Christmas 2025

“She gave birth, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” St. Luke tells it so simply, matter-of-factly. No dramatic music. No spotlight. It sounds like any birth, like many births happening in hospitals and homes around the world tonight. And yet the angel calls this moment “good news of great joy.” A Savior. A Messiah. The Lord.

But look at him. He cannot walk. He can’t talk. He cannot feed or care for himself. He cannot fix our problems or explain our questions. So, what exactly does this child bring us? Why would God choose to come among us like this – small, helpless, vulnerable.?

To answer that, let’s think about another child. Think back to the first time someone looked into your eyes as a newborn. What do you think they saw? Your parents, or whoever held you – what were they gazing at? They did not see a resume. They did not see mistakes or failures. They did not see everything you would one day get wrong.

They saw hopes and dreams. They saw possibility. They saw beauty that had nothing to do with appearance. They saw holiness before you ever did anything “holy.” They saw a miracle – God’s life alive in you.

Every one of us knows that look. Because we have seen it too. Go back and look at a baby picture of yourself. Look past what your life is right now and return to the beginning. It is all there – the innocence, the love, the promise.

And if it’s hard to see it in yourself, then remember the first time you looked into the face of your child or grandchild. Or the last baby you saw baptized. Or even a child you did not know – a baby in a stroller at the grocery store, a toddler on a playground. Something about that face stopped you. Held you. Softened you.

Why?

It is about more than cuteness. More than sentimentality. More than memories. In that gaze, we catch a glimpse of something bigger than a baby. We are standing in the presence of a revelation. We are being reminded of something we have forgotten. In that small face we are seeing Emmanuel – God with us.

That is why God came as a baby. Because in that child we see not only who God is – but who we are meant to be. In the face of the Christ Child, we recognize our own deepest truth:  goodness, beauty, love, holiness, possibility. The life God dreamed into us from the very beginning.

So, tonight is not only about remembering what happened long ago in Bethlehem. In some mysterious way, the Christ Child shows us who we truly are, who we can become, and what our life is really about. This holy child shows us our own reflection and offers us a new beginning. And who among us does not need that? Who has not wished for a chance to begin again – not just to do better, but to be different? Tonight is a festival of re-creation.

This is the child of peace – let us not be violent or anxious.

This is the child of love – let us not hate or harden our hearts.

This is the child of compassion -let us not be indifferent.

This is the child of gentleness – let us not be harsh.

This is the child of joy – let us not live as though hope is gone.

Tonight, divinity is wrapped in humanity. Let us be wrapped in divinity. Tonight, we behold the child. Let us become what we see. A child is born for us this night. Let us claim our new beginning.

So, the question is simple: What will we do with this gift? Your life is before you, and God’s dreams for you are deep and wide. So go – pull out that baby picture.  Gaze into the face of a child. Look int the eyes of the Christ Child – and remember who God has always known you to be.  Amen

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

What do you make of today’s gospel? It is a beautiful story – but does it make sense to you? I’ll be honest: sometimes it does not make sense to me. It feels too easy. Too clean. Too simple. Mary is a virgin, engaged to Joseph, and she’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Joseph plans to dismiss her quietly. An angel appears in a dream and tells him not to be afraid. Jospeh wakes up, does what the angel says, and Jesus is born.

That’s it.

No arguments. No tears. No fear. No confusion. No anger. No struggle. No words at all from Mary and Joseph.

Who lives in that kind of world? Because I don’t. And I suspect you don’t either.

My doubts about this gospel are not about God. I believe in the Spirit’s creative power. I believe God speaks through dreams and messengers. And I am not troubled by Mary’s virginity – I understand it as a theological truth pointing to God’s initiative. What troubles me is that the story feels sanitized. It reads like a Hallmark version of something that must have been painfully messy.

Where is Mary the frightened young woman? Where is Jospeh with his broken heart? Where are the questions, the misunderstanding, the shame, the fear?

So, let’s read between the lines. What if the story really went like this?

Joseph comes home and discovers Mary is pregnant. His heart breaks. He does not understand. He is angry, confused, ashamed. He asks, “Mary, what have you done?” She insists she is innocent but cannot explain how this happened. People talk. Rumors spread. Nothing make sense. It’s a mess!

