Video of the service is here.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“If you can awaken inside the familiar/and discover it new/you need never/leave home” (Ted Kooser, Local Wonders, 94). If you can awaken inside the familiar, and discover it new, you need never leave home. That was written by a poet named Ted Kooser about a painting that made a familiar street take on a new light. And it’s not a bad place for us to start this evening as we consider something that is very familiar to us; a street we have walked down so many times before: this account—or maybe this idea—of the Christmas story. Even the word “Christmas” brings with it all sorts of baggage: memories, and traditions, and smells and tastes, and even its own kind of feeling: the “Christmas spirit,” we call it. And so I wonder if we can—if it’s even possible—to awaken inside this familiar story and discover it new.

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