The Rev Lucy Winkett - 24/12/2025

Good morning, according to a poll commissioned by the charity Tearfund, almost half the adults in the UK have said that they will go to church for Christmas.
Many of these might turn up tonight for midnight mass. Perhaps as in the city centre church I currently serve, they might even come straight from the pub…..
From small villages to great cathedrals, people will come together and experience the darkness, the candlelight, the singing, the curious story of angels and night workers, mysterious visitors with symbolic gifts, and a young woman giving birth for the first time in an outhouse, laying her son in an animal feeding trough.
It's an enigmatic story of the birth of God into the world: a gospel soaked with layers of meaning, centuries of reflection. And that’s where the most beautiful paradox of Christmas is revealed: of time and eternity. Christmas celebrates a transgressive and creative moment Christians call incarnation: when the divine presence - God we can never see - breaks into the small worlds we’ve constructed, and reveals to us the unlimited possibilities of living; the transformational effect of forgiveness, the foundation of human life as love.
And the stable scene we envision tonight is an imaginative and powerful way of reminding us that across all our differences, (and there are many), one thing we have all been is born. Somehow. Somewhere. To someone. You and I have been born. If we were fortunate, into a family of adults that looked after us when we couldn’t survive by ourselves.
This festival expresses the holiness of birth, and fuses the practical fleshy human experience with the wonder and awe of heaven. You and I have been born. And the perilous journey we took then gives us the energy we need to live our lives now.
One of the gifts brought to Jesus when he was born was myrrh; a fragrant and aromatic resin. Used today as then as an antiseptic, to treat wounds and also for anointing the dead. A strange gift for a child, but one that prevents Christmas being some sort of fantasy escapist festival. This celebration of the birth of Jesus goes to the heart of the glory and suffering of what it is to be human. And offers humanity the chance to live, immersed in the knowledge that our life, from the moment we’re born, is shot through with both anguish and miracles.