Coming Home for Christmas - Christmas Eve 2025

What is it that we’ve just heard?

We’ve been talking about coming home for Christmas at the Table. But what we’ve read in Matthew and Luke doesn’t seem very home-like. In fact, it’s quite jarring how un-home-like it is.

It’s the story of a baby born in a small town that wasn’t really His own, laid down in a place that wasn’t His own. Not a nursery. Not a warm bed. A feeding trough. A manger. Dirty. Unsanitary. Quiet in all the wrong ways. He was born into obscurity, among the unwanted, with nothing around Him but poverty and the kind of loneliness you can almost hear.

And darkness. Lots of darkness.

It’s no accident that God comes to us at night. God descends into the dark to be with us. Because the truth is, for a lot of people, this is not “the most wonderful time of the year.” Some of you can’t even make it through that Andy Williams line without rolling your eyes. You hear it and you’re like, “No. It’s not.” Not everyone hears Christmas music as good news.

Because this world is messy. This world is broken. And some of you carrying your darkness. And you wonder if it will ever end. Grief is a kind of darkness. Anxiety is a kind of darkness. Loneliness, shame, guilt—darkness. It smothers. It overwhelms. It suffocates. And it whispers the same lie every time: this will never end.

And that’s why we have to come to this evening, this manger scene, this story again. Where we are told, “oh yes, it will. There is an end to this.” There is an end to the darkness. And the end has come into a manger.

Isaiah says it this way:

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; a light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness.” (Isaiah 9:2)

Listen closely: the promise of Christmas is not that you finally climbed out of your darkness. The promise is that God climbed down into it.

Into our darkness comes this baby. The darkness is shattered—by light, by music, by a message. Angels show up to shepherds on a hillside outside of town, and on their lips is the Gospel. Luke records it:

Luke 2:11 “Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

This is the Gospel! For you, the light has dawned. It was true that night in Bethlehem for Mary and Joseph and the shepherds, for a whole world that didn’t even know it was waiting to come home. And it’s true for you right here and right now. The light dawns for you. The light shines in the darkness—whatever the darkness is, whatever shape it takes, whatever name it answers to.

This is what “coming home for Christmas” finally means—not first of all that you made it back to the right house or the right people or the right memories. But that God has come home to you. He has come all the way into our world, into our flesh, into our night, so that home is no longer something you have to achieve. It’s something you’re given.

Christmas has come to our town. Christ has come into our night. And in Him, home is not a place you achieve—it’s a gift you receive.

For us. For me. For you.