The Kind of Remembering That Makes Room

Christmas Eve 2025 - Luke 2:1–14 (NRSVue)

Deacon Jeffrey Preiss
St. Helen’s Anglican Church, West Point Grey, Vancouver BC

I’ve learned something over the years: when someone is having a hard time, fear, loneliness, grief, one of the most powerful things you can do is surprisingly small.

You can say their name.

Not as a technique. Not as a trick. But as a way of saying: I see you. You’re not a problem to solve. You’re a person. You’re here with me.

Sometimes that’s the moment something shifts, because so much suffering comes with a second wound: invisibility. The feeling that you could disappear and the world wouldn’t notice.

So when we gather tonight to hear the Christmas story again, we’re doing something like that.

We’re speaking a name.

We’re refusing to let a life vanish into the past.

We’re remembering Jesus, not to escape the world, but to learn how to be present to it.

 

And Luke remembers this story in a way that keeps it grounded in the real world.

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” (Luke 2:1)

A decree. Paperwork. An empire counting bodies.

Christmas begins, not with a cozy glow, but with power doing what power does: issuing orders, setting the terms, moving people around. 

Joseph and Mary travel in our story because they have to. Someone far away makes a decision, and ordinary people carry the cost in their feet and their fatigue.

Then Luke gives us the line we’ve heard so often we risk missing how sharp it is:

“She gave birth to her firstborn son… and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room.” (Luke 2:7)

No place.

No space where a birth should happen.

No space in the proper rooms.

No space in the places that would have offered dignity.

That manger isn’t a cute prop. It’s a feeding trough. It’s what you use when the world doesn’t make room.



And here’s the Gospel truth at the centre of Christmas:

    • God does not wait for the world to be ready.

    • God does not wait until everything is tidy.

    • God does not wait until people are kind, or systems are fair, or fear has settled down.

  • God shows up in the world as it is.

That’s why the icon we’re using tonight—the Tent City Nativity—matters.

Take a long look at it.

In it, the holy family isn’t in a tidy stable with clean straw and soft lighting. They’re in a makeshift shelter, surrounded by tents. There’s a fence behind them. The city skyline is in the distance. There’s a fire burning because the night is cold and people are trying to survive it.

The star is still there. The halos are still there. But so is the reality we would often rather not see.

The icon is doing what Luke does: refusing to let the Nativity become decoration.

Because “no room” is not only a line in a carol. It is a truth we recognize in our world, in a hundred modern forms.


And the Christmas story, as the Church remembers it, tells the truth: God meets us in a world that can be crowded and pressured and cruel. And God does not enter that world from a safe distance. God enters it up close.

Then Luke shifts the scene to shepherds.

Not powerful people. Not important people. Night-shift workers out in the open, doing their job in the dark while the world sleeps.

And when the angel appears, Luke says they were terrified. (Luke 2:9)

Of course they were.

A lot of us know fear too. Fear about money. Fear about health. Fear about someone you love. Fear that you’re carrying more than you can carry.

So listen to what God says first:

“Do not be afraid.” (Luke 2:10)

Not denial. Not “everything is fine.” Presence. God meets human fear with a steadier voice.

Then the angel says: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” (Luke 2:10)

For all the people.



And the sign is not a palace, not a weapon, not a display of force:

“You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” (Luke 2:12)

A baby. Vulnerable. Dependent. Laid down in the only place available.

This is the remembered shape of God in the Christmas story:

not domination, but closeness

not spectacle, but solidarity

not comfort, but presence in the uncomfortable places.

And then the sky fills with song:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace…” (Luke 2:14)

Peace.

Not the shallow peace of “let’s keep things pleasant.”

Not the fake peace of looking away.

Biblical peace is deeper: safety, wholeness, dignity. Peace with justice inside it.



So here’s the turn.

Remembering Jesus is not passive.

If we remember a God born where there was “no room,” then we cannot accept a world that keeps saying “no room” to people made in God’s image.

So don’t let this be a beautiful story we admire and then put back on the shelf until next year.

Remembering Jesus means we leave here and make room—not in theory, not in sentiment, but in the real places where people are being squeezed out.

Make room in your attention for the person everyone talks over.

Make room in your life for truth-telling and repair.

Make room in this city for housing, care, safety, and dignity—by how you give, how you vote, how you advocate, how you refuse cruelty dressed up as “policy.”

If the world still says “no room,” then the Church—us, gathered here tonight—must become the people who say, with our lives: Yes. Here.

That is what it means to remember Jesus. To say his name—Jesus—on this most holy night.