Living Faithfully in the Middle

A Christmas Eve Sermon about Hope, Peace, and Unfinished Stories

Rev. David Collins

Luke 2:1-15

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Here we are, once again. Christmas Eve.

The thing I love about this night is the familiarity: Luke 2, O Holy Night, singing Silent Night by candlelight. This one night connects to all the other nights I’ve done this same thing, ever since I was a child, when the urgency and anticipation of Christmas morning spilled over into this night before, making this memory more powerful than so many others.

And it connects to my memory of those early Christmases when my kids were young, which many of you are in the middle of right now, and trust me, one day you won’t remember the stress, you’ll only remember the best parts, and you might not even remember those all that well.

You’ll just remember being young, and that your kids were young, and the promise and possibility that become so salient and real at moments like this one.

Christmas Eve has a way of collapsing time. The past feels close enough to touch. We remember things we haven’t thought about in years…the way a room felt, not the room itself. The sound of a voice that used to call us to bed. The version of ourselves who believed, without knowing why, that things were going to be okay.

And even when we know better now, even when life has complicated our trust and our hope, this night brings it back. But it doesn’t bring it back cleanly or neatly. It brings it back mixed with everything we’ve learned since.

We sing about it in O Little Town of Bethlehem, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

Sometimes that feeling becomes overwhelming and the tears fall, and they aren’t just tears of sadness or tears of joy but tears that connect us to every year we’ve cried at this same moment.

Like the walls between then and now have become transparent. This room fills with echoes of other rooms, other sanctuaries, other places where this same song was sung by people who also knew this feeling by heart.

For a moment, we are sitting beside our younger selves. Beside the people who taught us the words. Beside strangers across centuries who never knew our language, but knew this longing. This same hope. These same fears.

So the tears come because it’s too much to hold all at once…the love that’s endured, the love that’s been lost, the versions of the world we’ve outgrown, or that were taken away from us…the world or maybe just the life we’re still aching for, even if we don’t have a name for it. Not because it’s gone forever, but because it isn’t finished yet.

Those hopes and fears of all the years are met in me tonight too.

But... if we're not careful, all those feelings can make us kind of self-absorbed, can't they?

We might get a little emotionally self-absorbed this time of year. Or start orbiting around whoever it is in your life who is doing that, if you tend more towards that sort of thing.

Or maybe the feelings you're stuck in is that feeling of dread every time you look at the news, and think about the wars around the world, and the horrors closer to home

All these feelings are always right there, ready to suck us in, and it's easy to get stuck.

And we think, or at least I do, that I'll get unstuck once it's all better.

But that’s not the story we are here to remember tonight, is it?

It was into a world that was far more stuck than ours, that God sent his angels with news for those shepherds, that the Messiah had been born.

Now, when the angels use the word Messiah, it’s worth remembering what most people expected that to mean.

Messianic hope, in their world, wasn’t vague or sentimental. It was concrete. People were waiting for a grown man. A leader. Someone with strength and authority, and an army!

Someone who could confront the powers that were crushing ordinary people, and set things right. That’s the hope the shepherds would have grown up with. And it’s not a foolish hope, either. When your world is broken, you want someone who can actually fix it.

So when the angels say,


“to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord,”


They might have focused in on those key words: Savior. Messiah. Lord.


Those words describe someone who acts. Someone who changes the course of history. Someone who is the true Lord, because Caesar sure is not, no matter how much he says he is.

But then comes the next line, that may have left them saying, “Wait. What?”

“This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

A child. A baby. Which of course, obviously, is how all big burly Messiah’s would have to start out, right? Everyone has to start out as a baby.

But that means, that whatever God is doing…it’s gonna take time. This Savior won’t be of any immediate use to the shepherds. He won’t change their lives. He won’t remove the occupying army. He won’t make tomorrow any easier. All he’s going to make is a mess in those swaddling clothes.

13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
  and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

And while the shepherds were more than likely too flabbergasted just by the incredible display in the night sky and the way the angels’ voices surrounded them and filled them to consider what their words meant, they scooted off to follow their curiosity, we get to unpack the implications of what it all says about the way God works in the world.

Because I believe that God loves us, and everyone in the world, just as much as God loved those shepherds. And they had real problems that needed to be fixed, and so do we. And God didn’t fix their problems. Instead, he sent a baby.

What does that mean?

Let’s start with what the angels actually say.

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,

and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

That last line can trip us up a little. Among those whom he favors.

Among Those Whom He Favors?

It can sound like peace is selective…like God hands it out to a chosen few, and the rest of the world just has to live without it. That sounds more like victory to me. More like dominance.

