Wonder: a Christmas sermon
By Kenneth Padley
24 December 2025
Oh holy Child of Bethlehem;
descend to us we pray. Amen.
It’s all just something for the children isn’t it? If we look dispassionately at Christmas, we might dismiss it as mere entertainment for our offspring. They cover the house with tasteless decorations. They strew ripped wrapping across the lounge. They play obsessively with new toys – for moments at least. They mow down their elders with gleaming bicycles. And they empty the kitchen fridge by Boxing Day.
And if domestic Christmas seems all about children, then the cynic will say the same about the religious side of the festival. After all, the birth of Jesus has inspired countless school nativity plays. Here is one, described by Clare Bevan:
Here is an inn with a stable
Equipped with some straw and a chair.
Here is an angel in bed sheets,
With tinsel to tie back her hair.Here is a Joseph who stammers,
And tries to remember his lines.
Here is a teacher in anguish,
Who frantically gestures and signs.Here is a Mary with freckles,
Whose baby is plastic and hard.
Here is a donkey in trousers,
With ears made from pieces of card.
And the poem continues like this until the last verse:
Here is our final production,
And though it’s all held up with pins.
The parents will love every minute –
For this is where Christmas begins.
This is where Christmas begins. It is in the activity of children that we glimpse the truths of this season. Why should this be so?
There are certain skills and gifts which children possess that adults have abandoned or forgotten – things loved long since and lost awhile. Some of these capacities are physical:
- Think how many adults can’t hear the squeak of bats.
- Or that few middle-aged people do gymnastics.
- Or how many grown men sing soprano?
But beyond the realm of the physical there are emotional and spiritual realities to which the young are more attuned than the old. Children have enthusiasm, joy, and imagination. And above all else, they have wonder.
Wonder is our response to intense beauty, truth or feeling. Wonder runs down our spines and tingles our toes. G.K. Chesterton described wonder as ‘the forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence’. And he continued ‘the object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder’.[1] And it is this sunrise of wonder – a particular sunrise – because wonder can only be experienced here and now.
And children are more naturally attuned to ‘now’ things than adults. They live in the present simply because they have less past. By contrast, adults have been through the traumatic transition which we falsely call ‘growing up’. We have seen too much to remember just how valuable each instant is. We have become anaesthetised to wonder. By thinking that we comprehend everything, we reveal that we know very little.
So to all those of school age here tonight, I want to say ‘sorry’. I want to say sorry on behalf of adults when we patronise you, when we pretend that we have all the answers and that you should always listen to us. (You should sometimes listen to us. But we need to listen to you as well.) For there are things which you sense that we have forgotten. Not just bats, but angels also. You may not always recognise this when it is happening, but it is true. Never grow deaf to it; always remember it; never get so bogged down in adult stuff that you cease to wonder, that you forget just how exciting Christmas is. Think about the magic of cold and dark and snow. Think about the haunting beauty of carols. Think about the dazzle of shimmering multi-coloured lights which hint at something beyond electricity. And value it all for how it makes you feel.
For the sad truth is that adults usually set thinking above feeling – and that is not always the best thing to do.[2] In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens personified the worst of this tendency in the school superintendent Mr Gradgrind.[3] Gradgrind drives wonder out of his pupils by relentlessly pursuing facts and figures. Dickens quotes him as saying, “No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor.”
One barrier which adult Christians set up against Christmas wonder comes from a tendency to dissect the stories of the birth of Jesus like a professor. We look at narratives such as the one we heard from Luke’s gospel and our first reaction is not ‘wow!’, but ‘how?’ We identify more with Mary’s first response to Gabriel – ‘can this be?’ rather than her second – ‘let it be’. We ask awkward questions such as ‘did the Romans really send people to their hometowns for taxing?’ and ‘how can even wise men follow a star?’ or ‘just what is a virgin birth?’
Now don’t get me wrong. Christians should not abandon reason when they come to worship. We must always be probing our tradition for meaning and relevance – and also open to those with doubts and views that differ from our own. Rather my point is this: do not become so bogged down with facts that you lose sight of truth – because in losing sight of truth our wonder is suffocated. At the very least, the stories of wonder which we have about the baby Jesus would not exist if people had not wondered at the adult Jesus.
So, in summary, I encourage you to meet Christmas first with your heart and then your mind, not the other way around.[4] If we do this, we imitate those who greeted the adult Jesus with awe and trembling. Their reaction exposes that behind the man – whatever the details of his narrative – was Truth. In wondering at him like children they knew that God had become a child among them.
During the term ahead here at the Cathedral we will be exploring fundamentals of Christianity like this, as groups of adults and teenagers prepare for baptism and confirmation at Easter. If you’d like to find out more about these and other opportunities to dig deeper, we’d love to talk with you. Please speak with one of the clergy after this service or send us an email through the website.
Towards the end of his life, the Holocaust survivor Abraham Heschel said, ‘I did not ask for success: I asked for wonder’. And Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General, said ‘God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by … a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.’[5]
Not just bats but angels also: Christmas is about children, because God became a child, so that as children we might receive him.
[1] Cf. Mayne, Michael, The Sunrise of Wonder: Letters for the Journey (London: Fount, 1995), 303.
[2] Cf. McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary.
[3] Cf. Mayne, Sunrise, 109.
[4] Cf. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Christmas Eve Celebration: A Dialogue ed. Tice, Terrence N. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010).
[5] Both in Mayne, Sunrise, 11.