That they sing all the time like whatever everyone else is singing. I am in awe of people that can sing like that and they worked and worked at it. What a beautiful thing to be able to hear this Christmas season. If you’re visiting, my name is Alex. I’m one of the pastors here and it’s just my privilege just for a few minutes to try and orientate us around this Christmas story.

So if you’re visiting and a special welcome to you. to you. So delighted you could join us. I’m going to read us a passage from Matthew’s gospel. Knowing that you just sat down, I’m going to invite you to stand again and we’re going to read together. Matthew chapter 2 verse 1. Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judah, In the days of Herod the King, behold, wise men, Magi, came from the east, came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who is born King of the Jews?

For we saw his star when it rose in the east and have come to worship him. When Herod the King heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him in Bethlehem in the land of Judah.

For so it is written of the prophet, And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, Are by no means the least of the rulers of Judah. For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people. Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly, and learned from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them back to Bethlehem, saying, Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, so that I might come and worship.

After listening to the king, they went on their way, and behold, the star that they had seen, when it rose in the east, went before them, until it came to a place Where the child was 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 of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. You may be seated. Jesus, as we examine this, would you speak to us this Christmas season? Help us to follow you well. Reveal yourself to us. Amen. I’d like to start this evening with a question for you. It’s this.

It’s this. What’s your most, what was your most challenging journey? I know it might require kind of tapping back into some of the data banks, some of your past history and kind of wrestling with what was that? Maybe it was a journey that someone was set on. sick on. Maybe it was just a really long journey.

Maybe it was the people you went to visit. Maybe it was the people you traveled with. And maybe those people are in the room with you right now. Who knows? Maybe sat next to you while you’re thinking about it. Let me share with you mine. Every year, my wife And I take our kids on what we call maybe a pilgrimage, a journey to a special place.

We go up to see her folks at a lake house up in northern Minnesota, a 17 hour drive, one that is definitely only for the brave, especially when kids are included. And then another one. where we return to what I love to call the mothership, the homeland, back to England to see family and to see friends. And one of those recent journeys, we were returning back to the U.

S. and we landed in JFK Airport about 9 o’clock in the evening. At that point, we’d already been traveling for about 12 hours. It was this time in the time zone that we’d been staying, about 2 o’clock in the morning, and we had three kids around the age of 10 or under. And so as we got to the airport and we stand in line for about an hour with no place to sit, no place to rest, and just lots and lots of people gathered in a small confined area, I grabbed some photos of the faces.

This is my daughter Elena. She’s a little actress, so maybe there’s some exaggeration there. This is Gigi. There is no acting there, that’s just pure emotion. I wisely took the photo of my wife out. No wait, I meant to take the photo. There was this experience during this journey that might be phrased as a question.

It’s this moment where on a journey you start to wonder, will I ever be the same again? Is this journey just impacting me to such a degree? Maybe I’ll never travel anywhere, maybe this will just be it. The story we just read, It is a story of a journey. It gets bypassed because it’s not the most important detail.

We’ll get to that. But it’s where the narrative starts. We read in the beginning that Magi, or wise men as they are often known, sometimes known as kings, travel from the east. In the stories there’s almost always three, because there’s three gifts, but the story doesn’t say that there’s definitely three.

There could be twenty, thirty, they move a long distance from the east. Traveling. The poet and writer T. S. Eliot expresses this in just ways my scrappy English bro could just never keep up with. A cold coming we had of it. Just the worst time of year for a journey. And such a long journey. The waves deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.

Despite the brief reference, this journey is around 500 miles. The same as if you were to say, we’re going to go out and visit Park City. in Utah. The same as if you were to say we’re going to go explore the Grand Canyon, the same as if you were to say instead of driving through Omaha like everybody does, we’re going to stop for some reason in Omaha.

It’s a long way, and you have to ditch the forerunner to replicate this journey, which was done mostly with camels sleeping under some kind of tent. waking up each morning. Just for a moment, enter in to that narrative with me. You wake up, it’s day 39 of many days. It’s been 39 days since you felt the feel of silk sheets, where you, since you heard the laughter of children, since you lived in the fair comfort of a Zoroastrian or magician from the land of You’ve traveled and now for the first time the city of Jerusalem is there on the horizon You are within reach and then perhaps this is where the questions really hit home.

