sermon: The Nativity of our Lord, Luke 2:1-20

December 24, 2025

Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church

Pastora Veronica Alvarez

Christmas Eve carries a lot of expectations.

We come with familiar songs, familiar words, and familiar images.

Soft light. Holy night.

A sense that for one evening, the world should slow down and feel peaceful.

But the gospel we hear tonight does not begin with calm or perfection.

It begins with interruption. With movement. With a world that is busy, crowded, and unsettled.

Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth in a way that is almost stubbornly ordinary.

There are no halos, no dramatic speeches from Mary or Joseph, no detailed description of the moment itself. Instead, Luke anchors the birth of the Christ Child in real history.

A census. An emperor. A long journey. A crowded town. Luke wants us to understand that the incarnation does not float above human life.

God does not save us from a distance. God enters our world as it is, shaped by political power, economic pressure, and human vulnerability. God steps into a world where people are counted, moved around, displaced, and exhausted.

The child born in Bethlehem is not just a baby who will later become important.

This child is Christ the Lord from the very beginning. The eternal Word of God takes on flesh, not as a symbol or an idea, but as a real human being who needs to be fed, protected, and held.

That is the first shock of Christmas. God chooses weakness.

The Savior of the world is born to parents with no status.

There is no room for him in the guest space.

His first bed is a manger; a place meant for animals.

God’s glory is revealed not through domination, control, or spectacle, but through humility and self-giving love. This is not how we expect power to work. It is not how we would design salvation. And that is exactly the point.

Then there are the shepherds. In the first century, shepherds were not sentimental figures.

They were rough, unreliable, and socially invisible.

They were not trusted.

They were not admired.

Yet they are the first to hear the good news.

Not priests. Not rulers. Not the powerful.

God sends angels to people who are awake at night, doing ordinary work, living on the margins. The shepherds are the kind of people we tend to overlook, dismiss, or quietly avoid. The ones we assume God would not choose.

And yet God does.

Again and again, God does.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel says.

That phrase shows up whenever God is about to do something that disrupts the way the world works.

Fear makes sense when holiness breaks into human life. But the message is not judgment. It is joy. “To you is born this day a Savior.”

Not to humanity in the abstract. Not to the deserving.

To you. This child is given for real people with real fear, real hunger, real need. The sign is not power, but a baby wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger.

God makes himself findable. God makes himself vulnerable to rejection, to neglect, to love.

When the shepherds hear this, they do not analyze or debate.

They go.

They see.

They tell.

And then they return to their fields changed.

Nothing about their external situation improves. They are still poor. Still shepherds.

Still living under Roman rule. But they have encountered Christ, and that changes how they live in the same world. Joy does not erase reality. It reshapes how we live within it.

Mary, meanwhile, treasures these things and ponders them in her heart.

Faith does not always rush to speak.

Sometimes faith waits.

Sometimes faith holds what it cannot yet explain.

That matters for those who come tonight tired, grieving, uncertain, or worn thin.

Not everyone has words. God meets us there too.

Luke shows us that both responses belong in the life of the church.

Proclamation and quiet trust.

Speaking and waiting.

Going and pondering.

At the center of this story is not sentimentality, but incarnation.

God with us.

God for us.

God as one of us.

This child will grow up to eat with sinners, touch the unclean, challenge the powerful, forgive the guilty, and give himself over to death.

The manger already points to the cross. From the beginning, Jesus is given away for the life of the world.

That is why this story still matters. We do not gather tonight because we like tradition or nostalgia.

We gather because God has acted decisively in Jesus Christ. Salvation does not begin with our faith or our goodness. It begins with God’s decision to come near.

At the Lord’s table, that same Christ still comes to us. Bread and wine. Ordinary elements. Real presence. The same pattern as Bethlehem. God hides glory in what looks simple and small and gives himself for us again and again.

So tonight, we do not have to make Christmas happen. We do not have to force joy or manufacture hope.

Christ is born.

God has come.

That is enough.

Like the shepherds, we receive the news.

Like Mary, we treasure it.

And then we go back into the world carrying what God has given us.

Not fear, but joy. Not silence, but praise.

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors.

Amen.