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Good evening and Merry Christmas. I’m really glad you’re here tonight. As I’ve been preparing this sermon, I’ve been thinking about you, wondering what has been on your mind lately, what you’ve been talking about with family and friends over the holidays, what keeps surfacing, what feels pressing, what feels heavy, what feels hopeful. The holidays have a way of doing that, don’t they? They draw those questions out into the open. They bring both joy and ache to the same table: gratitude and anxiety, love and grief, the way things are and the way we wish they were.
I suspect Mary and Joseph were carrying on very similar conversations on that long journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. They weren’t cruising through the countryside in a serenity sedan to Disneyland. They were clomping along on a donkey because the emperor of the world had issued a decree. A census. Ordered by Caesar Augustus. Carried out under Quirinius, the governor of Syria. That census would have been on everyone’s minds: at every roadside stop, at every crowded dinner table.
And Mary and Joseph, knowing their Scriptures, would have been deeply troubled by it. In the Old Testament the people of Israel were warned that taking a census was spiritually hazardous unless God’s sovereignty was explicitly acknowledged by way of a small offering, a token payment, if you will, that symbolically right ordered the cosmos: God first; Caesar second. To forget this, the Old Testament says, invites disaster. (Exodus 30:12) To clarify, scripture doesn’t forbid counting people; it warns against confusing measurement with ownership; it cautions against turning humans into data, assets, or leverage for the benefit of a few, if not one. The people of Israel knew this lesson well. King David once ordered a census without acknowledging God’s sovereignty, and the result, as the story goes, was catastrophic. (2 Samuel 24)
Mary and Joseph knew this story. And now here was Augustus, an emperor who called himself the son of a god, ordering the entire known world to be counted. So why would he do this? Power? Taxation? Money? Surveillance… to know who lives where and with whom. To manage people at scale. You can imagine how divisive this census would have been, how it would have sparked anxiety, arguments, fear, even broken relationships, which, I might add, fits nicely into an imperial strategy as old as time: divide and conquer. That’s what empires do.
Today, two thousand years later, scholars still debate whether Augustus and Quirinius lined up with Luke’s account. They write books. They present papers. They debate at conferences. They parse footnotes. And then they go to the bar together. Because even someone as powerful as Augustus, who ruled the known world, reshaped history, moved entire populations with a word, eventually became… a footnote. Interesting, yes. Important, once. But no longer particularly relevant. The child born in Bethlehem, on the other hand, has never stopped being relevant, has never stopped changing the world. Two thousand years later, here we are, not because of an emperor, or census, or a decree. But because of a child. A child who carries hope – the hope of the world.
And here is one of the deepest truths of this night: where the most hope resides, the most care is required, because hope is never self-protecting. Hope is fragile. It can be nurtured, or it can be crushed. And God, in choosing to place the hope of the world not in an army, or a system, or an empire, but in a child, shows us something essential about how God works: God entrusts hope only where love is willing to show up, slow down and be tended. Augustus ruled with urgency, with speed, with force. Because empires always sense, whether consciously or not, their own fragility. They know time is limited. They know they won’t last. And so, they move fast to get as much as they can, as quickly as they can, before it all comes toppling down, or they die and become a footnote.
But God moves differently. The kingdom of God does not arrive in a rush. It arrives with patience. Slowly. Quietly. Vulnerably. God came as a child to be cared for. And slow is risky. Slow makes a space where mistakes can happen. Slow allows for exposure. But slow also allows for depth, for relationships to form, for endurance to mature, for things to take root. Fast alone. Slow together. The way of God is not a “go fast” model. It’s a “go far” together model, relationally, like our relational God… one and three: Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Our model is rooted in relationship, rather than domination, in love, rather than control, in partnership rather, than coercion.
In Jesus, God invites us not to conquer the world, but to tend it as a gardener, nurturing, patiently shaping what is becoming. I recently visited the bonsai garden down in Federal Way, on the Weyerhaeuser property. If you’ve ever stood close to those trees, you know how astonishing they are. Some of them are decades, maybe centuries, old. They are not rushed. They are clipped and pruned with extraordinary forethought and patience. Nothing about a bonsai is hurried. And yet, over time, something strong emerges. Balanced. Resilient. Beautiful. (Like this church). The bonsai is a quiet testimony to the patience of God: a metaphor for the slow, careful shaping of what it means to grow humans.
I saw that patience in an ordinary, yet sacred way the other day. I was watching my mother-in-law watch my son cook. She’s an expert cook. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She understands spices and broths and timing, intuitively. My son has that same intuition and is experimenting with it. Figuring it out. Like a chemist with an explorer’s curiosity, passionate, deft and creative. My mother-in-law sat there at the counter and watched. She could have stepped in. She has opinions. She would have stepped in if I’d been cooking. But now she didn’t. She sat there, making space.
And what I realized was this: what she was investing in wasn’t the perfect soup. She was investing in hope, hope for all the soup that he will make over the rest of his life. She understood that life isn’t about exact measurements or flawless execution. It’s about the enduring relationship, between the cook and the craft, between the people who share the meal, between the grandmother and her grandson, between Mumsy and Desmond. It is personal, which is why God came personally, as a baby with a name. Jesus. Immanuel. God with us. That is the enduring relationship we celebrate tonight.
A relationship bigger than data, than a census. Bigger than an emperor. Bigger than time. Empires come and go. Augustus and Quirinius included. What lasts is not power, but love. Not speed, but connection. Not control, but hope. And we see this clearly in Jesus, the child who reveals what hope in humanity is all about. Christmas is not only about the birth of Jesus. It is about the revelation of who we are: made in God’s image, invited into partnership with God, trusted with hope, called to tend a fragile, beautiful world, and to love one another.
And that is the invitation of this night to you and me. To slow down. To notice. To care for what matters most. To choose relationships over efficiency. To trust that patient, vulnerable love when lived out together, goes farther than power ever could. The empire will pass, the census fade, but the child remains. And because the child remains, so too does hope, visible, gathered here, in this room, among people who choose to show up.
Tonight, hope looks like what it has always looked like: people rooted in relationship, tended over time, grounded in a place… in this case, the neighborhood church; with other neighborhood churches all over the world – because of this child. Which is why we say here at Epiphany: The neighborhood church is the hope of the world. You are that hope, gathered on Christmas Eve. I’m glad you’re here. Merry Christmas.