Why are we doing this? What are we hoping for and what’s the outcome of this? Sure, we saw a star in the sky but what does it mean and what does it mean for us and where will this journey end and How will it change us, perhaps? They’re all lurking questions. This afternoon, on this Christmas Eve, you and I are on a journey together.

We’re not going anywhere physically. We’re staying right here. You don’t have to get up again until the end of the service. But, we’re spiritually journeying. I would say that we are journeying Towards the center of Christmas trying to find what is the heartbeat of it? What is the reason for the season that now I say that because I think we’re probably all aware There’s loads of other things that might end up forcing their way to the center of this Christmas season So some of them wonderful things that we should definitely value.

There’s the joy, perhaps, of gathering with family. Maybe some of you flew into town just from that. Some of you, I know, flew from other countries to be with family, loved ones, this season. Maybe there’s the joy of good food and perhaps good wine. Maybe there’s the sharing of gifts, the generosity. That might include.

And then there’s other things that definitely belong on the very periphery that find their way sometimes to the center. One company who would remain nameless if they hadn’t emblazoned their trucks with their logo, looked at this 2, 000 year old celebration and said, you know what belongs in the center of that celebration?

We do. Coca Cola is a really big deal at this time of year to the point that Santa wears red every year. because Coca Cola is red. There’s all these different things that might force their way into the middle. Again, not necessarily a problem unless this happens. Unless the thing that belongs in the center now feels like an interloper forcing itself in, perhaps where it doesn’t feel now to some like it belongs.

Then that, friends, would be a problem. The writer C. S. Lewis in the 20th century recorded a conversation overheard on a bus. Sitting on a bus, looking at a nativity scene outside of a church. Someone commented this. They try and bring religion into everything these days. They’re even trying to bring it into Christmas.

I’ve rehearsed that story enough times that I was like, are people gonna groan, are people gonna laugh, or worst case scenario, do what you did, which is a little bit of both. But I can get over it, don’t worry. We’ll deal. That’s potentially the result. of this kind of change in what is the center of Christmas.

That story that is central, that we are focusing on today. That kind of gets pushed to the outside. So today, as we examine it, my prayer is that we open our hearts and we receive what God has for us. Matthew chapter 2 verse 1. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judah during the reign of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?

We saw his star when it rose, and we have come to worship. Just for a moment, enter back into that imagined narrative with me. You’ve traveled 500 miles, night after night, now you smell like camel, because everything around you smells like camel when you travel on camel, you arrive in Jerusalem, expecting a city that is celebrating the birth of this king whose coming was foretold to you in the stars.

And what you arrive at and experience is a city in mourning, a city with an occupying force in place, a city with a Roman soldier on every street corner. You don’t experience a city celebrating, you experience just the grim reality of a city that has no hope. On the throne sits an aged king who’s desperately trying to hold on to the last remains of his power, willing to do anything it takes.

to ensure nobody ever takes his place. You don’t experience life. You experience death. We know from history that most births of kings are celebrated with noise, with grandeur, with singing, with dancing in the streets, with joy. When King Louis XIII of France, finally after 23 years of waiting, gave birth to an heir, they called him Louis the God given.

It was a celebration. There’s nothing like that at this point in this story. After a brief back and forth with the king of the country, these Magi, these wise men, hear a rumor of a king that was to be born in Bethlehem. About two hours journey from the city of Jerusalem. They’ve come this far. Why not go a little further?

But really? It was bad enough perhaps having to journey to somewhere like Jerusalem, but to now go to the backwaters of Israel? What do they expect to find there? What do they hope for? We read in verse 9, They went on their way and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the palace where the child was.

When they saw the star they were overjoyed and coming to the house they saw the child with his mother, Mary. These wise men navigate this journey and land at a scene that is shockingly normal. The thing that kind of reminds them constantly that something may be happening here is the star. It functions in the story in the same way the shepherds singing, sorry, the angels singing function for the shepherds in Luke’s narrative.

