2025-12-25 Christmas Day

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

“That’s impossible!” How often have you heard those words or even said those words in your life? Oh, probably more than a few times I’m sure. It’s often our response when something seems too tough to understand. Like little kids watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. “Wow! How’d he do that?!” There’s a moment of intense fascination and wonder. But then reason and rationality come in and insist “Nope! That’s impossible!” It’s interesting how many times those words have been tossed around over the generations. Take flying for example. It was deemed impossible that humans could ever fly. We’re too heavy and can’t flap our arms fast enough! But then, along came the Wright Brothers in 1903. 12 seconds in the air. 120 feet. Impossible no more. Think about Television. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox in 1946 said that TV will never hold any kind of broad appeal after the first six months. It’s impossible that people would willingly stare at a plywood box every night! Think about the original telephone. Western Union, way back in 1878, said it was impossible to be considered seriously as a practical form of communication due to its many short comings. Seeing into the human body without opening it up, transplanting a heart, self-driving cars, reusable orbital rockets, the list goes on and on. What was once thought to be impossible is now common place, almost every day things.

People take the same approach to God, too. When they consider creation, they think, ahhh, it’s impossible that God created everything. Or that God could become the creation, or even more scandalous, a human being! For many they see the body as a hostile prison for the spirit that enchained and corrupted the soul. That was a very popular idea with the Ancient Greeks. Death was something to be yearned for to finally free the spirit from the shackles of the mortal body. For them, there was no way that God would ever or could ever become incarnate. It was, yes, you guessed it, impossible!

But here we are, on Christmas morning. Gathered together as God’s people in this place to celebrate exactly this. God becoming man for us and our salvation. The incarnation of Christ. The Word made flesh. Myriads of Christian scholars and theologians and Church Fathers have likewise struggled with this idea of God becoming a human person in Jesus Christ. The outcome of their thinking and pondering was the some of the first heresies surrounding the incarnation of our Lord. Some of these guys proposed that God’s Divine Word or Logos simply hopped into a human body, but didn’t get an actual human soul (Apollinarianism). Others postulated that Christ was a created being, first before anything else (This is Arianism – to which the modern day Jehovah’s Witnesses are the great-grandchildren). Still, other people said that Christ was more human than He was Divine (Nestorianism) and again, another group said the opposite, that the Christ was more Divine than human, almost like His humanity was dissolved in Divinity like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee (Eutychianism). All of these heresies were attempts to explain away the impossible – that God became Man and dwelt among us.

Whenever we try to resolve the tension of the mystery, we end up in error! But this mystery is what Christmas is really all about. That God actually, truly, really, became a human being: incarnate, dwelling in the flesh, eternally fused with creation! It’s much like that “magic rabbit in the hat” type moment. We see it, we are astounded by it, then we doubt it and want to dissect it, figuring it all out. We yearn to understand this mind blowing mystery! In our sin, we want to make this infinite Divine mystery a slave to our finite human reason. Yet, if history can teach us anything, it is that God is the God of the impossible! Just ponder it for a moment! All of creation was created out of nothing, spoken into existence by the Almighty God. A great nation of people descended from one old man and his equally old barren wife! Water came forth from a solid rock in the desert. Enormous bodies of water split and people passed through them on dry ground. A prophet spent 3 days inside a giant fish. And lo and behold! A virgin conceived and had a Son named Emmanuel – God is with us. This my friends, this is the real reason for the season and why we are all gathered here today on this day of days!

It seems to me that God does the impossible precisely because it is impossible! It defies our reason and intellect, even our common sense! He does this to draw us into faith. To draw us up to something greater. That special belief and trust in His grace and mercy. It opens our eyes to see that God loves sinful humanity with an undying love. He stops at nothing to bring His light, life an salvation to us – where there is only darkness, death and damnation.

The Author of the entire universe became a single cell in the womb of a teenage girl. He learned to walk on the same kind of dirt we walk on. He shivered in the Judean winter, stubbed his toe in Nazareth, felt hunger, thirst, betrayal, and nails. St. John sums it up for us in one breathtaking line: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (JN 1:14). God Almighty became man. It was, by every law of logic and power, impossible. An infinite God cannot fit inside a finite body. Eternity cannot be squeezed into time. The One who holds galaxies cannot be held by a young mother’s arms. And yet … He did.

Truly this is an amazing mystery beyond our full comprehension. And still, another Scripture reassures us: “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (LK 18:27). And so we hold and treasure and ponder this incredibly mystery that is more than possible with God. “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4). God became a baby who cried in a manger so that one day He could cry, “It is finished” on a cross. And, He continues to do the impossible in our midst, as the same flesh and blood that were sacrificed some 2000 years ago are given and shed for us in common bread and wine to eat and to drink forgiveness, life and salvation. Thanks be to God that He makes the impossible very possible indeed. Amen! Merry Christmas!