In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was the cry of a newborn infant, swaddled in cloth and laid in a feeding trough. …

Christmas. It’s a time of tradition. We all know what to expect, from the decorations to the dinner table. We know which family member will fall asleep on the sofa in the afternoon. We know who will be leading the Christmas carols. We all have our traditions.

But when families change, when life is altered by natural disaster or the unnatural disasters of war, as it still is in Bethlehem tonight; even when someone marries into a new family, or there’s a new child, or the person who always hosts dinner moves away, or is lost to us, then our traditions are disrupted. Nothing is as we expected it to be. We have to shift and make way for something new, whether we would like to or not.

For Mary and Joseph, everything was new and unexpected. Of course, they didn’t have Christmas traditions, but even so. It can’t have been what Mary imagined the birth of her first child would be like. Instead of being in her own home, surrounded by her mother, maybe Elizabeth, for sure the familiar local midwives, comforted by those who knew this road, who had been this way before; instead she was on the long and difficult road to Bethlehem, scrabbling for room somewhere, anywhere, to give birth to a child announced by angels, sharing this most intimate moment of her life so far with Joseph, her husband, but a man with whom she’d never yet got naked, and a stable full of animals for company.

Into this confusion, into this new and unexpected turn of events, into this strange new world and way of being, Jesus is born. Jesus is born and all heaven is let loose with singing and angels and bright stars, and a baby lying in a manger full of animal food.

There is a profound gift in the chaos of Christmas, the reminder that nothing in this world is fixed, nothing final, nothing as enduring as love. Our traditions come and go with the supply chain and the growing children and the eldering generations and the grief that weaves its way through any life. New music is written, old ornaments break, they don’t make the same sweets they used to. The priest moves on. Things change.

And every Christmas, we are drawn back to the stable, back to the makeshift maternity bed of straw, back to the strangeness of a baby born to a virgin mother, the love of God made manifest, incarnate, taking flesh, taking form, giving voice with his cry to the song of God for the world, the song of creation, peace over the earth. Everything is strange and new there, too; and as old and enduring as eternity.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was the cry of a newborn infant, swaddled in cloth and laid in a feeding trough. The Word caught on the tears of his astonished and exhausted mother, drawing from her milk and love. The Word filled the mind of Joseph such that he could think of nothing, nothing but the child, and his love for him. The Word startled the sheep, and the shepherds followed them in wonder toward the light coming from the cave in which he was stabled. The Word ululated with the angels, as it had since before time began, and will after all time is ended. As the world continues to turn and spin and pivot and dance, and we with it, whirling with the fates and the weather, the Word remains, year after year the same: Emmanuel. God is with us.

May the good news of angels disturb you.

May the bright star of Bethlehem disrupt your dreams.

May the strangeness of this season of our Saviour’s birth comfort you with the familiar knowledge that God is with us: Emmanuel.

Amen.