Christmas is Just so Analogue

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 24, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Christmas Eve

We spent 40 years working out how to make computers our servants to fulfil every possible task quickly, accurately, and tidily. We’ve spent the last ten years realising we’re becoming servants of the computers, with our desires, anger and impulses manipulated by algorithms and bots. But perhaps the fundamental shift that’s happened over the last 20 years has been the transfer from analogue to digital. ‘Analogue’ originally comes from a family of words rooted in analogy, that’s to say a comparison between two non-identical things where the similarity is illuminating, like saying ‘Life’s a rollercoaster’ when you experience its gut-churning ups and downs. But analogue has come to mean an artefact that runs outside a computer network, and thus doesn’t have data a computer can process and store. The most obvious example is a clock that goes tick tock and has arms that go round a clock face. Remember those? Then there’s a thermometer where the mercury rises up through the narrow glass. What an interesting idea. And a vinyl record that you put in a gramophone and plays music through a stylus. How marvellously quaint.

There’s almost nothing, with the possible exception of unfashionable discriminatory language, that leaves you open to being called Grandad more than an attachment to analogue items. D’you mean you used to buy a roll of film, take it out of a box, get in a panic you were in too bright an area and run inside, refusing help while the camera back was open and you were dangling the new film from the plastic canister, and all the while fear you were going to lose your precious photos, of which you limited yourself to 24 per holiday and wouldn’t see again for three weeks after you sent them away to be printed? And then close the curtains and get auntie round and create a slide show with a projector that kept getting stuck and showing a white screen in place of the actual slide, which was invariably back to front or upside down or overexposed, before the mountain of books slid off the table and the projector fell and got damaged so you had to take the slides individually to the window to get any sense of Niagara Falls. Now tell me Grandad, what part of that wasn’t the best fun?

A month ago I was in a posh consultancy building in central London. We wanted coffee? We typed our request for espresso, cappuccino, latte, macchiato, doppio, ristretto, lungo, freddo and flat white into an iPad, we used an elaborate code to open the door to the meeting room, we signalled to the ground floor when we wanted the lift, and we adjusted the heat, light and ambience of the room using a smooth wall monitor. We watched a classy PowerPoint on a descending screen, and we took notes dutifully on our own devices. We were completely digital.

Unfortunately the technology didn’t help us make any decisions. Which highlights the paradox of the present day. Technology, it seems, can do almost everything, to the point of making human intelligence and interaction almost obsolete. Meanwhile the real issues of life haven’t significantly changed. No one seriously wants to go back to a 1970s family slide show. But in all our sophistication, are we doing more than kidding ourselves we’ve got life sorted?

Which brings us to why we’re here tonight. Christmas is just so analogue. The whole thing needs an event manager. For a start it’s not clean. Middle-eastern houses in the first century located their animals on the ground floor and put the human beings upstairs. It wasn’t great for earthy smells and noise, but it did a good job on the heating bills. The traditional nativity play, with the three innkeepers all being too lazy or busy to help the Holy Family, doesn’t quite capture it. The point is, all the upstairs rooms were taken, so young Mary ended up giving birth down among the animals on the ground floor. If only, we say, there’d been Airbnb, we’d have had a simple digital system to allocate spare space. The whole arrangement would never have passed a health and safety risk assessment on an online portal. But it does show us that Christ who was with the Father at creation is fully part of creation when he’s born, in all its unfortunate smells and alarming noises.

Meanwhile Christmas is not convenient. Nazareth to Bethlehem is a hundred miles. We’re not talking an electric car here, with air conditioning and google maps. If Bethlehem needs an event manager, the journey needs a project manager, with spreadsheets, Gannt charts and critical paths. If you’ve never tried taking a hundred-mile journey on the back of a donkey, keep it that way. Why people think Mary would have been better off on a donkey than walking is anyone’s guess. We’re not in the era of taking an uber. But the story does show us that, just as Joseph and Mary undertook a huge and arduous journey to arrive at Bethlehem, God in Christ went the extra mile to reach us.

Likewise Christmas is not well publicised. There’s two pretty dramatic but still rather clumsy prongs to the PR campaign. The shepherds get a visitation from a company of the heavenly host, and the wise men see a star in the east. It’s hardly a well-planned social media campaign, and there’s no viral video clips of sweet lambs gambolling beside the baby Jesus or the tiny baby knocking over the wise men’s gold gift. Not a single endearing kitten movie in sight. But the story tells us that just as the only people who got the first Christmas are the ones who actually showed up, so Christmas is fundamentally about the fact that God showed up. And still does.

Then it’s fair to say the Christmas story did not go well. If it were a pantomime, the wise men going to Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem might be funny. There’s plenty of scope for a ‘He’s behind you’ sequence, or a ‘He’s in Jerusalem’, ‘Oh no he isn’t,’ ‘Oh yes he is’ exchange. But it’s not a pantomime. And Herod’s not a pantomime villain. He’s set on killing every boy under 2, so alarmed is he by the rumour of a newborn king. So Jesus becomes a refugee while still a babe in arms. By the way, if Nazareth to Bethlehem is 100 miles, Bethlehem to Cairo is 500. That’s a long way for a donkey and a baby. Just imagine – it turns out the Christmas story is about vulnerable people fleeing hundreds of miles having faced persecution in their own country. There doesn’t seem to be a digital way to fix that problem – then or now. But it does show us that Christmas is about God sharing our human adversity – danger, dislocation, despair, displacement, distress.

And the last and perhaps most poignant thing about the Christmas story is no one was around to write it up on a website, online newspaper, blog or substack. We hang on every word of the story, but we can’t pretend it was made up of texts the shepherds sent to their families or voicemail messages the wise men recorded for the folks back home or rapid copy typed on a laptop by a journalist from Bethlehem Daily News. Beyond the dirt of the stable, the inconvenience of the journey, the clumsiness of the news management, the peril of the child at risk of infanticide, the most fragile thing about Christmas is the mysterious tentativeness of the story itself. Which is why it’s completely understandable people dismiss this as an idle fairy story from far away and long ago.

But if they do, they’re missing the heart and the point of the story. Christmas is so analogue. It’s not clean. It’s not convenient. It’s not well publicised. It did not go well. No one was around to write it up. Human reproduction is a complex, risky, emotional, messy and painful thing. Somehow the process of bringing human life into the world involves the texture of relationships, in all their passion and stumbling, the physicality of bodies, in all their beauty and cumbersomeness, and the contortion of birth, in all its agony and joy. At the end, when all goes well, a mother holds a tiny, precarious, yet glorious gift. At Christmas the Father entrusts Jesus to just this experience. They say being born is the most traumatic thing any of us ever goes through. Well, we could say becoming incarnate is the most significant thing God ever goes through. This moment, this birth, represents everything about the extent of God’s commitment to us and the way God commits to us. It’s so fragile. It’s so risky. It’s so easily misunderstood. It’s so precious. It’s so tender. It’s so mysterious. It’s so gentle. It’s so vulnerable. It’s so intimate. It’s so naked. It’s so amazing.

It’s so so so so analogue.