Tag Archives: Christmas eve

Ya’all Come

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ or Harrisburg, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Christmas Eve • December 24, 2025

Luke 2:1-20

Since the beginning of December, we’ve been on an Advent journey, visiting the places the built the hope of God’s coming. The candles of the Advent Wreath mark the steps we’ve taken and the spirit of the time is captured by the ancient Advent carol, “O come, O come Emmanuel”. Emmanuel: God with us. Since ancient times, since the prophet Isaiah, our people have hoped and prayed for Emmanuel to come, for God to come. Christmas is that moment and it is the moment in which we stop wondering when God will come and ask whether we will come. For Christmas Eve is all about coming to Christ.

Mary and Joseph are coming. Imagine the journey they’ve made. There is the physical journey: eight and a half months pregnant and riding on a jouncing donkey, day after day. Many of us have made Christmas journeys, we know what that’s like, how the traffic is more frustrating, breakdowns more heart breaking. 

Their journey is also emotional and spiritual. From the moment the angel first comes to Mary, telling her, as angels do, not to fear, through the announcement of the child to come, Mary has been on a journey of her own. Her body has changed from the lithe girl she was to a woman round and carrying God’s purpose. Perhaps her spirit has changed as well. She sings a song of brave resistance to the culture of plunder so much a part of her time that concludes, Joseph also has had to make a journey, from his traditional expectations to embracing the new way in which God has chosen to come to the world. Mary and Joseph have come a long way to this Christmas moment.

Others are traveling as well. Somewhere out East, a group of high-powered astronomers, the ones we call Wise Men or sages are already traveling, perhaps with a caravan. They’re not sure of the destination. They have no address to plug into the GPS, no point from which they can measure the distance when someone says, “How much longer?” They’ll go to Jerusalem and ask the way to the birth of the baby. And there, the politicians will have to confess: they have no idea what’s going on. Still, even if they don’t know where they are going, the wise ones are coming.

The shepherds are coming. Just like Mary, an angel has told them not to fear and promised them a good time in Bethlehem—“tidings of great joy”. What would be tidings of great joy to you? We run past this part but think: there must have been something powerfully enticing to get the shepherds moving. What would it take to move you? Would it need the word “free” in front of it? Would simply real joy be enough? The shepherds are walking at night, in the darkness we never experience in the city, the darkness you only get out in the Appalachian Mountains or the Adirondacks or on Lake Michigan or somewhere lamps are never lit. I’m sure they’re scared, aren’t we all when we walk in darkness? But they’re coming.

All these are coming to a special light. We all know there is a legend of a star that shone brilliantly over the stable. But we don’t have to believe every legendary detail to know this is true, true in the way wall deep things are true, true because it has happened to us. Aren’t we here, hoping to see the light of Christmas? That’s why we gather tonight, to sing the songs of Christmas but even more to light the lights, the candles that symbolize that light.

Christmas is God’s invitation, and it’s marked with a phrase Jacquelyn taught me, something from her Texas childhood: the phrase, “Ya’all come”. Christmas isn’t meant to be just a moment when Mary and Joseph come, when just the shepherds come, when just the wise ones come. It is “ya’ll come.” We are meant to one to the children of God, the ones our country cages, the ones who will wake up to a present tomorrow you gave through the Christmas missions here. We are meant to come to the children of God, and who are these children? The ones hiding in darkness from bombs; the ones who appear to be adults but feel lost, everyone who wanders in darkness, as scripture says. 

Ya’all come: come to Christmas, come to the light of Christmas, For when we together come to Christmas, when we light the candles of Christmas we are really saying what God says at Christmas: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Here is your invitation: ya’ll come, come and light the candles of Christmas.

Amen

Christmas Eve Meditation 2017

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Christmas Eve Meditation

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Christmas Eve/B • December 24, 2017

Most of the last 45 years, I have stood before a church, as I do tonight, as a pastor, often in a preaching robe, to lead in prayer and listening to God’s Word. It’s so common that some new members in our church who came to see me one weekday when I was wearing regular clothes remarked on it: “We’re not used to seeing you like this.” I assured them that I was the same person. But my first appearance before a church took place long before the robe and stole, when I was selected to play the little angel in a Christmas Pageant called, The Littlest Angel. Perhaps you know this story and if you do, you know that this angel has two characteristics: he’s little and he’s not very well behaved. I qualified on both points.

When we read the Christmas story, it’s striking to see how much of it concerns little things. It takes place in Bethlehem, a place the prophet Micah described as “..one of the little clans of Judah”. It’s main characters are small as well. Joseph is a tool maker forced to make a journey at the worst time of all. Can you imagine how worried and harried he is, helping his pregnant wife to travel, trying to find space for them to stay? Then there is Mary herself, a teenager who enters the story as an unwed mother, a woman in a culture that is overwhelmingly patriarchal, young in a culture that favors age, about to give birth in a time and place where birthing is a very dangerous business.

Mary defines small in the story. So does her reaction to all this. Faced with an angelic visitor, she summons the courage to say,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
And she goes on to remember all the other small ones.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Listen: because this ought to scare us just a bit. It ought to make us ask, “Are we the proud ones? Are we the enthroned powerful?” Because Mary is speaking for God here and the message is—I love the little.

This is Christmas Eve: and it’s all about the smallest present of all, a baby, the birth of Jesus. Have you seen a newborn? Can you remember how small she was, how tiny and perfect his fingers were, how small and helpless the little person was? Think of Jesus that way: think of him as small and vulnerable. And then remember: so are we before God.

This is Christmas Eve: and it’s all about little things. I don’t remember anything about playing the Littlest Angel—my mother never tired of reminding me that I had embarrassed her by yawning widely in front of the whole church during the singing—but I know the story and I know how it ends: it ends when the littlest angel brings little things to the baby.

…a butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the hills above Jerusalem, and a sky-blue egg from a bird’s nets in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother’s kitchen door. Yet, and two white stones found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small, brown beavers, and at the bottom the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute love and infinite devotion.

And out of those, out of those little things, he summons this: the laughter of God. And in the story at least, it is the box of the littlest angel’s gifts that becomes the star over the stable where the Song of God is born, where the love of God begins again, as it does every day.

This is Christmas Eve: with the little things of Christmas, let us also summon the laughter of God who indeed, does great things, and gives the greatest of things: the gift of love.

Amen