If we are to live fully as human beings, we have to acknowledge our mortality, our joys, our faults and our internal pain. All these things together make us who and what we are, and they combine into the song of never-ending love that we can sing with certainty and joy – when that song is sad and when it is full of life, it is still our song and speaks of who we are. So we need to sing, and to remember the songs of those who we come here to mourn today, because they also live still, in us and in the life which is yet to come.We are here to celebrate the gift of love, but love is risky. To love is to enter into the certainty of loss. And what a loss those of us here have suffered. So much of life is beyond our control. Cancer emerges; tumours grow. Death is still at work in our world. People find themselves in situations where they can see no way out. Our mental or physical health may decline and none of this means that there is no love, and none of this means that there is no love from God. We may grieve the future that could have been, with trips not taken, meals not shared, songs not sung. But if love is risky, it is worth the risk, for who would have not known love?So tonight, we are acknowledging a fact that is sometimes lost on many people during the celebration of this season—the reality that not everyone’s Christmas is a merry one. There are people for whom this time is one of sadness because a sense of loss in their lives becomes magnified. There are feelings of emptiness because of the absence of loved ones who have passed away.Jesus’ birthplace, a stable, was actually a cave. His burial-place, his tomb, was a cave as well. The first cave was prepared by Joseph, the poor carpenter from Nazareth. The second cave was also prepared by a Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea. At his birth, Mary wrapped Jesus’ body tightly in cloths for swaddling clothes. At his death, Mary also wrapped Jesus’ body, in linen cloth, for a burial shroud. She placed his body in a manger, a feed box for grain. He would give his own body as food, feeding his flock with his flesh and blood. Who first heard the news of Jesus’ birth? It was shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem – the light of the world, the source of love, calls us all at all stages of our lives and offers a final call as well, which requires the courage to answer and the faith to hope.It is for and through those who are hurting, though, that the real meaning of Christmas comes through. In fact, only a deeply “sanitized” reading of the Christmas Story would lead anyone to think that Christmas is “just only” about joy. Christmas is all about real life and God coming to us so that He can give us that real life. When we realize this, we receive the comfort we need that brings us the hope that we want and that gives us the joy that want to feel.Yet one problem with this is that there are some who often wonder: Does God knows my pain, does He know what I’m feeling, is He able to appreciate what I am going through in this life and living that seems to be all too often tempest-tossed? And Christmas holds the answer to these questions: Yes He does. In the person of Jesus Christ, the One who came to be Immanuel—God with us—God Himself entered into our world and became one with us by being one of us. In Jesus, God knows the hurt and pain of our lives because He shared in it. We have a God who knows our pain and grief, who has gone through our sufferings, and who knows what we need to heal broken, torn, and wounded lives.And this comfort that God brings to us gives us hope—a hope that we must have in this life that we live day by day. We need hope because we look around us and see and know that things are still “less than perfect”, including ourselves. Just the very fact that we are here tonight to acknowledge grief, suffering, sorrow, and pain makes this point clearly. Yet, why we are also here tonight is to acknowledge that there is hope, that there is a Source for this hope.Tonight, each of us knows the hurt, the pain, the grief, the suffering that we are going through. What each of us feels is real and no one can deny or convince us that this isn’t so. Yet, even though our feelings will be with us and will even be a part of our Christmas, what needs to be even greater than our feelings is the sure and certain knowledge that you still have a song to sing that is beautiful, that is your own and which unites you with the ones you have loved and still love. No matter how we live and no matter how we die, the love that we have is manifest here tonight, by the manger, under the tree, in your song, in your heart and in this building which is built to say one thing – love wins, and even death has been defeated. Fear not, Jesus says, I have overcome the world. Have a happy Christmas and keep on singing with love and hope.
