Sermon for the Patronal at St John’s – December 28th 2025There’s a new word to describe these days between Christmas and New Year. It’s called ‘Betwixmas’. What is describes is the strangeness of these days where there is a lull between celebrations. Where you don’t quite know what to do, what to eat, where to go, whether you’ve had enough of the tree and the decorations, and indeed your family or friends if you have visitors. Betwixmas seems quite a good word to describe this slightly funny feeling of liminal time which doesn’t feel altogether very comfortable. It’s the crash after the feast, or the restless lull, or even something of a lament as we finally have some time to reflect over the past year and some of the things which have brought us sorrow or grief.Well we too, in our lectionary are plunged from the joy of the nativity suddenly into the terror of the exodus of the holy family. Though this isn’t just a lull, this is a serious, rapid response escape in fear of their lives. Joseph has his second encounter with an angel and this time the imperative leaves no space for ambiguity: he must flee immediately, journeying 90 miles to the Egyptian border where the family will be safe from King Herod. However, I think we sometimes imagine Bethlehem as the ‘little town’ as the carols says, bustling with people coming for the census. But by the account in Matthew’s Gospel, time and place look slightly different to what we might imagine. According to Matthew we see Mary, Joseph and Jesus remaining in Bethlehem, presumably in more suitable accommodation, waiting for the arrival of the Wise Men from the East, who came perhaps even up to two years after Jesus was born. And so by this time they had settled into Bethlehem as their new home, Bethlehem being a village where Jesus would have been one of perhaps up to 30 young boys under 2. Sometimes we see these images of the slaying of the Holy Innocents where there are hundreds of children being killed, but in actual fact it would have been on a much smaller scale. It doesn’t detract from the utter horror of what happens but it does sharpen the focus. Herod had worked with precision to narrow his focus of attack. Herod knew exactly where his threat lay, and in one night destroyed an entire generation, out of fear and jealously. The 30 boys – all known and loved. Like the entire a whole preschool class wiped out. Mothers wailing. A village in shock and devastation. The killing of the holy innocents is not the first and by no means the last genocide that we see either in Scripture or in world history. But it reminds us of the seriousness of the Incarnation, the darkness of the world that Jesus came to dwell in, and the raging battle that continues in the spiritual realms. It should be no surprise that surrounding Jesus’ entire life was vulnerability, threat, opposition and attack. The Light of the World drew immense darkness around Him and yet never was that light overcome. Because through the fragility of his circumstance we see the power of God. Though the total uncertainty of their lives we see the complete trust in God. Saint Matthew is at pains to show both of these extremes – we feel the palpable fear and yet the unwavering faithfulness of God.I wonder what God wants to say to us today through this reading? I sense something really matters about the specificity of the detail – recognising the actuality of the truth of this horrific threat over the village in the hills. Something of the urgency of the response to the angels warning – now is the time to go, now is the time to lose certainty in order to find faith. I also wonder how we respond to God’s call into this exodus time, this season that, for all of us, will feel bumpy and unclear and confusing. And yet out of Egypt God calls his Son, and for us too can we recognise that a season of exile can protect us, draw us closer to God and to one another, make us more agile and responsive to the call of God?In uncertain times I think we may find ourselves more ready to let go of the earthly things that we may cling to, and instead free our hearts and minds and hands to cling to Christ. Reach out of our darkness into his Light. Reach out, knowing our weakness and seeking His strength.You’ve heard me banging on about ‘The Great Unravelling’ for some time now but I do believe that is the season we’re in – in the church, as in wider society. I sense that things will get worse before they get better. Big things that we thought were solid and secure will crumble, there will be deaths and endings in many ways. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in these uncertain times, the Church stood as a beacon of Hope, of light in the darkness. We who believe not just in death but also in resurrection? We who trust that heaven and earth will pass away but the Word of God will never pass away. We who know through our own lives and testimony that God goes with us – before us, beside us, behind us. God never leaves us and never forsakes us. We may see all that we know and love turn to dust, and yet in His Kingdom we are promised an eternity of love and joy and peace. Perhaps like Joseph and Mary and Jesus we will find ourselves in a season of exile, in a strange unknown land where language and surroundings are unfamiliar. But I pray that like them we can know the unfailing, unwavering, endless love of God. Perhaps my favourite line in all our carols is from ‘It came upon a midnight clear’ where we sing ‘when men at war with man hear not the love song which they bring, oh hush the noise ye men of strive and hear the angels sing’. May we hear the angels sing. May we know in these uncertain times that God is light. That God is love. That God is with us as we travel on.Amen