Joseph does not know who to believe or what to do. And so, overwhelmed, he plans to dismiss her quietly. That version sounds more real to me. Because I’ve known that kind of messiness in my life. Haven’t you? Messiness in relationships, Messiness in faith. Messiness in trying to trust God when nothing adds up.

Matthew gives us the theological truth. But maybe he leaves out the mess because we already know it too well. Because if we are honest, we do the same thing: we edit our own stories, we sanitize our lives, we quietly dismiss what is painful, confusing, or shameful.

Joseph wakes up, and the gospel says, “He did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” That one sentence carries enormous weight. Joseph chooses trust over certainty. He chooses presence over escape. He chooses to stay.

And because Joseph stays, Jesus is born into that household, into that imperfect situation, into that complicated family.

Matthew tells us that Jesus will be called Emmanuel – God with us. Not God with us once everything is figured out. Not God with us once life is clean and orderly. But God with us right in the middle of confusion, risk, and unfinished stories.

Advent is a season of preparation, but the preparation God desires is not perfection. It is honesty. It is naming the mess instead of hiding it. It is choosing not to dismiss our lives quietly, but to stay present and trust that God is already there. Because if Jesus is not born into the messiness of our lives, then what difference does his birth really make?

I suspect you are here today for the same reason I am. Life is not always clean. Faith is not always simple. And sometimes our best efforts still leave us with a mess. What if Emmanuel – God with us – begins right there? It did for Mary and Joseph. Why not for us?

The Third Sunday of Advent

What happened to John the Baptist? You remember last week in the gospel, John was strong and certain – a voice crying out in the wilderness. He preached repentance, he warned of the “wrath to come,” the ax at the root of the trees, and unquenchable fire. There was no hesitation. John the Baptist knew exactly what the kingdom should look like.

But today? Today the Baptist is in prison. Today he has a question. “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Last week there was confidence. This week, doubt. What changed?

Maybe this: John’s vision was so focused, so singular- wrath, ax, fire – that he could not see anything else God might be doing. His expectations became blinders. He was looking for a Messiah of judgement…and missed the Messiah of compassion standing right in front of him.

Jesus’ response is gentle, not critical: “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news.” In other words, “John, take off your blinders.” God is bigger than you imagined.”

I understand the Baptist – maybe you do too. It is easy for us to put on blinders without even realizing it. Sometimes we focus so intensely on one thing – a worry, a problem, a cause, a project, a fear – that it narrows our whole world. We see only what is wrong. Only what we expect. Only what we fear. And like John, we end up imprisoned in our own thinking.   Blinders come in many forms:

*The darkness of violence or injustice that makes us believe nothing will ever change.

*Feelings of being overwhelmed that hide the small good we can do. * Past guilt that will not let us imagine forgiveness. * Grief that steals our ability to notice joy. * Expectations of how Jesus should act that make us miss how he is acting. * Busyness and exhaustion that keep us from seeing the people who love us.

Every one of these can be a prison. Every one of these keep us from seeing God at work.

So what blinders are you wearing today? What is narrowing your vision? What is keeping you from noticing the Christ who is already in your life?

And here is the good news Jesus gives to John – and to us:

*If you feel in the dark, the blind receive sight. * If you feel powerless, the lame walk. * If you feel ashamed or unworthy, lepers are cleansed. * If you can’t hear God anymore, the deaf hear. * If you think nothing can change, the dead are raised. * If you need hope, the poor receive good news.

Jesus is painting a picture of life without blinders- a life where grace is larger than our fears, where God is doing far more than we have allowed ourselves to imagine.

John asks, “Are you the one who is to come?” Jesus answers not with arguments but with evidence of a world being reborn.

Today the same answer is given to us.

So, what about you? Are you ready to lay aside the blinders? Are you ready to see again? Because the Messiah is here – doing more than we expected, more than we imagined, more than our blinders ever allowed us to see.

Is he the One?

Yes.

But we must open our eyes.

Second Sunday of Advent

What if I preached like John the Baptist? What if I were as blunt, as confrontational, as shockingly direct as he is? What if I stepped into the pulpit and began like this: “So what brought you slithering in here today? You sons of snakes. Why are you here? To get out of the cold? To see your friends? To feel good about how faithful you are? Don’t tell me how long your family has been in the parish or how many committees you have chaired. I want to know what you are doing with your life. Where are you going? If you are here to change, to open yourself to God, then show it. And if you are not…then go ahead – crawl back into the hole you came from.”

