‘You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer and redeemer. Amen.

Tonight, on this most holy night, we gather to celebrate the story of a birth. One birth, in one place, among countless births across the world. No headlines. No royal announcement. No social media countdown. Just a baby. And yet – somehow – the ground begins to shift. Old prophecies are dusted off. Power feels… uneasy.

This baby – this body – does nothing, says nothing, claims nothing. And still, this is what the Incarnation does: it shakes foundations and shows us where we’ve been building on shifting sand.

Because when God chooses to enter the world as a body, that body does not arrive politely, asking for a quiet corner of our lives. It arrives as a question: a sharp, searching, unsettling question, pressing on all our buried assumptions about power and worth, about whose body matters and which bodies count.

For all our crib scenes and carols, our Christmas trees and tinsel, Christmas is not sentimental theology. Christmas is disruptive theology. This baby does not come to us as an idea, a doctrine, or a religious symbol. This baby comes as a body: vulnerable, dependent, uncontrollable. And this is the scandal of Christmas: that God becomes skin and breath and bone; God becomes us.

We can cope with God as an idea. We’re good at arguing about God, defining God, writing essays about God. But God as a body? That is something else entirely. For a body can be targeted. A body can be rejected. A body can be labelled, excluded, controlled, made unsafe. And the moment God takes on a human body God chooses to reside inside all of that: all that danger, rejection, vulnerability, pain. From that moment on, our understanding of what it means to be human – our anthropology – is on trial.

The truth is, we’ve become rather skilled at sorting bodies. We divide them into good bodies and bad bodies, acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and disposable. We build our societies, our politics, even our laws, around these categories, these binaries, these acts of “othering”.

And into the middle of this anxious, divided world God becomes one body among many. Not powerful. Not idealised. Not safe and distant. But real flesh and blood: fragile, dependent, present, precarious, without privilege. And almost immediately, the conversations start. Not about love, but about control. Not about welcome, but about management. Because when some-body does not fit our neat groups and tidy tribes, we hurry to place it, define it, contain it – to make sure it doesn’t disturb or disrupt us.

This is the logic behind the binaries of our age: Who is in and who is out. Who is “us” and who is “them”. Who is deemed fully human and who is not.

These binaries offer us the comfort of simplicity – as if a human being could ever be neatly sorted – but that simplicity comes at a terrible cost: it hardens hearts, demands scapegoats, and makes the world ever more unstable and violent. It shrinks our image of God down to something we think we can control.

And as if that were not disturbing enough, the Incarnation does not come to do away with human violence. It comes to expose it. A defenceless body exposes our fear. A different body exposes our prejudice. A vulnerable body exposes our cruelty. A holy body exposes our hierarchies.

Before this body has spoken a single word, the sheer presence of this body begins to unveil who we really are. Because our culture wars are not, at heart, about abstract ideas. They are about bodies: Whose body is believed. Whose body is welcomed. Whose body is legislated against. Whose body is named “a problem”.

And in the middle of all of this stands this body – God incarnate, utterly powerless, a silent, forensic, unyielding question to every generation.

What if the very bodies we struggle to welcome, the very bodies we “other” – disabled bodies, LGBTI+ bodies, refugee and immigrant bodies – what if these are precisely the bodies in which God has chosen to dwell? Because that is the deeper revelation of the Incarnation: not only that God became a body, but that in becoming a body, God has changed forever how we speak of any body.

‘The grace of God has appeared’, writes Paul to Titus, ‘bringing salvation to all.’

Not to some of us. Not only to the respectable, the majority, the easily included. To all of us – to every-body, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality.

Jesus is born, not to feed our hunger for certainty, but to bring our false certainties crashing down. Not to build up our silos and tribes, but to tear down the walls of our prejudice. Not to reinforce our sense of righteous belonging, but to shine a fierce, piercing light on our privilege.

Until we finally dare to embrace every-body as wildly, gracefully stubbornly precious as the body God chose to wear, we will not have embraced the truth of Christmas.

For on that day when every-body – disabled, displaced, queer, scarred, ageing, neurodivergent – is finally received as sacrament – as holy ground – this great feast of Christmas will no longer be our story about Christ, but Christ’s own revolution in our midst, and finally Christ will be at the centre of Christmas.

Amen.