Christmas Eve, 2025: The Two Stories
“When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.” (Matthew 2:10–12)
No serious historian or theologian doubts that Jesus existed. There’s too much corroboration from those who had nothing to gain by admitting his existence. He lived among actual people who could have objected to his divinity, as they had to countless pretend messiahs seeking a following. Christianity isn’t a religion that makes its claims mythologically but instead rests upon actual human witnesses. Jesus had brothers who could say he wasn’t really the son of God. The thing that should surprise us is that James and John not only claimed that Jesus was God but that they were not Gods despite being born from the same mother. Deny the incarnation and you have to ignore the unlikelihood that one man born into relative poverty could shake the foundations of the earth to the point that even today we date our checks or date our term papers by his birth into this world. But this is about more than cultural influence: the Caesars ruled over a world-wide empire but its ability to change lives crumbled just a handful of generations later. When we go to Rome it’s not to celebrate Caesar’s rule but to see its ruins. No one hails Caesar anymore; no one’s becoming Caesarian. But people are still becoming Christians even though two centuries ago Voltaire said that a hundred years after his death the Bible will have disappeared from the world. Thought leaders in the enlightenment expected that within a generation a great society of modern, scientific, rational humanists would snuff it out. Instead astrophysicists are believing in the Incarnation, agnostic historians are becoming Christians by being historians. Ditch-diggers and recording clerks and philosophers are breaking bread around the same communion tables. To deny Jesus we have to deny not only his existence but we have to deny everything that was changed as a result of his coming into the world, the same way that an auto mechanic, with axle grease in his knuckles, would have to deny that automobiles have come into the world. People are still becoming Christians and still showing up to look into the truth of his coming into the world. Why?
I think one reason is because of what the wise men tell us: The story of Christmas is told by skeptics. We don’t know whether there were three wise men, the tradition of three came from the fact that there were three gifts they brought. They aren’t there when Jesus is born. The Magi were likely from the region of ancient Babylon. They were some mix of astronomer and astrologer. Well schooled in ancient astrological arithmetic. They have seen his star in the sky and have gone looking for him. They travel to the local roman governor Herod who sees a potential threat to his Kingship. Herod was a builder of monuments when he wasn’t murdering his wife and some of his children. He loved putting his name on things. He even re-built the Temple in Jerusalem, creating a shimmering prize in Jerusalem that reminded everyone of Herod’s clout. Or aura, as the kids say today. He’s not the same Herod, called Antipas, that sees Jesus at his trial. This Herod is that Herod’s father.
We don’t know much about what is meant by “seeing his star in the sky” but it had to do with maintaining meticulous records of the stars’ seasonal orbits, comparing them with historical records, painstakingly trying to correlate the historic paths of stars to major events, looking for patterns. The Greeks believed the planetary movements harmonized with one another, even producing a kind of cosmic music. You can imagine these Magi who were steeped in the everyday work of focusing on the stars, who were maybe jaded by ordinary life. Why did the Magi take off for a distant country? Because their everyday life suddenly shifted. The star moved in a way that stars do not move. These weren’t country bumpkins. They were scientists and philosophers. They had to follow—the same way you might follow if you were a marine biologist listening to whale calls and they began calling your name, first and last.
Why the Magi? Could anyone be more rightly a skeptic than ones who were born into a region that not only wasn’t interested in Judaic religions, they were historic conquerers of the land. Their gods had triumphed over the Hebrew monotheism. Bethlehem was so distant that if they traveled by ordinary means with breaks only for sleeping and eating it would take them at least 40 days to make the journey. If a star was going to settle anywhere it would be in Babylon. The wise men are the skeptics we need in the story of Jesus’ coming into the world. And the gifts they bring are wonderful skeptics’ gifts: Gold, frankincense and myrrh. Let me explain:
Myrrh is a fragrant oil perhaps with some medicinal purposes. It had wide use in the Ancient Near East including the preparation of bodies for burial. You might think it’s strange to bring a burial fragrance to a baby’s family but the ancient world was less hesitant than us to think about the dead and dying and to see that, in that world, births and deaths often happen close together.
Frankincense is, what it sounds like, an aromatic. There is some mention in the Scriptures aligning it with use in Israel’s Temple worship. It is the fragrance of the sacred they brought to Jesus. So much of our lives are spent looking for the sacred, or trying to make common things sacred. We write in religious language about love and money, about a cardamom-crusted filet, about a nice Boujalais. We long to know that the sacred can exist in a world of broken, common and spoiled things.
And of course the gold. Gold is the currency of human life. We must buy and sell, we must provide for ourselves and our families. We call all kinds of things precious, but gold is the undisputed king in our worlds. It is the cause and resolution of nearly every war that has ever been fought. It is the difference between cleaning gutters for a living and having your gutters cleaned. It is the fuel for other people’s envy. And when placed at the foot of the king it is the final triumph over the human heart. ”
But the point of the visit and the reason why its in the Bible isn’t the gifts, though they’re interesting. It is the fact that these wise and serious people, these outsiders and skeptics saw Jesus and were compelled to go and worship him and bring him the best of what they had. What was it that they saw when they came to see Jesus?
