egypt, to hide out from King Herod’s agents, determined to kill him. It’s important because we see there a family with no power, not even free to live in their own home, but being driven away to save their lives. Jesus is the companion for all of us who are powerless. His first memories are of growing up far away from his parents’ families, of scrabbling for scraps to make a living. Born into a poor family, with no influence and little money, Jesus knows what it is to struggle.
It’s pain, and struggle, disappointment and fear that are the normal ways of our life. Jesus comes to help us overcome, to bring us to a place where we can rejoice, even when things go wrong, even when there is death and disaster, like this week past. This is the kind of time for which Jesus came. The days are short, dark, and mostly bitterly cold. Anguish is all around us; anger tints even the closest of conversations. So much seems wrong.
And then comes Jesus, come to live with us, to bear the same sorrows, to know the same horrors, to feel the same pain, to be here so that we might know that God knows us, stands with us, comforts us, and lovingly brings us home.
Christmas is not a pointer to eternally happy family celebrations, perfection around the table or living room. It’s a reminder that God cries when Jews are shot on Bondi Beach, when college students are murdered in a classroom, when parents are stabbed to death by a troubled son.
Even more – it tells us God is devastated when people are hungry and no one reaches out with food, when people are struggling to pay their health insurance premiums and no one tries to change the way medical costs are calculated; God is devastated when people are mean to one another, deliberately and intentionally.
For all those reasons, Jesus is born to be among us. Let us give thanks.
Amen.©2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 