Some years ago, I spent Advent in the Manchester Royal Infirmary as a patient. I’d been in hospital since October, by Advent I was recovering from surgery and waiting for test results. Miles from home, barrier-nursed in a side room, uncertain and anxious of what might lie ahead, it was a strange Advent... not the kind with candlelight services and carols, but one of ward life, the smell of disinfectant, and long nights broken only by the soft sounds of nurses’ footsteps.During those long nights I often played, again and again, Aled Jones singing O come, O come Emmanuel. The words became a lifeline. They filled that sterile little room with hope and comfort, as though the ancient longing of Israel had reached across the centuries and found me there, in Manchester. Something in that haunting melody sustained me... a reminder that even here, in weakness and waiting, Emmanuel... God with us, was near.And yet, I learned a great deal that Advent about waiting… and about the nearness of Christ in it. I came to recognise the sound of my mother’s footsteps coming down the ward at visiting time, long before I could see her. That sound brought peace before a single word was spoken. I welcomed, more than ever, the simple gift of a hand to hold. the reassurance of another person’s presence, the kindness that speaks without words.Waiting, I discovered, is not empty time. It is not something to be endured until life begins again. It is, in its own way, holy ground. Time itself can become sacramental… moments filled with grace and presence. Advent invites us to see that time is not just something that passes, but something through which God draws near.This morning, the violet vestments return. The Gloria falls silent. One candle burns on the Advent wreath. The Church’s rhythm changes… the mood deepens. A holy waiting begins. But Advent is not simply a countdown to Christmas, it is a season of depth, of longing, of quiet anticipation. It reminds us that the most important things in life are not instant but slow-growing… like healing, or forgiveness, or love that matures through time.Advent dares us to ask… What are we waiting for? We all wait… whether in hospital corridors, in checkout queues, in traffic jams, for phone calls, for letters, for news. We wait for reconciliation after an argument, for the courage to face a diagnosis, for the pain to ease, for love to begin again. We wait with hope, with fear, with endurance. And if we allow it, waiting reveals what truly matters. It strips away the unnecessary and clarifies the heart.If you’ve ever waited for test results or sat by a hospital bed, you’ll know how time slows down. The minutes seem endless, yet strangely full. You begin to notice details you’d usually miss… the sunlight on the wall, the rhythm of breathing, the kindness of a nurse, the faithfulness of those who visit. Waiting, if we let it, becomes prayer.In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Stay awake. Be ready.” I see it not as a harsh command… it’s more like a gentle whisper, “Wake up… it’s time”. Time to live awake to God, alert to grace, open to love. The world around us begins December quite differently. Lights go up quickly, carols fill the supermarkets, and there’s pressure to be festive… as though joy were something we could switch on like fairy lights. But Advent asks something deeper. it asks us to slow down, to notice, to hope in the dark of winter.I recall someone once saying that Advent is the Church’s gift to a world that has forgotten how to wait. In a culture that prizes speed, productivity, instant gratification, and algorithms, Advent says, wait, be still, God is coming. It’s the rhythm of Mary, treasuring all things in her heart. It’s the faith of Simeon and Anna, waiting with tired but patient eyes for the Consolation of Israel. It’s even the steady rhythm of the little donkey, plodding faithfully on, not fast, not grand, but constant, bearing the hope of the world on his back.In our readings, Isaiah paints a vision of peace where swords become ploughshares and nations learn war no more. Paul calls us to wake from sleep, for “the night is far gone, the day is near.” And Jesus warns against living forgetfully… not that eating and drinking, marrying and working are wrong, but that we can do them without gratitude, without awareness, without wonder. Advent invites us to recover wonder… to see God breaking through into the ordinary… in the people we love, in the face of a stranger, in bread and wine, in the small mercies of each day.Our Anglo-Catholic spirituality understands this deeply… that God comes not only in glory, but in the nearness of the everyday, in what seems small and ordinary. Emmanuel, God with us, is not far away in splendour, but close at hand, quietly at work in bread and wine, in time and touch, in the hidden corners of our days. As the Eucharistic Prayer says, “You make all things holy and gather a people to yourself.” At every Eucharist, that promise is renewed… heaven bends toward earth, and the daily things of life are caught up in God’s love.That is what Advent reveals… that God is already at work in the stillness of our waiting. He senses our need, hears our longing, and draws near with compassion. Like the father who ran to meet his prodigal son while he was still far off, so too God comes to us in Christ. He understands our needs, and makes even our waiting holy.Advent has inspired some of the richest music in our tradition, O come, O come Emmanuel, that aching cry from exile… and also... Lo, he comes with clouds descending… These aren’t sentimental carols, they are hymns for hearts that know both darkness and hope, that wait for the morning, that believe in light even when it is not yet seen. And so, O come, O come Emmanuel is not only the cry of the ancient prophets, it’s our song too. It is the prayer of the Church, the sigh of the weary, the longing for healing and peace. Wherever you find yourself waiting in the days ahead, whether in hope, in weariness, or simply plodding on like that little donkey… O come, O come Emmanuel can be your prayer too.God waits with us. When we wait faithfully, compassionately, honestly, we share in the patience of God who longs for his creation to be whole. So, don’t be troubled if you feel unready today, none of us is. That’s why we have Advent… it’s God’s gentle gift to help us begin again. It stirs the soul softly… it rekindles the flame.Perhaps this week, in the stillness before sleep or in the quiet before dawn, you might whisper…Come, Lord Jesus.Not as a demand, but as a welcome. Come into the quiet, come into the tiredness, come into the questions, come into our waiting.O come, O come Emmanuel. Amen
