Tag: Nativity

The Bedtime Story (Updated)

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Sermon for Tuesday, December 24, 2024 || Christmas Eve || Luke 2:1-20

Imagine with me a quiet moment when Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalene have gone for a walk together by the Sea of Galilee. The Ascension has come and gone, and they are missing Jesus. So Mary Magdalene asks his mother to tell her a story from Jesus’ childhood. Mary ponders for a moment and then begins:

As a boy, Jesus had trouble falling asleep. He wasn’t afraid of the dark or of monsters under his bed. He just had so much energy. Even a day full of running up hills and building rock forts couldn’t tire him out. When he couldn’t sleep, I would sing him a lullaby and run my fingers through his hair. Sometimes, after a few notes, he’d say, “Not tonight, Mama. Tell me the story instead.” The story. I was always glad when he asked me to tell him how he was born because, when the story remained silent in my heart, it always threatened to transform into a dream and vanish.

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The Christmas Pageant (Taylor’s Version)

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I wrote the dialogue and lyrics for this new Christmas Pageant, which kids from my church performed yesterday on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was a blast! (And, obviously, despite the assertion in the first paragraph, the real Taylor didn’t help us – but her music did.) Here’s the video of the pageant, followed by the script.

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The Dawn from on High

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, December 8, 2024 || Advent 2C || The Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68-79)

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie The Two Towers, which is the middle film of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I know I talk a lot about Star Wars in sermons, but my love for The Lord of the Rings is even greater than my love for Star Wars. So stick with me while I describe the scene. The people of Edoras have left their homes to take shelter in the great bastion known as Helm’s Deep. A few days before the flight to the supposedly impregnable fortress, the wizard Gandalf raced out of Edoras on his majestic steed Shadowfax in order to round up the cavalry spread across the country of Rohan. “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day,” Gandalf told Aragorn. “At dawn, look to the east.”

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Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2017: The Uniqueness of the Incarnation

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During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In 2017, I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve.

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2023 Christmas Pageant: Part of God’s Story

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This pageant takes the form of a bedtime picture book being read to a roomful of children. The story is the traditional Nativity story, but with one problem: the characters keep forgetting to appear! So the storyteller recruits the children to be part of the story God is telling. In the end, the whole assembly is invited to be part of God’s story.

In the beginning, God had a story to tell: the greatest story ever told, the story of Creation. And God began that story with four simple words: “Let there be light.” Everything God created was a character in the story: birds and bugs, land and lizards, fish and flowers, mammals and the moon. For untold generations, God’s story of Creation grew in the telling until a new group of characters entered the tale, characters who somehow knew the story was being told.

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O Magnum Mysterium

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Saturday, December 24, 2022 || Christmas Eve || John 1:1-14

Tonight, I’d like to share with you a great mystery. It is the mystery of God’s movement in creation in the singular way that we call the Incarnation; that is, the presence of God coming among us in the flesh and blood person of Jesus of Nazareth. Notice, I said I’d like to share this mystery with you. I’m using the verb “share” on purpose, because it is way above my paygrade to try to “explain” this mystery. 

This isn’t the type of mystery one can explain. This isn’t like the kinds of mysteries my mother loves to read – Whodunnits. In those books, a mystery is set forth: say, how does the killer manage to murder someone in a room locked from the inside? The plot revolves around the detective attempting to solve the puzzle. In the end, the detective figures out that the bell rope used to call for the maid is replaced with a poisonous snake, which somehow slithered unnoticed out of the room in the ensuing hubbub of discovering the body. Mystery solved. No more mystery. 

The mystery of God’s presence in creation is not this kind of mystery. The mystery of God cannot be solved. It cannot be grasped. But the mystery of God can be embraced. My prayer for all of us this Christmas is that we embrace this mystery of God’s movement, even as God embraces us with God’s love.

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The Stone Manger

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Sermon for Friday, December 24, 2021 || Christmas Eve || Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

Two and half years ago, I stood in a long line of pilgrims in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As I inched forward I took in the beautiful mosaics being painstakingly recovered on the walls and floors. I tried to count the oil lamps and candles hanging above the altar. Ahead of me was a short set of stairs that bent away to the left under the sanctuary. This was my destination, along with the pilgrims from my group, not to mention the hundreds of others from other groups who had descended upon the Church of the Nativity that morning. Finally, I reached the top of the stairs. I had to duck to enter the low-ceilinged chamber. The pilgrims ahead of me shuffled along, each stopping for a brief moment to touch something on the floor. I, too, approached. There…there was the spot – marked by a gold many-pointed star. There was the spot (the Church remembers) where Jesus was born. I touched it like everyone else. And I felt…nothing.

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A Bard’s Christmas Song

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Here is the yearly iteration of my Christmas Day sermon/song. It is a musical rendition of parts of John 1 and Luke 1-2. I absolutely love singing it, and it is the highlight of my Christmas worship every year. This is the first time I have recorded the song since 2012.

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Rightside Up Again

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Tuesday, December 25, 2019 || Christmas Eve || Luke 2:1-20

One of the unique things about the Gospel according to Luke is how concerned the text is with setting, with time and place. Several times, Luke tells us when and where the events are happening. You’ve all heard an example of this tendency a million times: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Why do we care that this registration happening while Quirinius was governor of Syria? The ancient world did not have reliably standardized calendars, so to date an event, one reliable way was to delve into Roman records. Rome was an empire, and if there’s one thing the Roman Empire did better than oppressing nations it conquered, it was record-keeping. So Luke uses the information available to date the birth of Jesus, and so this Quirinius guy had his named immortalized in the best-selling book of all time.

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