My dear brothers and sisters, our Saviour is born this day. With the angels, let us rejoice! Sadness should find no place on this the birth day of Life Itself; on the birth day of Life Himself. With the fear of death removed by His Life, let us be filled with gladness, because of our own promised immortality. No one is left out or excluded from sharing in this cheerfulness, for the reason of our joy is common to all people. Our Lord, the Conquerer of sin and death, came that He might bring deliverance to all.
Let the sinner rejoice, for he is invited to grace. Let the Gentiles exult, for they are called to life. For the Son of God, in the fullness of time, born of woman, has taken upon Himself the nature of our humanity, as the unsearchable depths of the divine counsel hath decreed, in order that the inventor of death, the Devil, by that very nature which he defeated in the Garden, would be himself overcome.
And in this contest that was undertaken for us, the battle was waged in accordance with a great and wondrous law of justice. For the all-powerful God engaged in combat with His most bitter enemy, not in the strength of His own divine Majesty, but in our human infirmity; confronting him with our very form and nature, and sharing likewise in our mortality; like us all in thing, except for sin.
As we know and celebrate, a royal Virgin of the house of David is chosen as the Theotokos, the bearer of the Sacred Fruit, who had conceived her divine and human Offspring in her soul, before she conceived Him in her body. And knowing not the divine purpose, and lest she be fearful at such unheard of and outrageous tidings, she learns from the angelic colloquy of what which was to be wrought in her by the Holy Ghost; and, miracle of miracles, she who was about to become the Mother of God did not believe that her conception meant the loss of her virginity! To her is promised the fruitfulness of the power of the Most High. The faith of the believer is confirmed by the witness of the miracle that went before, when to Elizabeth was given unlooked-for fruitfulness; so that it might not be doubted, that He Who had given to the barren to conceive, would give it likewise to Mary.
The Word of God, therefore, God, the Son of God, Who in the beginning was with God, by Whom all things were made, and without Whom was made nothing that was made, became Man, that He might free us from eternal death. He bent down to the taking of our lowliness, losing nothing of His own Majesty, so that remaining what He was, and taking upon Himself what He was not, He might join the form of a true servant to that form in which He is equal to God the Father; and by this bond so link both natures, that this exaltation might not shallow up the human, not adoption lessen the divine.
Preserving in Himself the fullness of both natures, human and divine, and uniting them in One Person, lowliness is assumed and taken up by Majesty; infirmity, by Power; mortality, by immortality. And to pay the debt humanity owed to God, this inviolable nature is united to our suffering one; and true God and true man are welded into the unity of One Lord. So that, as was needed for our healing, one and the same Mediator of God and men, might by the one, suffer death, and by the Other, rise again from the dead.
Such a birth, dearly beloved, befits Christ, the Power of God, and the Wisdom of God; whereby He would be both joined to our lowliness, yet remain far above us in His divinity. For unless He were true God, He could bring us no aid; and were He not true man, He could offer us no example. The exulting angels, therefore, sing to the new-born Lord, Glory to God in the Highest, and they announce unto us, peace on earth to men of good will. For the Angels see the heavenly Jerusalem made up from all peoples of the earth. With what joy may not the lowliness of mankind rejoice in this unspeakable work of diving compassion, when the angels in their glory so greatly rejoice.
Let us, therefore, give thanks, my dear brothers and sisters, to God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit; Who, because of the exceeding great love, wherein He has loved us, has had compassion on us. And even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together in Christ, that in Him we might be a new creature, and a new clay. Let us strip ourselves of the old man with his deeds; for being made partakers of the Birth of Christ, let us renounce the deeds of the flesh.
Let us Christians acknowledge the dignity that is now ours. Being made a partaker of the divine nature, let us not by an unworthy manner of living fall back into our former lowliness. Let us be mindful of Whose Head, and of Whose Body, we are member. Remember, that wrested from the powers of darkness, we are now translated into the Light and the Kingdom of God. By the Sacrament of Baptism we have become the temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not, by evil deeds, put a veil over the One dwelling with thee, and thereby submit again yourself to the bondage of the Devil. Because our price was the Blood of Christ; because in strictness He shall judge us Who in his wondrous mercy has redeemed us; Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.
[Note: this sermon is an adaptation of Sermon 21 by S. Leo the Great]
With the Angels, Let Us Rejoice