If I preached like that, what would you do? Call the Bishop? Complain in the parking lot? Fire off an email? Leave and never come back? Or…would you change your life?

Most of us don’t want messages like John’s – because many of us, in one way or another, have settled. We are not settled because everything is perfect; we are settled because we are tired. We are overwhelmed. We are busy. We are disappointed. We are cynical. We have created a way of living that gets us through the day, and we don’t want anyone disturbing that fragile balance.

And yet Matthew tells us that people flocked to hear John: the people of Jerusalem, all Judea, even the Pharisees and Sadducees. Why seek out someone who calls you a brood of vipers?

Because deep down, we know the truth John names. We know the cracks in the veneer. We know when we are out of balance, when we are not living who we truly are. We know the habits we keep, the fears we avoid, the relationships we resist. And after a while, it is easy to shrug and say, “That is just how it is. That’s just me.”

That is when we need John the Baptist.

Not because he tells us we need to change – we already know that. But because he reminds us that we can change. That God has not closed the book on us. That a different future is still possible. His message is simple and urgent: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

For years I thought repentance was mostly about behavior – feeling bad, trying harder, doing better. But life teaches us that even when we try our best, things do not always go right. So, what if repentance is something deeper? What if it is about returning to our truest self? What if it is about reclaiming our integrity, not betraying who God created us to be? What if repentance is an inner turning before it is ever an outer action? Maybe repentance is like learning to walk – not about never falling but about getting up again.

Maybe it is simply turning toward the future instead of resigning ourselves to the past. Maybe repentance is choosing hope when hope seems impossible.

And repentance does not have to be dramatic. It begins with one change. So let me ask you the questions John would ask:

What is one change you could begin today that would bring more wholeness to your life? One change that would deepen a strained relationship? One change that would soften your heart toward someone who is hurting? One change that would open a path toward forgiveness – of another or of yourself? One change that would help you see beauty, or love yourself, or trust God more?

One change.

A new start.

A future.

That is Advent. Something is coming – something holy, something hopeful, something new. So repent – not because you are bad. Repent because you are worth it. Amen.

The First Sunday of Advent

“…you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”

We’ve all had those days we did not see coming.
The day the doctor gave unexpected news… the day a baby arrived a week early… the day a judge finalized the divorce… and the day you stood at a grave and wondered what comes next.

Life is filled with those surprise days—some beautiful, some heartbreaking, some absolutely bewildering.

For example, I once planned a perfectly timed, carefully organized trip… only to arrive at the airport and discover I was at the wrong terminal… in the wrong concourse… with the wrong suitcase. That was an “Advent moment”: a reminder that I really do not know the day or the hour… or apparently the airline.

But those moments are exactly what Jesus is talking about.
Advent is not just a church season—it describes the way life really is: unpredictable, surprising, and filled with things we can’t control.

Every year, the First Sunday of Advent gives us a Gospel that sounds ominous. We imagine the end of the world. But Jesus never says the world is ending. He simply says life comes at us unexpectedly.

Look where it happens in the Gospel:
People are eating, drinking, getting married, going to work. In other words—ordinary life.

That’s the real “apocalypse”: not the end of the world, but the moments when our world shifts—when plans turn upside down, when life surprises us, when we face uncertainty and don’t have the answers.

We certainly know what that feels like today. Read the news: uncertainty everywhere. And inside our own lives? The same.

So the question of Advent isn’t, “When will the world end?” The question is: How do we live faithfully when we don’t know what’s coming next?

The poet John Keats called it negative capability—the ability to live with not knowing. To stay open, to stay patient, to stay grounded, even when we don’t have answers.

That’s what Jesus means by “Stay awake” and “Be prepared.”

Be prepared for what?
I can’t tell you. Jesus says no one knows.
But I can tell you this:

Be prepared for your life—as it unfolds, surprises, shifts, breaks, and heals.
Because every moment matters.
Every surprise contains grace.
Every disappointment holds a lesson.
And God shows up in them all.

So this Advent:
Stay awake. Be prepared.
Not for the end of the world—but for God already arriving in your world.

God is in the wonderful surprises.
God is in the unexpected detours.
God is in the simple, ordinary moments.
And God is even in the moments we wish we could skip.

Don’t miss a moment.
Stay awake. God is here.