But everything else we know about this story pushes us in the opposite direction. The angels don’t appear to kings or generals. They appear to shepherds. The announcement isn’t made in a palace. It’s made out in a field. From the very beginning, God is favoring the ones no one else favors. And once you see that, it becomes hard to argue that God’s favor stops anywhere.

God favors everyone. Which is exactly what makes peace so complicated.

Because peace among people God favors means peace among all kinds of people. People who don't agree. People who don't trust each other. People who have hurt one another.

People who benefit from the way things are and people who are crushed by it. Peace among those whom God favors isn't easy peace. It's costly and slow.

And notice something else. The angels sing this as if it's already done.

Not there will be peace someday.

Not peace is possible.

They declare it. Peace on earth.

Which is bold, considering where they're standing, or floating. The world hasn't changed yet. Rome is still in charge. The shepherds are still poor. The baby they're singing about can't even lift up his head.

What the angels are announcing isn't the end of the story. It's the beginning of it. They're naming what God has set in motion as if it's already true...because from God's perspective, once the work begins, the ending is sure.

Peace hasn't arrived fully formed.

But it has begun.

And if you know the rest of the story, you know that the baby did not grow up to ride at the head of an army to bring a temporary victory, but he taught and loved and died and rose again and is still working on that promised peace in ways that we can’t always see and often don’t understand.

So what does that mean for us?

It means we don’t have to wait for everything to be resolved before we start living differently. We don’t have to wait until the world makes sense, or until peace finally feels obvious and complete. If we wait for that, we’ll always be waiting.

The story the angels tell doesn’t skip over the middle. It drops us right into it. The shepherds leave the fields, but Rome is still in charge. Mary still has a newborn to care for. The world keeps being the world. And yet…something real has begun.

God begins what will be finished

and invites us to live faithfully in the middle.

That’s what Christmas is. Not the celebration of an ending, but the courage to trust a beginning. The decision to believe that God is already at work, even when the work looks small and fragile and unfinished. Especially when it looks like a baby who needs to be fed and held and protected.

So how can you do that? What would it look like for you to live faithfully in the middle?

Maybe it looks like deciding that you don’t need everything to make sense before you take the next step. It looks like having hope without insisting on quick results. You keep doing the next right thing…even when it doesn’t seem to be changing the big picture.

It looks like practicing peace where you actually have some power. In your words. In how you treat the people closest to you. In how you refuse to give in to cynicism, even when it would be easier.

You show up for the people who are hurting. You stay engaged with the work God has put in front of you, not the work you wish you had, or the work that would finally fix everything.

Just what God has called you to do. And isn’t that the only way peace on earth could ever come…if it’s going to come at all?

Not all at once. Not as a sweeping victory. But through ordinary people choosing to live faithfully in the middle of an unfinished world. That’s how it started, with shepherds going back to their fields and Mary going back to the quiet, demanding work of caring for a child who would one day change everything. And that’s how it still comes, through people who keep showing up, who keep choosing love over fear and faithfulness over withdrawal, trusting that God is already at work and deciding to join in, even when it feels small.

And that’s what makes all of this so uncomfortable for us. We don’t like things that are unfinished. We don’t like living without resolution. We want to know how it’s going to turn out, and when. We want peace to feel obvious and secure, not partial and fragile.

And when so much in our lives and in our world still feels unresolved, that can create a deep anxiety…a fear that maybe we’re stuck here longer than we want to be, or that things won’t actually come together in the end.

And maybe that’s why the tears keep coming. Not just because of what’s been lost, but because of what’s been promised. Tears of hope, and peace, and joy, all tangled together. Because somewhere deep down, we trust that if God has begun this work, then of course God will finish it. Not on our schedule. Not necessarily in our lifetime as we experience time. But finished all the same.

And maybe that strange feeling tonight…that sense that time has thinned, that past and present feel closer than they should…is a small glimpse of how God experiences time. Not moment by moment the way we do, but all at once. Every beginning God has made, every ending God has promised, every act of love that has ever mattered, held together in a single, eternal now.

That might be why this room feels fuller than it looks. We’re aware of those who sat where we sit now, who sang these same songs and carried this same hope before us. But we’re also aware, in a quieter way, of those who will come after us. Of children not yet born, of lives still waiting to unfold. We sense that the story doesn’t end with us…that it keeps moving forward through ordinary human lives.

Because that’s how peace comes. Not all at once, and not from the top down. Peace comes through babies who will grow up. Through children who will learn how to love and fail and try again. Through women and men who will live in their own middles, just as we are now, carrying forward what God has already begun.

Those hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight…not because everything is resolved, but because everything is held. And for one holy night, we’re allowed to feel what God already knows…that the story is still unfolding, and it is in good hands.