Sermon Illustrations for Christmas and Advent

Luke mentions the manger three times in a handful of verses. When a writer repeats a detail like that, he is pointing at it. A manger is a feed trough. It is where the animals eat. It would not have been clean, and it did not smell of anything anyone puts in a candle. The angel gives it to the shepherds as the identifying sign — this is how you will know which baby. Not a palace, not a name, not a star. A feed trough.

Matthew opens with a genealogy most readers skip. It repays attention, because it includes women, which was unusual, and because of which women. Tamar, who posed as a prostitute to secure her rights from her father-in-law. Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho. Ruth, a Moabite — a foreigner from a nation Israel was forbidden to intermarry with. And "the wife of Uriah," whom Matthew pointedly does not name Bathsheba, keeping the adultery visible in the phrasing. This is the family tree of the Messiah, and it has been assembled to be read.

Shepherds appear on every Christmas card, which has drained the detail of its content. In the first century they were low-status manual workers, ritually unclean much of the time by the nature of the job, and generally not regarded as reliable witnesses. The announcement of the birth is made to them first. Not to the temple authorities, not to Herod, not to anyone in Jerusalem who mattered — to the night shift, in a field.

Matthew 2 does not stop at the wise men. Herod, having been outmanoeuvred, orders the killing of the boys in Bethlehem two years old and under. The holy family become refugees in Egypt. This is in the Christmas narrative. It is simply never on the card. And it means the incarnation is not a story about a world that was ready. It is a story about God entering a world exactly as violent as the one outside the church door.

How do I preach Christmas without being sentimental?

Put the specifics back — the feed trough, the occupation and census, the compromised genealogy, the flight into Egypt. The sentimentality comes from the cultural retelling, not from the text.

What about people who find Christmas painful?

Say so out loud, early, and briefly. Matthew's own account includes a massacre and a refugee family, so acknowledging grief is faithful to the text rather than a concession to it.