Download Sermon TextChristmas Day 2025: What do we do with all of this?
Rex McKee
Christmas Day 2025
What do we do with all of this?
Rex McKee
I can imagine the shepherds asking themselves around the campfire, “What Do We Do With All of This?”
On Christmas morning, the Church dares to say something astonishing:
that the world has changed
because a child was born.
Not a metaphorical child.
Not an idea.
Not a feeling.
A real child—
born into an occupied land,
under imperial decree,
to parents with no leverage,
no protection,
and very little certainty.
Isaiah names it with unsettling clarity.
He does not begin with angels or sweetness.
He begins with burdens:
“The yoke of their burden,
the bar across their shoulders,
the rod of their oppressor…”
This is not abstract suffering.
This is lived reality.
This is what it feels like when systems press down on human bodies and call it order.
When people wake up already tired.
When hope feels irresponsible.
And then Isaiah says something startling, almost offensive in its simplicity:
“For a child has been born for us.”
Which raises the inevitable question we avoid each Christmas:
What do we do with all of this?
Luke refuses to let us sentimentalize the scene.
He names names.
“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus…”
This is how the world normally works:
decrees, registrations, compliance, fear.
Power flows from the top down,
and ordinary people adjust their lives accordingly.
Joseph and Mary are not on a spiritual retreat.
They are complying with an empire that does not care
whether she is nine months pregnant.
Christmas does not happen outside the real world.
It happens right in the middle of it.
And into that world,
God does not send an army.
God sends a child.
To redefine the conflicts of power
Isaiah assures us: “Authority rests upon his shoulders.”
Which is striking—
because shoulders are where burdens have been placed for generations.
The child carries what the people were never meant to carry.
Isaiah dares to imagine a world
Where we break forth into singing
Knowing that this Baby Jesus would comfort us
And that the ends of the earth will see the good news
Yet, Christmas is not merely about comfort.
It is about disarmament.
We follow the way of love for peace to grow.
And here is where memory presses in.
In Las Posadas, we followed Mary and Joseph
as they knocked on door after door,
carrying the fear every migrant family knows—
the fear of being unseen, unwanted, unwelcome.
Posada—“shelter,” “dwelling”—
refused to let us sentimentalize that fear.
Night after night, the procession asked us a question
that continues to echo on Christmas morning.
It holds a mirror up to our hearts:
Did we make room for Jesus
when he came to us as the stranger at the border?
Did we make room
when he arrived as a parent seeking safety?
Did we make room
when he came as a child whose only mistake
was being born on the other side of a line we drew?
If Mary and Joseph were traveling today—
poor, brown-skinned, undocumented—
the holy family might not reach the stable.
The child might be separated.
Registered.
Held behind chain-link fences.
Counted not by angels, but by enforcement.
Perhaps, if we are honest,
the manger might be empty.
Not because God did not come—
but because the child was detained.
This is hard to hear.
It is meant to be.
Not to shame us—
but to awaken us.
In this baby, Jesus,
God chooses to be known
not through force or certainty,
but through vulnerability.
God comes to us as a child—
small, dependent, fragile—
revealing that divine power looks like love
that risks closeness.
And this Christ child comes to us at the margins:
with the poor,
the rejected,
the immigrant,
the forgotten—
meeting us precisely where the world says
God should not be.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,
“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in.”
While our nation pours its treasure
into walls, weapons, ballrooms, and prisons for migrant children,
Jesus whispers across the centuries,
“Put away your sword.”
While families are torn apart
and children ripped from the arms of their parents,
Jesus stands among us saying,
“What God has joined together, let no one separate.”
While voices shout,
“Send them back. Let them fend for themselves,”
Jesus reminds us, “I was hungry… I was thirsty…”
Where hatred toward LGBTQ+ Trans is normalized
and cruelty excused as policy,
Jesus commands, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Where our non-white and immigrant siblings live in fear—
fear of detention and deportation—Jesus declares,
“I have come to proclaim release to the captives.”
freedom for the oppressed.”
Where our society is blinded by fear
Forced to forget and to revise our truthful history
Jesus promises, “Recovery of sight to the blind…
This is not social or political commentary.
This is the Incarnation refusing to stay in the manger.
Christmas is more than Jesus’ birth announcement
It is the renewal of who we have promised to be.
Grace does this slow, faithful work in us—
shaping our loves, reforming our courage,
transforming our lives into lived responses of
“Yes, I will, with God’s help.”
Which brings us back—once more—
to Mary and Joseph.
Joseph did not walk away…
And Mary said yes to the Holy Spirit,
So—what do we do with all of this?
Let us not reduce Christmas to nostalgia.
Let us not admire the child from a safe distance.
Let us look for the child where God has always been:
among the detained, the displaced,
the frightened, the homeless, the poor.
Christmas memories return the way grace often does—
not when we summon them,
but when we are open enough to receive them.
And when Christmas Memories knock,
like Mary and Joseph,
they are not asking us to relive the past.
They are asking us to live differently
The question is not whether we remember.
The question is will we open our hearts
Open wide the doors
and welcome him in?
A child has been born.
Peace once again has been set in motion.
May God’s dream awaken within each of us!
Amen.