I have discerned, with the support of my Bishops Philip and Jill, that it is :me for me to step down as Vicar of the United Benefice. I am enormously grateful for the opportunity that I have had to serve here over the last two years. I have met some amazing people, and been encouraged in many ways. I’m par:cularly grateful to have seen an enormous growth in lay leadership with so many people coming forward and thriving as they have taken on new roles serving God’s Church.I came here to learn, to serve, and to love, and I want to thank you all for all the many ways you have enabled me also to grow. AGer 10 very full years raising my 3 boys whilst studying, serving as an ordinand, then curate, then Incumbent, I will be taking a sabba:cal from parish ministry and exploring some avenues for academic study and chaplaincy, perhaps in the educa:on sector. Our family hope to find a new home in Warton, and con:nue to be a part of the village community. I hope to con:nue my involvement in educa:on and sustainability work here.My final service as Vicar of the Benefice will be the St John’s Patronal Fes:val on December 28th. I hope you will be able to join me then to give thanks for all that God has been doing in our Benefice, and to commit the future to Him.Please pray for me and for my family as we con:nue to follow Jesus and be faithful to His call. I truly believe this is God’s purpose – both for me and for the Benefice – and so though there are different emo:ons today, I want to invite you to once again place your trust in Him, trus:ng that ‘He can do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine’ Ephesians 3:20.Mother Alice1st Sunday of Advent November 30th 2025
Sermon for the 1st Sunday of Advent 2025Amongst my youngest son’s collec:on of drawings and pictures brought back from Forest School last week, I found one par:cularly special drawing that caught my aCen:on. It was :tled ‘Theo’s world’, and it had on it a picture of a house in one corner and a picture of a tree in the other. Between the house and the tree were two lines, one straight and one that went round in a bend. I realised that he had drawn, with remarkably accuracy, a map showing our route to Forest School up at Leighton Hall. The straight line was the Coach Road, the route we take if we’re running a liCle late and need a direct way up, and the line in the big bend was Hyning Road, the route we normally take up through Hyning Wood to Yealand Conyers and then up Peters Hill. I always smile when we get there because my dad’s name is Peter Hill. What I saw was the clarity and confidence that my son had to orient himself. These are Theo’s places, these are his ways.As we begin this new Church year and our beau:ful season of Advent we are faced with a similar opportunity for a roadmap spiritually. We’re all got our new lec:onary, we’ve all got the rota, we know what Christmas is going to look like. And some of the more giPed planners in our congrega:ons have already got their 2026 roadmaps well underway – with dates and :mes and ideas and considerable planning. It is necessary and indeed useful to be able to see clearly and to see ahead.Except that we need to hold some tension. Because all of our readings today invite us to press pause, even perhaps to press stop on the whole thing. And to acknowledge that in tension with our hopes and expecta:ons and our desire for certainty and the confidence of having a plan, God’s ways are not our ways. We live daily with the things that are known and the things that are yet unknown. I’ve been reading a beau:ful book by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, who speaks about driving in a fog – with just enough light to illuminate sufficiently for us to keep going, but with sufficient darkness and obscurity to ensure cau:on and humility of speed. I really sense that. Because God is God and we are not God. We can never know His ways, there is always mystery, and by His grace a slow and steady unfurling of His plans and purposes in only the way that we are able to somehow grasp them and understand as best we can for now.I know that feels so deeply uncomfortable but it is the paradox at the heart of faith – that we trust in God, and yet we do not fully know God. It is Paul’s image in his first leCer to the Corinthians of seeing now through the mirror darkly, knowing that then we shall see face to face. It is the refrain in Psalm 42 of puZng our trust in God, knowing that we will yet give Him thanks for all that will come to pass. It is Minnie Louise Haskins invita:on at the turn of the new year to put our hands into the hand of God, knowing that He will show us a beCer way.And so the invita:on is to bring before God our honesty and our vulnerability, because through those postures a space opens up. A space between heaven and earth, a space in our bodies and souls, a space where once again, laying down our wills and our plans and our purposes, we can whisper ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. Come, into our sorrows and our despair. Come, in the darkness of our lives and our world. Come, into your Church. Make us humble,give us eyes to see and ears to hear. May we be the new crea:on that you have made us to be. May we lay aside all that burdens and hinders us and fix our eyes on you, Jesus.I feel the Lord promp:ng me to say through Advent this year that ‘Hope looks different’. Because I think it is so easy to seCle into tradi:on, because it is comfortable and oh so familiar. We like tradi:on because it reassures us of a certainty which I do not think we can own. It is a lie to say that all is well, that our Ways of being and doing are aligned fully with the God’s Ways of being and doing. I really want to pray that though we do have our plans and we will do what we normally do, that there is space to be, as CS Lewis calls it, Surprised by Hope. That our posture through Advent is one of openness to the ways of God so that through our plans and purposes we allow thank chink to let the Light in. And maybe even more than than. In our repentance, can we lament, with Isaiah, the ways that are so dark. Causing so much misery in the world. In our intercessions can we pray with Paul for the Church to wake up, and to respond with urgency to our need for a renewed commitment to living lives worthy of our call? And in the Gospel that we proclaim, can we speak confidently about the Hope we have in Jesus, he truth of the promise that we have that He can come amongst us and He will come again?Come, Lord Jesus, we pray. S:r us up, break us open, make us to be hearers and doers of your Word as we await your coming amongst us. We want to make room in our hearts for you. We want to see your paths and your Ways unfolding on our spiritual roadmaps. We put again, afresh, our every Hope in you.Amen