John Gardner was a poet and novelist who grew up in Batavia, up state, in the ‘30s. Taught many places including SUNY Binghamton. I tell you about John Gardner because there’s only one thing he’s written that I can recite off the top of my head and it is this thing that comes to mind on Christmas Eve almost every year from me, and here’s what he said: he said that there are really only two kinds of stories—a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes into town. It occurs to me that the story of Christ’s birth is both. Jesus is both the stranger who comes into town and the one who has gone on a long journey. In fact, Jesus goes on a long journey in order to be the stranger that comes into town. The one that we don’t know completely, who keeps his reasons for things largely private, who saves whomever he chooses to save and speaks in mysterious parables. He is the stranger who has come a long way for us.
It’s unclear if these pagan outsiders actually became believers in Jesus. But I believe God gave them every reason to put away their skepticism. We see the heart of God for skeptics here, and that’s almost more important. What they saw was the union between the transcendent, the powerful, the light in the sky that defied their physics and settled over this one house. And the way the transcendent was connected to the imminent, the weak, the flesh like their flesh. They saw God’s power wrapped in vulnerable physical presence. The stars they always had to view at a distance, whose purposes were always so unclear was now flesh and blood, knowable. No more calculations, no more painstaking research. If they really believed it was because they came a long way only to find that God had come farther. They brought gifts, but learned when they got there that they were not the givers. They were the outsiders and God led these outsiders to his son.
The wise men were Christmas and Easter types. They went to Jesus to see a show. But if they went from skepticism to worship it’s because they were hit by the blunt force of the Incarnation. Not just a story, not just a theological proposition, but astronomy in the flesh. Annie Dillard once wrote that “It’s as if I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck,” This is what the Incarnation is, a moment which strikes us and by its force reveals something in us. It picks us up and shakes us and what is loose and dull within us strikes against something solid. If they believed in him it’s because they longed to understand the stars and their hearts struck against the maker of the stars, in the flesh, and they rang.
It’s one thing if someone tells you that the stranger who came to town is a King about to be crowned, and you’re invited. You wear your best, you feel important, respected. Now imagine if the Magi knew what we know, what has turned dull hearts into bells for the last two thousand years: that the stranger who came into town did so in order to die. The God who traveled farther and gave more generously also gives himself for you. That’s the full story of Jesus’ birth. Jesus was born in flesh like ours so he can bleed. Instead of important you feel cracked open, seen, exposed, but also loved.
“[Jesus] emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:7–8)
The Ramones wrote a Christmas song once where they said “Christmas aint the time for breaking each others’ hearts.” But I think Christmas is made for the hard truths, even the heartbreaking ones because sometimes we need our hearts to be broken so we can know what makes them ache. When the Magi saw Jesus they had to fall on their faces. They had to be broken of the idea that they could chart this star like the others, that they could master this knowledge like scientists. They had to know that no matter how precious the gifts they had to bring, they could never be the giver. And tonight I don’t want you to miss it, the savior, a star wrapped in flesh for you. You cannot give him your gifts and go, or you’ll miss it. You have to give him your heart. Jesus comes to us in the flesh because only flesh can bleed. If you thought it was possible to behold Jesus without beholding him as the one you desperately need to die for you then let Christmas be a time to break your heart.
Here are three gifts from the Incarnation that I hope you’ll carry with you as you leave: First, if you see Jesus’ birth then you have also seen the guarantee of his death. The Jesus who was born in a manger was born to be the bread of life for the world the eat. The first gift is life. Don’t stop with the birth. Second, if you behold Jesus’ birth then you also behold what is sacred. Whether you’re a skeptic or you’ve been a Christian as long as you can remember, Jesus is the center of what we’re after in human living. Has he rung your bell? And third, if you behold Jesus as he is then you will see that he is worth anything you have to give him. If you want to see if He is worth it, if he is worth the treasure in your chest, then come back for a while and join us on Sundays to hear more. The birth is a lot to take in, but if you want to understand why so many people from so many walks of life, in the face of opposition from empires and armies, has somehow continued to sing these songs and lean over the manger, come and see every week. It’s 75 minutes of time; what if it changed your life? I can’t promise you that you’ll fall on your face and worship, but I can promise you that we will bring nothing less every week than the same Christ the Magi saw.
The novelist Leif Enger said this about the miraculous: “Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in..People fear miracles because they fear being changed -- though ignoring them will change you also…” The Magi went because if they didn’t go, and missed this moment, they might be missing the reason for the all the stars and their paths in the sky and the music they made. To miss out on that would change a person. To miss out on what’s happening here tonight might change you, too.