A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 25, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Christmas Day
There was once a little boy who had a big infectious smile. You never saw that smile more than when he loved to take his plastic wheelie bus around the different rooms of his house. There were only three rooms downstairs: the kitchen, the sitting room and the office. Each got many visits several times a day, either when he sat on the bus and manipulated the forward motion with his feet and legs, or when he stood behind the bus and pushed it while keeping his balance by holding the raised railing. The bus had a central section with a flap that lifted up. The little boy liked the effect of raising the flap and letting it slam down on the bus, an action that would invariably be followed by a gurgle that said something along the lines of ‘Aren’t I gorgeous?’.
The little boy was of an age when Christmas was beginning to turn from a mass of starry lights and constant visitors to a prospect of serious present-receiving and incoming consumer goods. Just like the first day he’d tasted chocolate, an event that caused an ecstatic smile of delight, Christmas was starting to feel like a uniquely positive event with little besides goodies and new toys.
Life in the rest of the house continued as normal. Decorations were hung, favourite shows were watched on TV, family was called to make plans for getting together. Until the moment came when life started to become difficult. Certain things were missing, and the absence of those things made the regular pattern of the day problematic. It was hard to understand what was going wrong, and whether it was a series of coincidences or there was actually more to it.
The little boy decided it was time to branch out with his toy bus. One thing he’d never done was to take it upstairs and wend its way thought the bathroom and each of the bedrooms. He was just old enough to be trusted without a stair gate to protect him from a rapid descent, so he had freedom to drag the bus slowly up to the top. After a day or two in his new surroundings, he had an idea. He thought to himself, ‘I wonder what would happen if I pushed the bus down the stairs without me on it.’ There’s few things more exciting to a little boy than a dramatic scene of a bus plunging down the stairs with attendant noise and calamity. And so it was that others in the house rushed to the hallway in concern when they heard the clattering sound of a plastic bus descending to the ground floor bump after crash after bang.
And at that moment everything that had been mysterious in the preceding days of anxiety was explained. Because once the bus reached the bottom of the stairs, up popped the plastic flap. And inside the small area at the heart of the bus were four items. There was the TV remote control. There was the mobile phone. There was the address book (you need to recall this was at a time when the phone wasn’t used very often and didn’t have an address book on it). And there was one final item: the baby Jesus from the nativity set. In his non-verbal, unafraid, and uncomplicated way, the little boy had gone to the centre of the family’s life and taken into his heart the four items at the heart of Christmas. Which is why life had been ceasing to function over the previous few days.
It was an impressive performance, and demonstrated one should never underestimate what a young child sees, hears and understands. But it also shows us the heart of the Christmas story. At Christmas, God assembles the most precious things. God assembles the whole creation, in the form of the creatures of the stable. God assembles the humblest people of Israel, in the form of the excluded shepherds who slept outside. God assembles the searching soul of the gentiles, in the form of the wise men from the east. And God assembles ordinary human beings, in the form of Mary and Joseph. That stable is like the inner container of the little boy’s bus. It’s here that the word is made flesh, God comes among us, heaven and earth are brought together, time and eternity meet. All the things that matter are squeezed into that stable. Christmas is about all the things that matter, in a tiny space, all at the same time. At Christmas, the bus falls down from on high, and the inner container of God’s heart opens. And it turns out what’s in the inner container of God’s heart is you and me. That’s the mystery from before the foundation of the world.
And the little boy who is totally God, and totally us, looks up at us, from his manger, and holds our gaze, with a gurgle that says, ‘Aren’t I gorgeous?’
