Every Sunday of Advent during the Call to Worship and again during the Children’s Sermon, we have gather around the Advent Wreath. Each week, we have endeavored to ignite hope, peace, joy, and love in our lives and in our world. 

Week by week, we celebrate these gifts that God gives us through the miracle of Christmas. Week by week, the circle of candles grows brighter. And then, on Christmas Eve, something quietly extraordinary happens: we finally light the Christ Candle. I hope you’ll join us on Christmas Eve for this simple yet profound ritual. 

The Christ Candle doesn’t just complete the wreath. It reminds us that the Advent candles of hope, peace, joy, and love are not just things we long for. At Christmas, they become real. They draw breath in a child born in an out-of-the-way corner of the world to parents who had almost nothing. Nothing that is, except courage, trust, and a willingness to say yes to God’s dream.

Christmas matters because it reveals a God who shows up not with spectacle or force, but with vulnerability. A God who arrives not in the halls of power, but in a borrowed stable. A God who chooses human life and human struggle as the way to heal the world.

When we light the Christ Candle on Christmas Eve, we aren’t just celebrating a birth long ago. We’re proclaiming that God is still choosing to be born in unexpected places today. In every act of compassion. In every risk taken for justice. In every moment when love outshines fear.

The four Advent candles remind us of the sacred gifts of Christmas. The Christ Candle, however, is the ultimate reminder of the Source of those gifts: The Light of Christ that enters the world and refuses to be overcome.

And so, as the flame rises from the center of the wreath this Christmas Eve, may we remember what it means: God is with us. Not abstractly or distantly, but right here, choosing again and again to enter our world and our lives with possibility.

May this Christmas renew your spirit. May it rekindle your hope, peace, joy, and love. And may the light of Christ burn brightly in all of us so that we might carry it into the places most in need of healing.

See you in church,

–Rev. Dominic