May I speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AmenI read recently that psychologists think that our brains take around 35,000 conscious decisions every day, or one decision every two seconds. It’s quite an interesting statistic, one that reminds us of the extraordinary capacity of our created selves, but also of the often overwhelming burden of our responsibilities as conscious beings.Today as we celebrate the feast of Mary, the mother of Jesus, we do above all give God thanks for the ‘yes’ of Mary to God’s call on her life. But I think we also need to give thanks, and pay attention to the way that the whole of Mary’s life is an ongoing decision to say yes, an ongoing decision to walk in the ways of obedience and truth, even at times bearing the unbearable pain of that decision. I think we often consider Mary at the start and the end of Jesus’ life. In the drama of birth and death. We often consider her joy and her pain at these critical times in the narrative of our salvation. We think of the teenage mother, an unmarried refugee, the birth in the stable, the angels, the visitors, the beauty in the vulnerability and the unbelievable strength and power shining through this young woman bearing the saviour of the world in her young arms. We think also of the middle aged mother, her head shrouded with the veil of mourning, standing weeping at the foot of the cross, her sorrow shouldered alongside the women who stand with her in her grief.But do we consider Mary in the middle? Mary in the ordinary? Mary raising the boy, the young man, the adult son. Mary whose unseen and undocumented decisions also testify to a life of conscious faithfulness. I believe that in times of drama and of crisis we see an exposure of what has been built in the in between times. A closer walk with God is a decision that we take not just when our life depends on it and we cry out to God, but it is a decision we take when in our spaces of ease and of liberty we choose to walk God’s ways. We choose to spend time in His word, time in prayer, time in worship and study and service. I want to say that the glimpses we get of Mary indicate the depth of her everyday faithfulness, the rootedness of her love of God, the conscious ‘yes’ of the depths of her heart to following the commandments of God. I think when we consider the teaching of Jesus in today’s gospel we see the product of an upbringing which testifies to this ordinary faithfulness capable of bearing an extraordinary calling. What Jesus says is clearly outrageous. Leave all your relationships, give up all your possessions, and think very very hard about whether you have enough in your tank to bear the weight of the calling. I mean who is able to consider all of that and still say ‘yes, I will follow you’. It’s impossible.But I think what Jesus is really saying is that you can never know the cost of saying ‘yes’ to God when you begin the journey. You can never imagine how your life is going to change. How all of things that you now hold dear might pale into utter insignificance as you go on this journey of following Christ, how the cost will be great but the blessings will be greater. And he has to speak in such stark and shocking language because he has to challenge his hearers to truly let go. Because there can be no relationship in our lives more precious than our relationship with Him. There can be no plan that we can make ourselves that comes close to the plans and purposes that He has for us and for His Church. There can be no house or car or holiday or pension pot or any sum of money or possession that can come close to the value of knowing Christ’s love for us, and for his promise of eternal life.Jesus is the son of the woman who said ‘yes’. Not just once. Not just in the difficult times, but yes in the ordinary, yes in the every day. Mary knew she had nothing without the love of God. Mary knew she couldn’t control or plan her life. Mary knew that there was nothing of value that she desired except for the love of God. And Mary knew both the cost of this ‘yes’, but also the blessings. Mary lived a life which many would consider to be unthinkably dangerous and daunting and perhaps one that we would not envy.But as we honour her today I want to commend to you her witness of righteous living, not just in the times of crisis. I think in these times it perhaps both the easiest and the hardest it has ever been to make these micro decisions in each moment to follow God’s ways. Our access to Scripture, to worship, to prayer, to spiritual literature and fellowship both in person and digitally is extraordinary. And yet the overwhelm of information that we are exposed to in a digital age, the work of marketing which promotes security in financial and material ways, the lure of an idealised, perfect life somehow free from sorrow, and the illusion of fellowship on social media which isn’t actually real, and fleshy and honest – all these things manipulative our brains and our souls into places where suddenly we turn around and find we have walked far, far, far away from God.Mary knew the Hebrew scriptures and the exhortation from Deuteronomy to choose life. And she did that. In choosing life she found God’s faithfulness, she found God’s truth, she found God’s light. She found that love is stronger than death. She found that in the disciplines of the life of prayer there were freedoms and joys that she had never expected. So like Mary, we must choose life. We must put our devotions to Christ higher than anything else in our lives. We must lay down our own plans and purposes and dreams, and allow the gentle whisper of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide. We must lay aside our clinging on to all that glitters and promises security, remembering that God has promised that those who meditate on his law day and night will prosper, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.Amen
