In his seasonal message, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, explains how the Christmas story is a signal to us to follow our star.

A few years ago I was telephoned by a television station the weekend before Christmas. Would I please go on air and explain - from my lofty height as a historian and theologian - that we can't be sure how many Wise Men there were visiting Jesus, or whether they even existed in the first place?

"'Well," I answered. "Supposing I were to tell you that, as a historian, I think it's very likely that ancient stargazers were extremely interested in the strange combinations of stars and planets that took place around the time of Jesus's birth, and that some of them might well have come to Palestine to see what was going on?"

"Oh," said the researcher on the phone. 'I don't think that's what my producer had in mind.'

"Thank you and happy Christmas," I said, putting the phone down.

Frustrating, or what? That's all some people seem to think about at Christmas: did it happen or didn't it, can we chip away at the story and make it mean something else, is there yet another part we can try to doubt or mock or debunk... and why? Presumably so we can sit back with a sigh of relief and tell ourselves that we don't need to worry too much after all. Perhaps it was only an old legend, a myth, a dream, a fantasy.

Why might people want to think that? After all, it's the Christmas story itself, not our rejection of it, that ought to bring us a sigh of relief. It's the greatest news imaginable: there really is a God, he really does care, and he's come to live as one of us, as a baby, then as a vulnerable young man, a prophet telling the world that God is putting everything straight at last, a Man of Sorrows coming to take the weight of the world's evil on his own shoulders.

Ah, but there's the rub. Do we really want someone dealing with evil once and for all? Do we really want a prophet turning the spotlight on the bits of our lives we are quite happy to keep hidden in the dark? Do we really want a God who doesn't just live a long way up in the sky but comes to live within our own world? Perhaps not. It's a challenge. More of a challenge than we normally want to have to face.

That's why we perhaps prefer to keep the visit of the Wise Men as a kind of pantomime sketch: three funny men on stage camels bringing inappropriate presents to a little baby. We smile patronisingly and turn away.

But one of the carols we sing to celebrate that strange arrival brings us back to reality with a bump. "O worship the Lord," we shall sing, "in the beauty of holiness".

Now that's a phrase to roll around your mouth after all that Christmas pudding. We think we know a bit about beauty, even though we differ about what it is. We think we know a bit about holiness - though we probably don't like the word very much, since it reminds us of goody-goody people who are too holier-than-thou to laugh at a good joke or enjoy a good pint. But what happens when we put 'beauty' and 'holiness' together, and, like the Wise Men, stand in front of the child Jesus and think what it all means?

Just up the lane from where I'm writing there's a signpost pointing through a gate, into the darkness of a winter night. Imagine standing by the signpost very early on Christmas morning and setting off to walk down the path into the darkness. You trust the signpost; and by the time the sun comes up you are on the way. That's what beauty is like. That's what holiness is like. And that, actually, is what Christmas itself is like. What do I mean?

The beauty of this world is a puzzle. We gaze at the sunset but it quickly fades. We love the music, but it ends in silence. We try to capture beauty in a photograph, a painting, a poem; but all we're left with is a signpost pointing into the dark.

The world is both beautiful and ugly, both delightful and appalling; and the greatest art reflects this double truth, inviting us to ponder a world that is wonderful but incomplete, that needs putting to rights.

Come this way, says the signpost called Beauty, and when the sun comes up you'll see where you're going. I think that was something like the invitation the Wise Men saw in the stars. They followed, and we should do the same.

But at the heart of the world's joys and sorrows stands the human race, you and me: immensely gifted and immensely foolish, remarkably skilful and remarkably stupid, made for joy yet often causing sorrow, powerful yet horribly vulnerable.

The call to holiness is the call to discover genuine humanness, not by drifting with every wind or obeying every impulse but by learning the hard, high way of simultaneous self-discovery and self-denial. Discovery without denial is mere self-indulgence; denial without discovery is spiritual suicide. Holiness requires discernment of when to say yes and when to say no.

Another signpost into the darkness: Come this way, says Holiness, and when the sun comes up you'll see where you're going. As TS Eliot saw in his poem, this too is part of why the Wise Men went to see Jesus.

The Beauty of Holiness, then, isn't something you can weigh in a balance or measure with a ruler. It's a quality of life, deeply attractive and deeply demanding, that we glimpse like a signpost enticing us to walk forwards into the darkness and trust that, as we do so, the sun will come up and show us where we're going.

That's what Christmas morning ought to be like, with or without stockings and Santa: a sense of wonder, of someone beckoning us, of all the hidden signals in the stars and the sea and the sparkle in a child's eyes, all the half-heard messages we get when we think of those who give themselves tirelessly in cheerful service to others, all the deep longings that normally stay locked up safely within our hearts.

Christmas morning ought to be the time when the sun comes up and we discover that the signals are telling the truth, that the messages are indeed meant for us, that the longings can be expressed because the thing they long for, the One they long for, is here, is with us, is one of us.

"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness". Follow the Wise Men; stand and gaze in silence and adoration at the child who has brought both beauty and holiness into fresh expression; and set off into the beckoning darkness of the new year in pursuit of that beauty, that holiness, and that child, so that when the sun comes up on God's final new world, the world put to rights, full of light and delight, we will be among those who have found the path, who know the way.