Sermon

4th January  2026

A lot of fussy parish priests get worked up about the Christmas crib.  They insist that you shouldn’t have both the shepherds and the wise men around the manger at the same time.  They tell us that this is because the shepherds came on the night of the birth of Jesus, whilst the wise men travelled from a long way away and arrived days, even months later.  Or they tell us that we should remember the shepherds visiting the baby Jesus on Christmas night, whereas we think of the wise men on the Feast of the Epiphany.  Or they tell us that we only read of the shepherds in St Luke’s Gospel, while St Matthew alone writes of the wise men.

I spoke in my Christmas sermon about the crib on Bromley High Street, and described how it is a powerful tool for evangelism.  But how the liturgical purists must hate it!  For on one side of the Holy Family is a shepherd with a sheep whilst, on the other side are the kings presenting their gifts.  Now I don’t have a problem with this: indeed I welcome it.  When I see the shepherd and wise men together adoring the Christ child, I don’t see it as liturgically offensive, theologically wrong, or biblically inaccurate.  Rather I see it as a sign of Jesus coming into the world for all, and not for just for any one group.

n the one hand you have the shepherds.  They were local, they were poor, they were jews.  Then you have the wise men, or kings, or whatever they were.  They were foreign, they were rich, they were gentiles.  So, when you have both shepherds and wise men adoring the baby Jesus, they don’t just represent themselves, rather they represent the whole of humanity: be that rich or poor, local or foreign, jew or gentile.

Over time, the iconography of the wise men developed this symbolism even further.  In Renaissance art, they are frequently depicted as being of different generations and from very different parts of the world.  Caspar is a white bearded old man bringing gold from Turkey, Melchior is middle aged and brings frankincense from Arabia, whilst Balthazar is a young black man offering his gift of myrrh from the Yemen.

All you need to do now is to add a shepherdess to cover gender equality, and everyone is represented in just a few visitors to the Bethlehem stable.  This ticks all the boxes on the diversity and inclusion agenda: how the politically correct must rejoice, and the hearts of the woke be gladdened!  And we? … we should recognize that God comes into His world at Christmas for everybody, irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, education, social background, or whatever.  Whether we like it or not, Christ truly comes for all who will believe in him!

Amen