Stories

Christmas Eve 2025

I like stories and for me Christmas has always been a time of stories. When I was little, during Advent my family hung an advent wreath from the ceiling of our living room and on Saturday evenings we would gather to sing Advent hymns, eat gingerbread, and read stories.

One of my favourite stories was Selma Lagerlöf’s “The Holy Night.” It’s an old story, though not as old as the story of the birth of Jesus. I have since read the story to my own children and in 2019 we read it with my sister-in-law and our niece who were with us. I had forgotten that it contained Lagerlöf’s grief for her grandmother and the great loneliness she felt when her grandmother was gone. It was the first Christmas after my brother-in-law had died and Lagerlöf said for us what we all knew was true but were afraid to say. Lagerlöf tells about her grandmother and tells of the morning when the corner sofa stood empty and how it was impossible for her to understand her life without her grandmother. She writes, “I remember that something was gone from our lives. It seemed as if the door to a whole beautiful, enchanted world – where before we had been free to go in and out – had been closed. And now there was no one who knew how to open that door.”¹ And then she tells “The Holy Night”, a story her grandmother had told her.
The story is beautiful and I will not retell it here, but it is a retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus and the miracle of that story is not simply the birth of Jesus announced by angels, but that on that night even the most hard-hearted character in the story cannot help but show compassion toward the poor couple and their child, evidence that the presence of this child had worked profound change and sign that something of great importance had happened, which is why so many years later we still gather to remember this birth.

There is another Christmas story that comes to mind. The American storyteller Garrison Keillor also retells the story of the birth of Jesus. He tells of emperors who like to see people march to their orders, he tells of shepherds in the fields who do not trust their eyes or ears and attribute the vision of the heavenly host to the wine skins they had emptied, though they eventually do go to Bethlehem. He tells of the clerk at the hotel that doesn’t have room for Mary and Joseph and of the innkeeper who eventually comes to believe, at least enough to make plans to rename the hotel the “L’Enfant Hotel” and to raise his prices, and to add a gift shop with nativity type items. And he tells of King Herod’s jealousy and the family’s escape to Egypt and he ends the story by saying this, “And so they […] left. The stable was empty. The manger was empty. Just a bunch of hungry animals standing around inside. (…)
The shepherds were the lucky ones when you come right down to it. And the wise men. They saw it all. They were there. It all happened to them. It didn’t have to be told to them by somebody else. They didn’t have to sit down and study it or figure it out. It was just given to them as a gift.”²

There is a third retelling of the Christmas story I want to tell you about. It is an illustrated children’s book based on a poem by the Spanish poet Joan Alavedra, illustrated by Ulises Wensell. The book’s title is “They Followed a Bright Star,” and like all good children’s books, adults enjoy the book as much.

The visual artist moved the story into the mountains of Spain where the first thing we see is a group of shepherds gathered around the fire at night while their sheep are sleeping. An angel appears to them, although they are second guessing what they see and hear, and being afraid of what they see and hear, they move closer to the fire. But the angel does not give up and tells them about the child to be born and that they must go to Bethlehem. Then they follow the bright star.
Along the way they meet others and ask them to come along: A man drawing water from a well, a fisherman, a farmer plowing, a man and a woman harvesting grapes, and every time they have the same conversation. They invite those they meet to come with them, for they must share the joy of which the angel had told them. And each time those invited reply that they cannot for an angel had appeared to them too, telling them to protect the water, to catch fish, to grow grain and make bread, to harvest grapes and make wine. The shepherds wish each of them peace on this good night and journey on, and they marvel at how busy the angels have been. And then their path converges with that of the magi and they arrive at the stable at the same time.

The story ends with these words,

And far away,
the man watched the well,
the fisherman fished,
the plowman sowed,
and the man and woman aged the wine.

For the time would come
when Jesus would need
water and fish and bread and wine.

Water to cleanse the souls of the weary,
fish to multiply to feed the many,
and bread to break with the wine
on another night of miracles.

But on that night,
those who could not follow the star
remembered the words of the angels.
Let the world rejoice!³

In many ways Christmas is about stories. We come to church on Christmas Eve to hear the story, and of course to sing the carols that tell the story. It is the story that inspires our hearts to grow wider, and to gather with family and friends.
The thing with stories is that they have room for us. This last one in particular, even those not coming along have a place in the story. But for us too it is impossible to read or hear a story without identifying with a character. When Selma Lagerlöf wrote that life would never be the same without her grandmother she was writing not just about her grandmother but she was writing for all of us who have and have had grandmothers. In the same way the birth of Jesus is told as a story to make it clear that this is a story for us and a story that invites us to enter. Because story-telling is never about the past, we realize that the birth of Jesus is about life and the world and salvation. At the beginning Wendell Berry reminded us that we in that world into which Jesus was born. And we retell the story because it has significance for us, and because it is our story, for in it we have come upon holiness, have encountered God, and in the encounter we experienced that God makes the common holy, that God makes our lives holy.

So when we come to church on Christmas Eve, we come because we believe somehow in God, in holiness, in more than meets the eye, whatever our words for it may be, and we believe if it happened back then it happens now, and we want to catch a glimpse of it.
Garrison Keillor is right when he said that the shepherds and the wise ones were the lucky ones because they were right there. But we are here because we know the story is not over, but that we are somehow part of it, and that we too are blessed by it.

It’s Christmas and this is the story we came to tell and to hear. And yet there are many stories and story we choose matters for the life we live.
The ancient Greeks had gods which essentially were an extension of the life they knew and those gods ruled without mercy.
Today we have the gods of the market that determine the value of products and the value of people; in case you are wondering, in this economy products matter more than people. And some look at life as if it could be reduced to science and technology, as if there were no mystery.
David Foster Wallace in his famous 2005 commencement address said, “… [I]n the day-to day trenches of (…) life, there is (…) no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. (…)
If you worship money then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”⁴ These too are stories of sorts.

We have come to hear and sing a story most of us know well. And like any story it asks us which character we want to be. Do we want to be Herod or the Holy Family, Pilate or the disciples, those who Lord it over others or the lowly ones Jesus calls blessed, the innkeeper or the shepherds?

When we go forth from here this evening, let us think about the story by which we live, and let us remember that the story we heard and sung tonight is not only a story that we can choose, but it is a story that already has chosen us.

And that fills us with great joy.

Amen.