I don’t usually write my sermons down, but for I did for this Christmas Eve 2025. Mostly for myself, so I can remember my words. If you like to read sermons, may this one encourage you this Christmas season.

Grace and peace to you from the Christ – child that brought love into the world for you.

For my storytime sermon, congregation, you know how much I love it when you help me. So when you hear me say, “Everything is…” you say, “Just fine.”

Let’s practice. “Everything is…” you say, “Just fine.”

I want to share two short stories with you today. The first is about a dream, which fits beautifully into the sermon series we’ve been living into this Advent/ Christmas season entitled: “For all who dream.”

Here is the first story. My son, who passed away one year ago yesterday, used to come home from school, and I would ask him how his day was. He would always answer, “Just fine. Everything was just fine.” Oh, how I long to hear those words from him again.

Thinking about these words, a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to receive a message from a friend of mine. You see, my friend is a dreamer—someone who has visions. She wrote to tell me about two dreams she had involving Jacob. In the last dream, he told her to tell me,

“Everything is… just fine.”

She said he was with my dad, my husband’s dad, and maybe even my brother.

As much as I love her words—none of it makes sense to me. Not his death. Not her dreams.

The second story happened just last week when I was at Great Clips. I was getting a trim, and the man sitting next to me—who was bald—was having the few hairs on the top of his head plucked out. He said to me and his hairdresser, “I have a problem. I’ve had five accidents with deer in the last two years.”

Then Mary, his hairdresser, said, “I have a problem too—I have too many blankets! I donated twenty blankets to Goodwill last week.”

They both turned to me, and I said—without knowing why, because I never know why I say the things I say until it’s time to write a sermon—“That reminds me of the Christmas story!”

And why?

Because none of what they were talking about made any sense to me at all.

And neither does the Christmas story.

Think about it.

The Christmas story doesn’t make sense because God shows up in all the wrong places. Not in a palace, but in a stable. Not to the powerful, but to shepherds who worked the night shift and smelled like sheep. Not with clarity and control, but with angels who confuse people and dreams that disrupt plans. A teenage girl says yes to something she cannot possibly understand. A baby is born into danger, poverty, and uncertainty. None of it is neat. None of it is efficient. None of it follows the rules we expect God to follow.

And that is exactly why it is good news.

Because if God only came when things made sense, then God would never come to us. God would not come into grief that has no answers, into dreams we don’t know what to do with, into conversations at Great Clips about deer accidents and too many blankets. God would not come into lives like ours.

But the Christmas story tells us that God comes anyway.

God comes when everything feels broken, confusing, and unfinished—and whispers, “Everything is…
Just fine.“

Not because everything is easy. Not because everything is fixed. But because God is present right in the middle of it. In the not-knowing. In the sorrow. In the strange, ordinary, nonsensical moments of our lives.

A baby in a manger doesn’t explain our pain. But that baby promises that God is with us in it. That love is born into the mess. That hope shows up where we least expect it.

So maybe Christmas doesn’t make sense.

And maybe that’s the miracle.

Because even when it doesn’t make sense—God still comes, and quietly, gently says:
“Everything is…
Just fine.“

Amen.