There’s something that reminds them that something may be happening here. But without that, everything on the surface seems perfectly normal. They arrive at a small house, sometimes in a kind of legend called a stable. It’s maybe a shared room where the animals of the family would be kept out of the cold.

They make do with just any space that’s available to them. This child’s birth is no different to the birth of millions of children in a somewhat impoverished country even today. Born to insignificant parents in a country at the time at least that seemed insignificant. Born to peasants. No grand narrative available at all, at least on the surface.

I wonder if perhaps you’re someone who would say, I can deal with Christmas at Easter or, sorry, I can deal with church at Easter or Christmas. If you’re someone that struggles perhaps with the intellectual propositions of Christianity, I wonder if maybe this is not some of the struggle. That the story kind of seems too normal.

It’s just a child born that could be one of millions of children born. The 10 billion of us born in history share this common story, right? Birth from a mother. Hopefully, perhaps held in that mother’s arms, although perhaps that story can be broken. Maybe the story just seems so normal that we we’re going to reduce it down to just this simple story.

We maybe see this story play out in front of us all too often. A child is born, we know it. Perhaps you have a child of your own, perhaps you have a grandchild, perhaps you have a niece or a nephew or your friends are now having children. Perhaps you are a child. And you know that story of a child being born is not special.

We say it is. A child is born, it’s this beautiful thing, but we know what happens afterwards. We know how quickly the story turns very human as the human sickness kind of grabs hold of that child as they start to act in ways that we could never imagine this darling baby that we first hold acting. The great prophet Homer Simpson said this, children talk and then they talk.

I’ve seen this narrative at play just recently in my own life. I have a two year old, his name is Leo. Leo is special. He gets told he’s special regularly. He gets told he’s different. He’s the wonder child of our family, the last of all of his siblings, or at least for now, the last of all his siblings. He has golden hair, and like the rest of his family, you are brunette, and they, we call him the golden child because of his hair.

He gets celebrated by his siblings constantly. And yet, just recently, I started to see Leo’s shadow story, the broken humanity that sits within him. We were at the Denver Science Museum playing in the water pools. There’s fountains and there’s whirlpools. There’s all of these wonderful things for kids to experience.

And so Leo was fully in his moment of joy, invested in everything in front of him, playing with toys, playing with whirlpools, playing with rapids. As they stood there enjoying this experience, a child, maybe one or two years older, came over to him and grabbed the toy out of his hands, ripped it from between them, and then walked about a foot to two feet further away and began playing with this toy himself.

And I watched to see how Leo would deal with this. Would he cry, burst into tears? Would he come running to his father for help? Would he simply sit there stoically just wondering why this child clearly broken in some way would come and interfere with his pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, but he didn’t do any of those things.

He reached into the pool of water and grabbed what I can only be described as a foam block, sat in water for year upon year, time untold, heavy with the weight of that water, and he cranked back that small arm, and with the power, Of a future Major Leaguer. He whipped this foam ball through the air, and it hit this kid straight in the side of the face.

A few thoughts occurred to me as I watched this beautiful moment. One, I’ve never been so proud of him in my life. Two, I’m so glad that it wasn’t like heavy and hard. Nobody needs a lawsuit, but I’m so glad it was soaking wet because this kid deserved it. And three, as I watched this story, I wondered, who is the most broken in this narrative?

The child of three or four that did the stealing. The child of two that took revenge upon that first child. Or the grown adult that watched them gleefully and with joy play out this drama. We know who, right? But we know that the human story inevitably ends that way. However sweet the child is that is born, it grows in ways and develops traits that reflect that as human beings we all have a warped side, a broken side.

Perhaps when you read this Christmas story, perhaps when you hear it told, you say, this is just too normal, too like every other story. And yet, all of the narratives agree that this child. That this child grows to be something else. On the surface, the obscurity of Jesus birth, Joseph and Mary, the lonely manger, the humble shepherds, would never for a moment have suggested that the child who was born ruled the entire universe.

