Don't Watch
A Christmas Eve homily
Preached on December 24, 2025, at East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church
On a night that is beyond words, I actually have three words I’m going to try and fail to explain tonight: “meaning,” “glory,” and “behold.” But first, a Merry Christmas to those who have been watching and waiting for Jesus like perfectly good disciples, and a Merry Christmas to you who are naturally cheerful all year; you would be happy whether Christmas came or not, you just are perfectly joyful at all times. Thank you for your service, but, I don’t know if I have much to preach for you tonight, nor do I have a sermon for perfect Christians, so if you are either, please leave the room at this time.
Tonight is actually for those of you who were dragged here tonight. Or you dragged yourself here, because you drag yourself everywhere, because life has not gone gloriously for you. Tonight is for our friends watching who can’t drag themselves here tonight because their bodies are too broken, or their loved one’s is. Maybe you feel like God himself dragged you into this whole crowded inn of a world against your wishes. Maybe you feel like you are here tonight doing this quaint, old thing that used to mean something, this whole church stuff, but it is still tolerated and sometimes enjoyable—once, maybe twice a year, when the weird Christians pull out all the stops for a glorified solstice celebration because they actually believe this stuff. Welcome.
(Although, if you know anybody who grew up with hippie parents (or maybe you did yourself), it is not hard to imagine some ancient Roman kids feeling dragged to those boring, pagan winter festivals: “Mom, I don’t care about drunken revelry for Saturn, can’t I just play imaginary barbarian war with my friends?”)
No, tonight is for those who have stopped watching for God. Tonight is for those who, as a friend put it, feel this whole holiday season to be an “oppressive joy.” There’s a popular scene from Family Guy where Peter Griffin explains why he hates The Godfather, and he says derisively, “It insists upon itself.” Our American holiday season, indeed, insists upon itself. It forces you to perform happiness and joy.
Christians often bemoan that Christmas in our culture has lost Jesus as the reason for the season. A decade ago, the show Community had a Christmas episode in search of the true meaning of Christmas, only to discover that the meaning of Christmas is just “meaning,” a totally circular logic that we all now play out. So even if you are not oppressed by Christmas joy, you are still afflicted by the insistence that it’s supposed to mean something. And now I must confess I won’t even try to explain what “meaning” means.
But there was no performative joy or meaning just for the sake of meaning on the first Christmas night, because there is a difference between a religion or a culture that insists upon itself and the One who simply shows up and is undeniable. Jesus does not insist upon himself. He shows up as a baby, in a hidden place to poor teenage parents in a Roman colony, noticed by a couple of well-educated foreigners who were not watching for God that night, just for stars, and some rural shepherds who were also not watching for God that night, just their livestock. What they saw did not pretend or perform something greater than it was or mean something for the sake of being meaningful. It simply was, and it was so awe-inspiring you could only call it “glory.” For thousands of years, we have then tried to make meaning of this glory that is actually joyful.
It is actually joyful because it is truly glorious, a word that is hard to describe that also doesn’t capture what or who it is trying to describe. Because true glory is beyond us, glory is bound to be misunderstood when we hear about it yet undeniable when we witness it. Glory is something of God that is so full it can’t be from us. We get into trouble when we try to manufacture glory and mistake it for God’s, like mistaking winning the Super Bowl for God’s true triumph, or mistaking our favorite song for the sound of heaven, or mistaking any number of highs we can elicit with a drug or an accomplishment as supposedly from God. No, true glory does not manufacture itself and does not insist upon itself; glory just is glorious. And it is so wonderful you couldn’t not praise it.
To those shepherds, glory first came from God, shining on them, scaring them while also saying, “Do not be afraid,” because even though you are in the presence of something totally more powerful than you, utterly beyond your control, a presence so much bigger than any of us, that powerful Glory loves you, it is here for you, and it is on your side especially if you can’t find joy.
But tonight we re-learn that the glory of God—whatever it is that causes people to stop and drop in pure awe—is not just a powerful show of force from above. It’s relational in between. Glory does not stay with itself; if it could, it wouldn’t be glory, for God is a love for all of humanity. Glory is not just something between God and shepherds and Mary and Joseph. Glory is so bright it shines and shines until it is reflected everywhere.
The shepherds witness that overwhelming glory, then immediately go to see the family, then glorify God all the way home, because you can’t keep glory to yourself even if you wanted to. You can’t help but bear witness to it, you can’t help but share it, because God does not give out glory just for himself, he gives it to us to share. As the Gospel of John tells us, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory.” (John 1:14) True glory that has given up glory itself to dwell in you. Glory that gave up glory to become a helpless baby who would one day die in shame and dishonor and dismay in the ultimate rescue project, because true glory is the self-giving glory of God that pours out life until it covers all forces of destruction and tyranny. Glory is the mysterious, self-giving creativity of God, the ongoing work of creation that reveals itself through a million little ways even in the harshest winter until all we can do is sing a symphony of Gloria. I know I am wasting my time up here, because you cannot explain glory at all—what can you say about glory besides singing it?
But we have one more word to try and grasp at: behold. This is not just “look” or “see,” but a kind of standing-in-the-presence-of that fills your very being with fullness. To behold is to receive the glory that God is shining on you. But because it is glory, to really behold glory is not to keep it for yourself, but to be so filled with the love of God that you can’t help but share it. Just as “love” can only exist in a relationship, so it is with glory, and so it is with beholding. We can’t behold God by ourselves if we tried; to behold at all is to behold together.
So in the midst of all the depression, the confusion, the emptiness, our broken bodies, our broken spirits, if we have lost Jesus Christ in the middle of Christmas, then the oppressive joy of a commercial holiday is the perfect time for the true glory of God to sneak by our worst instincts and be beheld, pointed by stars over hidden fields towards an animal stall in the sticks of imperial Rome.
Tonight is not for those who are living in privileged serenity or monastic tranquility but for those who, even in our beautiful, pastoral Vermont, find the world to be entirely too noisy. For those who are surrounded by beauty but live on screens with bottomless news feeds with nugget after nugget of distraction, addiction, rage, tragedy, and every variety of noise engineered for your attention. Tonight, while a preacher may insist, the glory of God does not insist. It simply shines for our attention, even if just one night a year for some of us, so that we remember God is for those who the world discards and rejects and shuts out and shuts up. As Thomas Merton wrote sixty years ago in the midst of the tumultuous 1960s:
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
The shepherds were not watching for this Christ. But the glory of God opened himself up to make his glory vulnerable to us—yes, if glory can possibly be vulnerable, our God has a vulnerable glory. God knows we will hurt him, and he still makes himself vulnerable to us again and again in his perfect love. And when we reflect the love of God to each other out of vulnerable love, and when you have it reflected to you, it is not fake, oppressive joy, or empty meaning, it is a true love that you can’t help but stop in awe and behold together.
Maybe you’ve been watching for something joyful. Maybe you’ve been watching for something meaningful. But actually, don’t watch. Behold. Merry Christmas. Amen.
Thanks Joe! A wonderful Christmas Eve homily. Merry Christmas.