Perhaps you didn’t manage to get the present for Uncle George bought and wrapped and in the mail before the deadline. Never mind. Uncle George still has the sweater you sent him last year. It’s in a box with the tag still attached. Phone him tomorrow and tell him you love him so much, you don’t want to clutter up his life with any more doodads. He’ll thank you.

Perhaps you didn’t get that Christmas letter written and printed on special paper and mailed to everyone who sent you a similar letter last year. It’s O.K. People love receiving Epiphany letters. Or maybe even Pentecost letters. Somehow I doubt folks are pacing the floor tonight thinking, "Where’s that letter from you?" They’ll have other things on their minds.

I love this service for the simple reason that once it begins, there’ no time left to do anything else. No more anthems to rehearse. No more cookies to bake. No more sermons to write. We’ve done everything we can to make Christmas happen, and what happens next is beyond our control.

It was the same for Joseph and Mary. They did what they could. They tried their in-laws. No room. They tried their outlaws. No room. They tried knocking on every door in Bethlehem. Everywhere the same story. (Of course the text doesn’t provide any of these details. The text just says there was no room for them in the inn. But if you can’t use a little imagination on Christmas Eve, when can you?)

The night our elder son was born, the snow was falling "snow on snow/ snow on snow." It made the "bleak midwinter" of that old carol seem like spring break in Florida.

Andra’s labor pains were getting closer and closer together when we pulled out on Route 29, headed for the hospital 30 miles away. Our tiny Ford Escort barely made it a mile before we had to turn back.

I can remember what it feels like to think "What if I don’t get her to a safe place? What if we skid off the road into a snow drift? I was born in South Texas. I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies in the snow."

If it hadn’t been for the Altavista, Virginia, Volunteer Rescue Squad, we’d never have made it. Forgive me for projecting my experience into the text, but I can’t help wondering if Joseph felt anything like as incompetent and clueless the night his boy came into the world as I did the night mine arrived.

You might not be a parent, but you know the feeling. Out of control. No longer in charge. Totally and completely at the mercy of God. Like a young husband who has knocked on the last door in town. Like a young wife who can’t hold back the urge to push any longer. There’s nothing more you can do.

It’s when we reach this moment that Christmas arrives. When we are no longer in charge. When there’s nothing more we can humanly do. Then the Christ comes. The Word made flesh with healing in his wings. The child laid in a manger lined with our unrealizable expectations. The Savior born to save us from our sins and, I sometimes think, born to save us from ourselves.

No one, save the angels, who had the inside track, had high expectations for the baby born to Mary and Joseph. Humanly speaking, his was an inauspicious birth. But to the eyes of faith, his birth is the answer to centuries of longing by people who realize that they can’t fix the world by themselves.

Left to our own devices, we make an awful mess of things. We invade countries, telling the residents it’s for their own good. We take a wonderful idea called "democracy" and demean it by pandering to the voters’ greed and fear. We pay preschool teachers a pittance to nurture our children and football coaches a fortune because they used to win ballgames. We unify the proud in the imagination of their hearts and elevate the mighty on their thrones.

It’s a crazy world we live in just now, but no crazier than it was when Caesar Augustus was Emperor in Rome and Quirinius was governor of Syria. Caesar could order a census, but even Caesar couldn’t keep this Savior from arriving. All the legions of Rome could not keep this little baby from being born, could not silence the multitudes of heavenly hosts, could not keep the shepherds from paying him homage.

And so we gather tonight, when we have done all we can and can do no more, to hear the story of how God saves us who cannot save ourselves.

It turns out, we don’t make Christmas happen after all. Christmas is God’s doing. All we can do is join the shepherds who are amazed by what they have seen and heard. All we can do us receive the gift that we don’t deserve and eat the meal that is laid out to nourish and delight us.

Another name for "Christmas" is "the Feast of the Incarnation." That’s what Christmas is – and the best thing about it is, we didn’t do anything to make it happen.

Christmas is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.