Some years ago, sailing into Plymouth harbour, the boom vang on my yacht snapped. Boom Vangs are small things, but of crucial importance if you want the boat to move in the way you wish it to, because it connects the wheel to the sail, via a device known, amusingly, as a ‘tabernacle’. The snap came about fifty metres from the harbour wall, beyond which all was still and calm and the onboard motor would have been quite sufficient, with the sails down, to pootle into the marina and moor up to get the thing repaired. However, those fifty metres were the issue – it was a high wind and the boat could not be steered, the sail was flapping around uncontrollably and I thought I would have to allow it to scupper on the harbour wall, leap out and save myself. Instead, I reached up, caught the boom with my hand while attaching my belt to the wheel, steered with my feet and got to safety, where the boom slowly flapped overhead and banged me on the head, cracking my skull and making me quite dizzy. The Doctor in the hospital later on was fussing around in an irritating fashion, and I just thought ‘it’s not the end of the world’.“It’s not the end of the world!” Everywhere I’ve been, people say this. For our world to end would be a disaster: it would be the end of everything familiar, everything we know. The trouble is that when suffering comes to us – losing our job, relationship break up, illness, bereavement, being banged on the head by an errant boom – we can indeed feel it’s the end of our world. And in a way we’re right: the old certainties, the old comforts, have gone – perhaps forever, we have no idea if things will return to how they were – but then, they never do, we keep on growing and moving on.As Christians, we don’t try to explain suffering and change away. We don’t try to pretend either that it’s just not happening or frantically try to avoid it. We see Christ on the Cross, suffering with us, changing with us, the Old Covenant giving way to the New, through this most painful rebirth – the Gospel today is simply a beautiful picture of our own pilgrimage, in which we both suffer, turn to Christ and rise again.And we see more. In today’s Second Reading, St. Paul, perhaps quoting an early Christian hymn, gives us an essential insight into the cross. Jesus, who is “the Beginning, the first-born from the dead” reconciled “things in heaven and things on earth” on the Cross. Stretched between heaven (the invisible) and earth (the visible), between God and creation, and his arms wide to embrace the whole of time and space, Jesus embraces all that is good and all that is broken. And he makes peace: he makes it new, and He makes it new for us as an act of love, as a King would do, living for his people and caring for them – this is not the feast day of a King we can admire beyond a velvet rope, but a King who is part of us and us Him, there is no divide, just love.But how does he and therefore we make peace? I suggest Jesus offers us an understanding of suffering which is beginning to be appreciated by modern psychotherapy. Suffering is not good in itself. We should not seek it. But when it comes, we have to go through it – we can’t avoid it. And we will only get through it with the strength that comes from understanding more deeply what is behind our suffering. As Christians, we don’t need to do that on our own. Knowledge and love, bring us a larger view of reality. We start to see things more as they really are. This might bring us to make changes in our lives. An old world might come to an end and a new one start to come into being. “Today you will be with me in paradise,” says Jesus to the good thief, and that ‘today’ is ours to give as well, through Baptism and living authentically our Christian life.War and climate chaos are major causes of suffering, and I find the flagrant defence of either to be challenging, as though a nation can deserve suffering, and a major cause of that is human sin: exploiting and polluting nature and each other, and manipulating people, rather than tilling the garden and keeping it, as God directed Adam to do . And the brunt is borne by people who live far from us. We have forgotten we are part of creation, not its consumers. Changing our ways, living by the true knowledge of creation which comes from God is to reign from the Cross of creation’s suffering. It is to put to death the old world of power as tyranny and exploitation. It is to understand instead what it means for us to be baptised as priest, prophet and king. A good king is a wise king, one who serves justly in universal love. It may take suffering to open us to receive this insight. And to start to know and love as God knows and loves is for the Resurrection to begin in us.Christ the King is the feast of the end of a fallen world and its worldly ways. Next Sunday we begin Advent, as we long for the coming of the Risen Lord in glory. We long for the new heaven and new earth. And as we begin to live the Kingship of Christ, we will see that even in the smallest things, heaven begins now.So cheer up, it’s the end of the World! It only comes once a year.