And yet the way he grows up suggests something different is in play. This child grows and he teaches and he heals, he reaches out to those on the margins, he’s compassionate to those that are most broken, welcoming them in to new stories. Ultimately, he dies, and startlingly, three days later, is resurrected from the dead.

He’s the reason that we celebrate this idea that God so loved the world that he gave his only son. There is something different in the Jesus story. So much so that every major religion has had to answer the question, what do you say and what do you do with Jesus? He exists across everything. He is part of everything.

Amen. I would suggest this Christmas, when wanting to find the center, remind yourself that while we pause at Christmas and celebrate something as simple as a baby in a mother’s arms, that story itself is part of a grand story that encompasses time beyond measure. It will end in death and resurrection, but surprisingly come to be something more.

And it begins in eternity, timeless past. When the God of the universe decided he would do anything it took to save you, to reach you, to care for you. The poet Charles Wesley wrote these words. Born by people to deliver, born a child and yet a king. Born to reign in us forever. Now thy gracious kingdom bring.

Phil Wickham, in his own words, wrote the same idea. But you chose meekness over majesty, wrapped your power in humanity. As normal as this story seems, as similar as many of the narratives that we’ve experienced or are coming to experience counter intuitively in this story, the child is a king. His manger is a throne, and at this story, God is at work.

There’s a slight twist to the end of the story that I cut from the first reading. These Magi, these travelers from far away, they don’t just come and experience a child and his mother. They respond to that child in a particular way. We’re told they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense.

These wise men journey a long way and they find, at that first nativity scene, they find Christ the King Christmas. Can you find that same King this Christmas? Can you find Jesus the King this Christmas? C. S. Lewis once said this, the gospel announcement is one that if true is of supreme importance, and if false is of no importance.

It cannot be moderately important. This story means everything, or it means nothing. This Christmas, I invite you into a space of contemplating this Jesus in new ways. In a moment, we’re gonna do what we do every Christmas Eve. We’re gonna light candles, and we’re gonna sing Silent Night. Remember the stillness and simplicity of this birth.

A child in a mother’s arms, laid in a manger. God bless you. We’re also going to remember that this story becomes so much more. So as I ask this question, How do we respond? I’d love to give you a couple of answers. I’d love to invite the choir to begin to make their way up on stage. So if you see people moving around, that’s them doing their thing.

It takes a little while to get 60, 70 people on stage. Two ways this Christmas that you might choose to respond to this story. The first is to worship, to take a moment this Christmas Day tomorrow, pause in amongst all the beautiful things that might take the place in the center, to pause in amongst celebrating with family.

To support, to pause in amongst enjoying company, opening gifts, great food. Maybe pause to pray for a moment. Maybe take a step outside and look at the beauty of creation around you. Contemplate the idea that this King Jesus came for you. A second is that, is to follow. Is to, an invite to maybe in the new year to think about ways that you can follow Jesus practically.

We’re about to begin a series that we’re calling in. the way of Jesus that’s designed for exactly that. We’d love to invite you to come and learn what it is to follow Jesus, step for step, to maybe begin some simple practices that might help you engage with him day to day. One of the beautiful things that we see every time someone says yes to following Jesus is that transformation, new life seems to emerge from that journey.

I’ll leave you at the end with the words again from Isaiah. Hear them again, having heard of Jesus, the King, who loves you and gave himself for you. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

The greatness of his government and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness. From that time on and forever, the work of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. In the midst of the normality of Christmas, we invite you to remember that the child surprisingly is a king.

The manger surprisingly is a throne. God is at work in the world. Jesus, thank you for your grand story. Thank you for your care for each of us. Amen. This Christmas, knowing people come at all sorts of places of joy and despair, some come in leaping, some come in leaping, some come in having had a great year and Christmas somehow makes it better, and perhaps some come in having had a difficult year.

Sometimes it can feel like Christmas makes it worse. Thank you that wherever we are, your story is for us.

Through our Advent journey, we’ve remembered the hardest part of my day. Faith. Joy, peace, and love. Today we light the Christ candle. Christ is born. A new story is beginning. We are thankful.