Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Preaching by Sister Elise D. García, OP
Isaiah 9:1-6
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14

 

This is the night we have been anticipating, waiting for, in hopeful expectation through the weeks of Advent. It is the night of the inbreaking of Divine light into our lives. It is a night we relish each year in stillness and renewed wonder – astonished by the unexpected particularity of God becoming one among us. “God’s infinity dwindled to infancy,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins so memorable writes.

One particularity we are just awakening to, as we step back into deep space and time, is God’s dwindling to infancy right here in our common Earth home. This ordinary yet extraordinary particularity is reflected in Christmas cards that depict our wondrous blue-green planet against the inky darkness of space. Our imaginations can picture our Earth home orbiting the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy – one of trillions of galaxies in an expanding cosmos that emerged out of nothingness. It was sparked into being nearly 14 billion years ago by the same Divine light that incarnated as human flesh some 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem.

As we hone into the particularity of the Divine inbreaking that Luke narrates in his Gospel, we see that is fraught with peril. The Divine child is born into a time of empire to an unwed teenage mother. It is a cold winter’s night in Judea with no room at the inn. She finds shelter in a dark stable smelling of manure and warmed by the bodies of barnyard animals. She and her fiancée, already exhausted having traveled for days as migrants from Galilee to Judea, were following an imperial decree to become documented in the town he descended from – Bethlehem, in the house and family of David. In his narrative, Luke depicts no other women in the scene to help her through the hours of painful labor to bring this firstborn child into a dangerous world.

Such is the inbreaking of Divine light – into an obscure planet in the vastness of space and in a lowly manger at a time of peril.

The revelation of this Divine inbreaking is equally unexpected. It comes to poor shepherds tending to their flock in the fields outside of Bethlehem. An angel appears, shining with the glory of God – and terrifying them.

According to Luke, the angel calms their fears by delivering the good news that on this day a Savior, Jesus, the Christ, was born. The angel says that the sign by which the shepherds would recognize this Savior is a child bundled in a manger – in a feeding trough for animals.

Luke then tells us that a multitude of heavenly host join the angel, giving glory to God in the highest heaven and on Earth peace.

There is an enduring hopefulness to this Christmas Eve story that arises from its particularities:

• From the humble and ordinary character of those chosen to bring the Divine light into being – and of those to whom the good news is revealed.

• From God’s coming into human flesh, embraced by the warmth and smell of other forms of Earthly animal flesh.

• From the circumstances of the Divine birth taking place “in a land where imperial might holds sway.”¹

These are enduring signs of God being with us, at all times and in all circumstances. Especially in times that are perilous, like the one we are in now where imperial might seems to hold sway – with enormous suffering for millions of innocent people and for our whole beloved Earth community.

It is on nights like this that we are invited to look into the vast depths of time and space that have brought all of us into this present moment. Through that deep lens, we are invited to view the particularity of that one moment in time and place more than 2,000 years ago when the abiding light of Divine love appeared in our world, calling each of us from that day forward into the fullness of our being as bearers of that Christ light for the common good of all.

It was on a night like this, on Christmas Eve of 1914, that British and German soldiers – in trenches across from each other on the Western front at the start of a brutal world war – somehow felt the transformative pull of that call.

It started with Christmas carols – Silent Night/Stille Nacht – in English and in German echoing across the front. The sound of shooting ended with voices raised in song. On some parts of the front, soldiers ventured into no-man’s land, recovering the dead bodies of their friends and then exchanging food, tobacco, caps and buttons with those they had earlier in the day fought. Some soldiers wrote letters home about having played soccer with each other that night, before the brutal war resumed the next morning.

What child is this – that would summon such a response?

It is the same child that calls us, this Christmas eve, to enter into the fullness of our being as bearers of the light and love of Christ – for the common good of all – especially in perilous times such as these.

 

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¹Wisdom Commentary: Luke 1-9, edited by Barbara E. Reid, OP, and Shelly Matthews, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021 (pp. 63-64).