The First Sunday After Christmas, December 28, 2025

The First Sunday after Christmas is often described as a “low Sunday,” similarly to the Sunday immediately after Easter. It’s a great day for supply preachers as many preachers try to take this Sunday off, recuperating from the activities of Advent and Christmas, and not wanting to face greatly reduced congregations. In contrast, I’ve enjoyed preaching the week after Christmas, and will do so again this year at the congregation where I serve as Theologian in Residence.
On the first Sunday after Christmas, I celebrate a mini-Christmas. We will have carol singing (at least five!), joyful readings, and encourage children to take leadership roles. After church, we have the church community bring cookies and cakes from their Christmas festivities. Often, I diverge from the lectionary to maintain a spirit of joy. This year, I will do the same. The Gospel from the Sunday after Christmas describes the Flight of the Holy Family and the Slaughter [Massacre] of the Innocent Children. This “R-Rated” scripture is hardly the word I want to share in an intergenerational service. The world is filled with tragic beauty, as Whitehead avers, and some days we need to focus on the beauty of life rather than the violence that traumatizes body, mind, and spirit.
This year, I will preach on Simeon and Anna, described in Luke 2:22-38, focusing on the need to keep our senses open to God’s coming in our lives, a theme that even the younger children can understand, highlighted by the question, “What are you looking for?” (Still, in this commentary series, I will focus on the readings of the day, including the frightening tale of a violent king’s quest to destroy Jesus and his family. I conclude this commentary with an early draft of my December 28 sermon.)
The prophet Isaiah proclaims God’s glory reflected in the moral and spiritual arcs of history, reminding us that recalling God’s providence transforms our lives and communities. Despite the challenges, the people have faced, gratitude is the only appropriate response to God’s saving presence. Gratitude changes us and inspires care for others. God has done great things for God’s people even in the midst of the Babylonian conquest. God’s grace and providence are prevenient in nature and make a way forward even when see no way ahead. God’s call to abundance is constant but will we respond in gratitude and lovingkindness?
Right now, many of us struggle to rejoice and dance: our nation’s Nebuchadnezzar builds monuments to himself even as he seeks to destroy the social safety net and protections for vulnerable people and the LGBTQ+ community. Each morning brings another offense against the moral and spiritual arc of history, and many of our Christian kin seem content with domination rather than partnership and deportation rather than welcome of undocumented Christian (and other) residents. Yet, the seeds of justice are germinating. “Trouble don’t last forever,” as the spiritual chants, and prevaricating potentates and their minions will join Nebuchadnezzar in the trash heap of history. Don’t let the troubles our leaders formulate take your Alleluias away from you! As long as you have a song of praise, like Paul and Silas in prison, you can face the tyrants and troublers knowing God will have the final word for our and their lives – and it is love and justice.
Psalm 148 proclaims a world of praise. “All nature sings and around rings the music of the spheres.” Similar to Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun, Psalm 148 delights in God’s loving wisdom inspiring praise in all creation, human and non-human alike. A world of praise is a realm of gratitude, wonder, awe, and justice seeking. All nature is alive. Open your eyes and lift up your voice in prayer and praise. The disenchanted world of modernity gives way to the reenchanted world of unity with all creation.
The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that the God who creates the universe and all things comes to us as one of us and suffers with us, a child, a companion, and a persecuted one, living our lives, to transform and save our lives. God is not far off: God is the fellow sufferer who understands. God in Christ becomes human so that we, in the spirit of early Christian philosophy, might share in his divinity. In Jesus, we are saved in our tragedy and trauma, our sin and disobedience. We are also healed to give God glory and heal the world.
In the Gospel reading, once more we encounter Joseph the dreamer. The One who spoke in a dream about the uniqueness of Mary’s pregnancy is now giving Joseph warning of danger. God communicates in dreams and through the unconscious as well as conscious mind. We are part of an environment of revelation in which every moment can awaken us not only to wonder but to divine guidance. God’s call comes in dreams and also in protests, in synchronous encounters and intentional spiritual practices, in the cries of the poor and the delights of children.
Yet, the call of God is cautionary as well as jubilant. Joseph is warned of Herod’s diabolical scheme to kill the Christ Child, and the Holy Family takes flight, immigrants and asylum seekers, refugees hoping for hospitality in a foreign land. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are no different than today’s Jesús, María y José seeking asylum for themselves and their child in the United States. When we strike out in cruelty toward undocumented residents, we are striking out against Jesus and his family. When we call Jesús, María y José thugs and rapists, we are debasing God’s image in vulnerable refugees, whose aims are the same as our own. Appropriate immigration laws are essential but they must be meted out with justice and respect. Every undocumented resident is Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in disguise and as we have done unto them, we do unto God.
Herod wreaks vengeance on the children of Jesus’ hometown just as potentates and politicians wreak destruction on the most vulnerable members of our society and nations across the globe. Using children as political pawns or neglecting their basic needs goes against God’s vision of Shalom. Jesus is every child, and our obligation is to see Jesus in the hungry, houseless, sick, and traumatized regardless of their nation of origin or homeland. God sees the child in Sudan, the DACA teen, or the undocumented toddler with the same love that God sees our US American children, and our mandate is to ensure wholeness and abundant life for every child, without cost or exception. In the spirit of the prophet Amos, those who fail to experience the cries of the poor, who disregard the unhoused as they enjoy their affluence, will experience a famine of hearing God’s word.
Our celebration of Christmas can be year-round. We can experience the childhood delight of Christmas morning and have a carol in our hearts and on our lips to get us through life’s challenges. God is here. God’s beauty surrounds us. We can awaken to the Christmas spirit year-round though prayer and praise and hospitality and justice-seeking. “Let heaven and nature sing.”
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Alternative Sermon Theme
What are you looking for? (Simeon and Anna)
Luke 2:22-38
Christmas is the season of lights and stars, of surprise and wonder, and we want that to last all year round. We want life to be brighter, hugs to be longer, words to be kinder, and love to be stronger.
In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, Annie Dillard tells of seeing the tree with lights as she walked in the woods near her home.
One day, I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.
The author continues:
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
The light that shines in the darkness had been there all along, but Dillard had been too preoccupied with her own personal drama to see it!
Poet William Blake, whose words inspired by the naming of the rock group “The Doors,” asserts that “if the doors of perception are cleansed, we will see everything as it is – Infinite.”
Light fills our spirits! We will see wonder and beauty everywhere. We will reclaim our imagination and see angels in boulders and children of God in ICE agents.
What we see depends on what we’re looking for. But we need as poet Mary Oliver says to “Pay attention. Be astonished. Then…tell about it.”

