Bishop Anderson’s sermon preached at St Jude on the Hill at the Midnight Mass. 2025.
Why did you show up tonight? Be honest. For some of you, it’s habit—if you didn’t show up, your mother or father would call you tomorrow and you’d never hear the end of it. Some are here for the music, hoping the choir hits the high notes better than your singing. Some are just curious, or perhaps you just needed a break from the “festive” stress of trying to buy and assemble gifts with unintelligible instructions.
But whatever your reason for walking through those doors, I have news for you: The Word made flesh is already here. And He’s not just in the ‘holy’ spots. He’s in the person sitting next to you (yes, even that one), He’s in the streets, and He’s in the parts of your life you usually try to keep the lights off in.
We like our God spectacular. We want fireworks, booming voices, and maybe a little “muscular” authority to straighten out the world. Instead, God pulls a fast one on us. He doesn’t show up in a palace or a fortress. He doesn’t even show up in a decent neighbourhood.
God shows up as a vulnerable, crying babby, swaddled in hurriedly packed cloths in a cattle-crib. Think about how ‘un-religious’ that is. It is messy. It is inauspicious. It is, frankly, a bit of a scandal. God bypassed the ‘High and Mighty’ and chose a stable. If you are looking for God in the ‘Magisterium’ or the halls of power, you’re looking in the wrong place. God is found in the particularity of a homeless refugee child in a cowshed. God is rewriting the scripture and subverting tradition.
Friends, the inconvenient truth is the Incarnation presents an unsurpassable horizon of God anchored in the human flesh and living among us. In the act of Incarnation, God did not simply disperse into the entirety of humanity but took the form of a unique individual in a unique place, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph. It is only from this extraordinary particularity can Jesus then be universal
It is in and through Jesus’ scandalous particularity that humanity is assured of God’s saving action. Because God is fully human in Jesus Christ, humanity is fully able to enter into relationship with God. The Incarnation reminds us that the flesh, the concrete, the particular, the ordinary is the way to God.
The irony of Christmas is that we often take this scandalous Word became flesh in the vulnerable child and try to lock Him back up, where He should be, as part of a nativity set. We build walls of tradition, thick layers of cramped creedal orthodoxy, and receive theological and legal advice to keep God hemmed in. I am sorry to break it to you: the little child you will find in Mary’s embrace is not going to be contained.
We’ve become experts at refurbishing our prison cells. We make our exclusionary practices look ‘traditional, comfortable and rooted in scripture’, while the Word made flesh is outside, trying to kick the doors down.
It’s a bit funny, isn’t it? We spend all year using the Bible to tell people who isn’t allowed in, and then we act surprised when the Christmas story is about a God who refuses to stay in the box, we built for Him.
The sisters and brothers in the far-right says they want to “put Christ back in Christmas”, but I suspect if they actually met this vulnerable, refugee, Middle Eastern child, they’d be the first to call him to be deported back to ‘wherever he came from’.
The divine decent, the incarnation is in our face reminding us of the living, it is an invitation to a radical transformation
If God became flesh, something religious people once called “polluted” or “common”, then nothing is too ordinary for God.
If God is in the flesh, then the way we treat human bodies matters.
If God is in the marginalized, then our ‘hospitality’ isn’t an option; it’s a requirement.
We cannot uphold texts of patriarchal terror and expect to cuddle the Christ Child.
We cannot celebrate the Christ of the Cowshed while turning our backs on our sisters and brothers whose love simply lacks a scriptural footnote.
As Isaiah prophesied the peace that this child brings will be rooted in justice and righteousness.
In the face of Jesus, we see God drawing near to each of us, honouring our unique worth as God’s own sons and daughters. This is the mystery of the Incarnation: the infinite God chose the “scandalous” path of becoming human to bridge the gap between the impersonal and the intimate. To truly experience this requires a “re-birth” of the soul—a spiritual reset that allows the buried image of God within us to shine once more
Our world is deeply fractured by the devastation in Palestine, rising antisemitism, the poison of ethno-nationalism, and the scapegoating of the vulnerable. Beneath these crises lies a deep, collective ache for belonging. When the Word became flesh, God ‘emptied’ Himself to move into our locality, restoring not just our link to heaven, but our ties to each other. Our faith calls us to this central truth: in God, we are inextricably bound to one another
As you leave tonight, don’t just go back to the ‘comfort’ of your own preconceptions. Don’t go back to the ‘violence of orthodoxy’ that hurts the living to protect a vacuous tradition.
Instead, let’s have the humility to repent and the courage to be prophetic. Let’s turn our churches into places of equity and freedom, not fortresses of exclusion.
The Word became flesh to set us free. So let us join in this scandal of God’s love and be the presence of the God who embraces everyone. Especially the ones you were hoping He’d forget. Amen.