As we approach the end of the liturgical year, many of the readings encountered at Mass may seem rather apocalyptic, looking towards the end…..the end times; end of an era. The context of today’s gospel is that we are coming to the end of Jesus’ ministry. We are fast approaching the cross. Apocalyptic scripture may seem devastating; it is very often imagery based and yet while it seems to be very violent and full of suffering, there is also always a message of hope alongside the stern warnings we may read or hear. Today’s gospel is no exception as Jesus foretells destruction, tribulation, family rifts but promises the hope of life eternal for those who remain steadfast in following Him. And our very short Old Testament reading from Malachi has the same warning followed by hope – ‘all the arrogant and evildoers will be stubble’ while the ‘sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings’ for those who remain in fear of the Lord.In today’s gospel, Jesus is foretelling destruction and devastation, and it may appear that this is a foretelling of the eschaton, the end times, as Revelation portrays it. But the majority view of scholars and theologians is that Jesus is foretelling the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the very Temple which is being so admired and revered by His companions. This Temple (not Solomon’s Temple, that one was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC) – this Temple is the second Temple which was completed around 516 BC. It was then expanded by Herod the Great over a period of a number of years into the majestic, imposing structure being admired. And this is important. The Temple – so beautiful and magnificent was nonetheless impermanent. Jesus tells of its total destruction, stone by stone. Now to the Jews, this would have been almost an anathema; imagine the total destruction of places or buildings that we revere (and I’m sure there will be a variety of thoughts as to what they may be) but it would have seemed like the destruction of everything that the Jews held dear, something which was deemed to be representative of the permanence of God’s power. But it was manmade, and nothing which is manmade is permanent. The Temple is a building, a structure, a thing and by its very being it is impermanent.Its destruction along with the routing of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, had profound consequences for Judaism, heralding the end of the Jewish national state for nearly 1900 years and it also brought about a move in religious practices from the Temple into the synagogues.As Jesus’ discourse continues, He foretells great woes, catastrophes, wars, uprisings, nation against nation, famine, earthquakes – sound a bit familiar…? But He says that these events are necessary. They must take place before the Parousia – the coming of the eternal Kingdom. He warns us not to panic, not to be led stray by the ‘noise’ and in particular not to be drawn towards anyone who promises a quick fix, a simple immediate answer. These are the false messiahs. The constant crises of the world are the necessary chaos leading towards the coming of Christ’s eternal Kingdom. But Jesus tells His followers, and us, that the more personal trials and tribulations that they/we will undergo will be opportunities to proclaim the good news. ‘This will be your opportunity to bear witness.’ For them/us to use the ridicule, persecution to proclaim for Jesus. And this is not easy, believe me. Now I’ve never been persecuted for my faith, but I have been ridiculed, or rather God/Jesus has been ridiculed to me. And I have felt ill equipped to stand up for my faith, felt unable to rationalize my beliefs. I never had the self-confidence to stand up for my faith, for Jesus, to proclaim the good news. I am getting better, gaining a little in self-confidence, but it is still very much something I need to work on. But this is what we are called to do as Christians. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s out there, outside of the church where we enter the mission field, where we need to be ready to share our stories, whenever the Lord gives us the opportunity.However, opposition makes Christianity thrive. In the early church, the more Christians martyred, the stronger Christianity became. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’ (Tertullian 2nd century AD). The early Christians were given power, powerful power, by the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit working in and through us today. As Jesus foretells, Christianity will cause familial division (has done and still does). And althoughpersecuted, ridiculed, Christians are assured of rewards in heaven, that not a hair on our heads will be lost. Now this does not mean an end to earthly suffering, we just need to consider how many souls are remembered in the Martyrology for example, but it does mean life eternal for those who hold fast to God and do not deny Jesus Christ, if we keep our eyes on Jesus as an Ordinand in my college group often says.But Jesus advises that our hardships are not stumbling blocks. They are stepping stones. The crises are not a defeat but a platform. Our weaknesses, our despairs are a conduit for God’s greatest moments of strength. St Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that God’s grace is sufficient for us; His powers are made perfect in our weakness. The Holy Spirit is with us and so we don’t need to rehearse clever arguments but if we cultivate a deep, abiding relationship with Jesus Christ, He will be our guide, will never leave us, because nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.At the end of our gospel, Jesus tells us ‘By your endurance you will gain your lives.’ Endurance is not just surviving the storms of life; it is using these storms to give weight to our testimony. Everything man made will eventually perish – our buildings, possessions. The world can take it all away, even our very breath. But our testimony, our witness will remain.So, let’s not cling to the temporary temples of our world – they will fall.Let’s remember that the chaos we experience and see all around us – these are like the birth pains preparing the way for Christ’s return.And let’s use the trials and personal tribulations we experience as God given platforms to bear witness to our Lord Jesus Christ.The Spirit goes ahead of us when we witness, preparing the way, giving us the word and granting us courage. Our faith grows by expression – we must share it – we must witness. (Billy Graham)
