Worship - 21 December 2025

Summary of this week's theme

On Monday, I watched a large yellow marker buoy being tossed around by the waves at S’Algar. After last weekend’s strong winds, it had clearly broken free from the cable that anchored it in place. I thought about hauling it ashore, but each time I approached, a wave pushed it farther away. It struck me as a fitting metaphor for something that has been troubling me for a while: the way supposedly Christian values in the UK and North America have become detached from their moorings.

‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’ can sound appealing, but the slogan often floats free of the gospel it claims to defend. Our culture risks keeping Christian symbols while losing their substance. Christmas pageants persist, yet much of the story has faded into a comfortable blur.

Billy Bragg names this problem sharply in his song about putting Christ back into Christmas, exposing the hypocrisy of invoking Christ while promoting division and exclusion, forgetting Christ’s welcoming nature. The Christ of Christmas is far more challenging than many slogans allow.

Matthew’s birth story already points us in this direction. Surprisingly, it opens not with Mary, but with Joseph and an angel. At first, this can feel disappointingly patriarchal. Joseph’s initial plan - to dismiss Mary quietly - hardly seems heroic. Yet something deeper unfolds. Urged by the angel, Joseph chooses to stand with Mary and take responsibility for her child, despite the cost of gossip and suspicion. In doing so, he gives Jesus a family, a home, and a place within Israel’s story, and offers a model of adoption and inclusion that echoes through the life of the Church.

Joseph is entrusted with naming the child: Jesus - Yeshua - ‘God saves.’ The name reaches back to Joshua and the promise that God would be with the people wherever they went. Emmanuel, ‘God with us,’ is not a contradiction but an interpretation: God’s saving presence at work here and now.

Matthew tells the story this way to draw us in. Like Jesus, we belong to a broader lineage than biology alone. We are part of God’s extended family, sustained by generations of faith and care. And like Joseph, we are invited into supporting roles in God’s ongoing work. It takes many people to bring the divine to birth.

This, then, is the Christ we need to put back into Christmas: not a slogan or a weapon, but the one who stands with the vulnerable and welcomes the outsider. A marker buoy, after all, is no use if it’s just sloshing around in the surf.