That’s the heart of today’s scripture and the Christmas message for 2025. Two senior citizens have been waiting for the Messiah. For decades, they have come to the Jerusalem Temple, opening their aging eyes to look at each passerby…going beyond appearances to see the reality beneath pauper’s rags and privileged pomp and circumstance. Their trust was that one day – if they kept their senses alert – they would see God’s Prophet and Healer.
A young couple come to the Temple bearing their first-born child. Working folk who can only afford a few pigeons to sacrifice at the altar, while others purchase lambs and make big donations to honor their children. An ordinary couple. You see them everywhere. Nothing to notice. Except if you have the eyes of faith.
That day, Simeon and Anna see what everyone misses. Simeon and Anna see infinity in an ordinary family and salvation in an infant. They see the Infant Christ because they were looking. Simeon shouts for joy. His journey has ended. Now he can rest in peace.
Anna laughs and dances: eighty-four years old, she shouts good news. Her journey is just beginning and from now she will tell about it. Till the day she dies, she will sing God’s praises and tell about the little baby, Emmanuel, Jesus, God with us to heal and save us.
What are you looking for? As Howard Thurman counsels, the work of Christmas is just beginning. The Christ child has been celebrated, we’re thinking of taking down the tree, but the Spirit of Christmas has just started…if we keep looking for the Child who will change everything…the Child who challenges us to celebrate Christmas all year long.
On this final Sunday of the year, with just a week to go before the coming of the magi and the start of Epiphany, the Christ Child is here. This Child is among us. We can see the light of a star on the horizon; we can sing carols all year long; our hearts can expand three sizes like the Grinch.
It’s all about seeing: seeing the light, being the light, and bringing the light.
Guided by a star that lights every day, every day is Christmas, full of love and gifts and the opportunity to bring joy to the world, for God is here.
Merry Christmas!

Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, MD and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. He is the author of over eighty books, including Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet; Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-Human World; Messy Incarnation: Meditations on Christ in Process; and Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries; and the upcoming Three Wise Wisdom: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna (volume seven in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” series.  He can be reached at www.brucepperly.com.