Co-missioners,
I haven’t preached on Christmas since 2021. That was halfway through my final year of fulltime pastoral ministry. Since then I’ve sat in pews on Christmas Eve listening to others preach. It’s been enough to prompt today’s screed, a few dollops of unsought advice to this year’s set of Christmas preachers. See below. If you’re not a preacher and are afflicted even so with the chutzpah to pass this along to the person you’ll be listening to, do so gently, humbly, remembering that even the best of intentions, yours and mine, are stained with the self-serving sin that Christ was born to deal with. The folks we give advice to are aware of this and may well take umbrage. Umbrage, of course, is another spasm of the sin Christ came to handle. Thanks be to God for this One who first lay in a manger and later hung on a cross “for us [all] and for our salvation.”
Before plunging ahead, let me put on another hat as president of the Crossings Board of Directors and thank God for all of you who read this. Thanks all the more for those of you who make a habit of consulting our weekly output of essays and text studies, and still more for those who support what we’re doing with the occasional gift. Yes, we welcome your support and invite those gifts. May our absurdly generous God put us all to joyful use this Christmas in service of the Gospel!
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
for the Crossings Community
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Angles on Angels and Other Aspects of Christmas Preaching
by Jerome Burce
I may as well start with those angels. I mean the “multitude of the heavenly host” that joined the shepherds’ angel in “praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:13-14 KJV). No, these were not the massed choir of pious hymnody “singing sweetly o’er the plain.” Instead they comprised an army—stratios in Greek, “host” in an older English that grabbed the term from the Latin hostis, meaning “enemy.” One could put the thought in today’s debased English by saying that the sky over Bethlehem was teeming with “hostiles” on that first Christmas night.
Willem Schellinks (1627-1678) – The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds.
From Wikimedia Commons
A whiff of fear, faint yet pervasive, will spoil the air of Christmas Eve, 2025. Sensitive noses are sure to pick it up. The little church I’ve been going to when I’m not filling in somewhere else decided this summer to start locking its doors when there’s a service already in progress. Who knows in these American days when an earthbound “hostile” might suddenly barge in waving a gun? Such was the reasoning, at any rate, even in small-town Ohio where this church is located.
Lesson #1 for Christmas Eve preachers: your Lord Jesus Christ was born to deal with the real fears, the real threats, the real enemies that the people you’ll be talking to this year are struggling with. You’ll do no one any favors by papering these things over so as not to spoil the mood. Peace is the mood that God aims to instill, and not the phony, fleeting peace that tries to smile our troubles away, but the genuine, enduring peace that Christmas initiates and Easter trumpets. Your preacher’s job is to point to that peace; to drop a hint or two of how this baby anchors it and brings it about; of how Christ is born to handle our troubles as he alone is able to handle them, once and for all. You get on Christmas Eve to preach the promise of a day-on-the-way when no church will think to lock its doors (Rev. 21:25), so pervasive and enduring will be this peace that the Bethlehem baby is born to establish.
In other words, you get to talk crazy on Christmas Eve. Seriously, talking crazy is your job that night. You’re the spiller of words the Holy Spirit will use to get the people you’re looking at smiling on the inside as well as the outside, no matter how dark it is out there in the little worlds they each inhabit and the larger one we all share. So—for but one example; there are many others—maybe you help them think about that angelic army in the sky; how perhaps we see it as God’s Option #1 for cleaning up the mess that God’s enemies and the human rebels they enlist keep making of the world God treasures. How at the last minute, aka the fullness of time, God sets aside this Option 1 in favor of Option 2. Instead of dispatching the heavenly army, God sends in the heavenly Son. Imagine that, you say. This noise going on above the heads of the shepherds: what is this, you say, if not the sound of troops going nuts with relief as they clash spear on shield and head back to the barracks because Christ is born to handle our sin and the war is off. “Glory to God in the highest…”—well of course that’s what they’re singing. And of course they invite us to join their song. How can we not?
Crazy talk, as I say. But talk that’s also realistic enough to tug some hearers into the joy of God in Christ for us, God wondrously in Christ for a world still mad enough to imagine that armies will solve their problems. “God in Christ is so much better than this!” Say this a time or two on Christmas Eve. It’s what God puts you there to do.
Speaking of which, here’s a second Christmas lesson. You, dear preacher, are the angel—the messenger, strictly speaking—that God will dispatch next Wednesday night to the people you’ll be talking to. Or to put that another way, it’s not only the members of your audience who will count on you to say something worthy of Christmas. God will expect this too. In doing so, he’ll doubtless take you far more seriously than you dare to take yourself. Those of us who were raised in pious Lutheran homes were taught to avoid presumption. Where our preaching task is concerned, it’s more often a lack of presumption that we need to repent of. Luther underscored that God relies on human mouths to deliver the Gospel. Yours will be another angelic mouth that he’ll count on next week to make this happen. You will serve God well if that first angel’s “Fear not!” is the first thing out of your mouth too. And you’ll serve God all the more when you promptly add the news of the baby born “for you,” as in all of you, every person you catch yourself looking at this Christmas Eve. Saying these thing is your job, your privilege, your holy vocation as a servant of the Christmas Word-made-flesh.
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And with that, a few other things to wrap this up:
From Canva
- Remember next week to honor the gift of delight that lots of those who show up will already be enjoying. The Christmas tree, the presents, the prospect of a fabulous dinner tomorrow with people we cherish—all these are First-Article gifts of God to the world. Yes, they fall far short of that gift of gifts of Christ in the manger. Even so, they are not to be despised. Let God be thanked for them all.
- Remember how on this night of all nights you’re not up there to tell people what they can and ought to do to save the world. Instead, you’re there to tell them all what God has done and is doing still—in Christ, through Christ—to save them; to save the rest of the world with them.
- This last point is important enough to say again, this time in an aphoristic way, easier to remember, perhaps: “Thou shalt not ‘should’ on people come Christmas Eve. Preach Christ instead!”
- And in preaching Christ, do as Melanchthon urges, and give Christ all the glory, not some of it. Don’t tempt or push hearers to grab a bit of glory for themselves. Underscore that the baby is born to be their Savior, and not as the false prophets would have it to be their Example. Say this especially for the troubled souls in your audience who will know full well how bad they are at following examples. Make Christ their comfort, their hope, their joy. That’s preaching the Gospel on Christmas Eve.
- Remember too how on Christmas Eve you’ll be looking at a more diverse crowd than usual. Thank God for them all the minute you set eyes on them. Judge them not lest you be judged. Sure, some will be thinking of imminent Santa Claus, a few will be sunk in their grief, still others will exhibit the signs of a person who is there only to make somebody else happy. So what? If you’ve been in that place for a few years you’ll spot the Chreesters too, as in the folks who show up on Christmas and Easter only. Do not embarrass or reprove them as embarrassing preachers have been known to do. Instead, thank God for them as well, and for the opportunity God gives you to slide some Gospel into their ears at least once or twice a year.
- One last thing for now: God himself gives you a goal to aim for on Christmas Eve. More precisely, it’s a goal the Holy Spirit will be out to achieve. See Luke 2:20, where we hear of shepherds heading back to their work “glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them” (KJV). These are the sounds God wants to hear in the cars that are pulling out of your parking lot this Christmas Eve. May the Holy Spirit working in you and through you get this done.
And yes, there is more, a lot more, but for now this is enough. Except to say that all of us will have the privilege next week of praying for the angels, these messengers God will send—you among them, dear preacher—to deliver “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” God’s will in Christ be done in you and through you for the sake of the people you’ll get to serve.
JB
Roaming Shores, OH
Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
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