Christmas & 1st Sunday after Christmas
25 & 28/12/2025
OPENING SENTENCE OF SCRIPTURE –
To you is born this day a Saviour who is Christ the Lord (Luke 2, 11)
HYMN-
GREETING
Grace and peace to you from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
COLLECT FOR PURITY
Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.
SUMMARY OF THE LAW
Our Lord Jesus Christ said: The first commandment is this:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”
The second is this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. Amen. Lord, have mercy.
CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION
God is love and we are God’s children. There is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.
Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith.
SILENCE
God our Father,
we confess to you
and to our fellow members in the Body of Christ
that we have sinned in thought, word and deed,
and in what we have failed to do.
We are truly sorry.
Forgive us our sins,
and deliver us from the power of evil,
for the sake of your Son who died for us, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
ABSOLUTION
God, who is both power and love,
forgive you and free you from your sins,
heal and strengthen you by the Holy Spirit,
and raise you to new life in Christ our Lord. Amen.
GLORIA sung by Sue St Joseph
COLLECT
O God,
who wonderfully created
and yet more wonderfully restored
the dignity of our human nature:
grant that we may share in the divinity of Christ,
who humbled himself to share in our humanity;
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, world without end.
PROCLAIMING & RECEIVING GOD’S WORD
FIRST READING Isaiah 52.7–10 , read by David Kerr
7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
8 Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of the LORD to Zion. 9 Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the LORD has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. 10 The LORD has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.
SECOND READING Hebrews 1.1–12, read by David Kerr
1 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.
3 He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4 having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. 5 For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be his Father, and he will be my Son’? 6 And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’ 7 Of the angels he says, ‘He makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire.’ 8 But of the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever, and the righteous sceptre is the sceptre of your kingdom. 9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.’ 10 And, ‘In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands; 11 they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like clothing; 12 like a cloak you will roll them up, and like clothing they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will never end.’
GRADUAL HYMN
GOSPEL READING: John 1, 1-14, read by Kay Solaja
Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John, Chapter 1,beginning at verse 1:
Glory to Christ our Saviour
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. 4 What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man but of God. 14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Give thanks to the Lord for his glorious Gospel
Praise to Christ our Lord.
SERMON
Forget Santa and his reindeer – today is the real deal!
One of my favourite ‘funny men’ is the stand-up comedian, master of one-liners, Milton Jones. I particularly like him because he operates as a Christian in a world which is irreligious and foul-mouthed. He once said that he was in an Indian restaurant in Buenos Aires, and wished that he had plucked up the courage to ask for an ‘Argie-bhaji’. He has written a small book entitled ’10 Second Sermons’. (Ah! You should be so lucky!) Here is one of his Christmas ones. He says “Sometimes I feel like Joseph at the inn in Bethlehem, holding the crib of straw and saying ‘No, I asked to see the manager’”. And another: ‘The arrival of Jesus signifies the end of keeping traditions for the sake of tradition. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come at Christmas then.’ (Of course, he didn’t…………….!)
All this is by way of leading into the most profound question about Christmas, one which has exercised the best minds down the ages, and most famously asked by St Anselm of Canterbury.
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He was actually an Italian Benedictine, from Aosta in northern Italy, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. He wrote a famous work entitled ‘Why did God become human?’. (‘Cur Deus Homo”?) And so I put it to you that this is the great and authentic Christmas question. Why indeed, did God become a human being; why did the Word become flesh?
Former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Richard Holloway, (to whom I owe a great deal, in that it was he who made it possible for my ministry here), has opened our eyes to many great truths about what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century. “Christians believe” he once said, “that Jesus was born into a world in which ‘all was not well’. His birth is God’s response to the injustice of that world, and for us today is a witness to the power of love as a challenge to the greed and the injustice which characterises so much of our society.”
Still today, ‘all is not well’.
Think about the world. Think about those areas of conflict where people are undergoing horrific suffering, and in other places where the very rich, the oligarchs, are intent on exploiting the likes of us for their own aggrandisement. And think about the drift away from democracy to the fascist fantasy of the powerful dictators. No names, no pack drill!
And then there is something you might have heard about, something called ‘Christian Nationalism’ It is rife in America, and it is coming here, as witnessed by the likes of Tommy Robinson, so called, who a few days ago was attempting to hijack Christmas for his own political agenda, by holding an open-air Carol service in London. He says he wants ‘to put Christ back into Christmas’. Well, isn’t that what Christians have been doing for centuries?
his Photoby Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
We in the churches are being asked to resist this heresy. In the USA, a movement called ‘Faithful America’ is standing against this perversion of Christianity, which despises the poor, the weak, the exploited, the vulnerable, the refugee, the asylum seeker. As one commentator in the ‘Herald’ newspaper, an atheist as it happens, put it last week: ‘If Christ was alive today, these people would hate him…………Jesus would be on an English beach, giving hot tea and blankets to refugees arriving in small boats’.
Paul, writing to Christians in Galatia, says to them that ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law……….in order to redeem (us).’ Right time, right person, right way, right reason.
This is a great mystery, even so. The Christian claim that God became human is an offence to some, but to others it is quite reasonable. Nevertheless, it is a mystery, whichever way you view it. Often when the Gospel of John which we heard this morning is read at at the Nine Lessons and Carols, it is preceded with the words ‘St John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation’, that is to say, the great mystery of the notion that God became human.
Yes, indeed, the Christmas event is, indeed, a great mystery.
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One of the most popular Christmas hymns is, surprise, surprise, one by Charles Wesley – ‘Hark the herald angels sing’. We sing it with great gusto – great tune, great words. Did I say ‘great words’? Let me remind you of a few, see what you make of them:
God and sinners reconciled;
Late in time behold him come
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
The Incarnate Deity
Jesus our Immanuel;
He lays his glory by
Born to give them second birth;
The Sun of Righteousness
Healing in his wings
There are those who say such language is impenetrable to the modern generation. So why would you sing it? I put it to you this Christmas morning, that this is simply a challenge to consider what you sing, especially at Christmas, and to help us wrestle with this great 0mystery.
Let’s go back to St Anselm’s question. “Why did God become a human being?” I suggest that this is not just a Christmas question after all, but a question which comes time and time again in the course of the Christian year – at Epiphany, in Lent and Passiontide, at Easter, at Ascensiontide, at Pentecost and on every feast and festival of the year.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC
For it is at the heart of the redemption story, of how God loved us so much that by his grace Jesus, showing us God’s way, came to rescue us from selfishness, self interest and greed, things which shrivel us up and cause us, Scrooge-like, to die. God in Jesus entered humanity in order to map out for us a new way of living under his authority and the rule of His Kingdom. For me, that is one part of the answer to the question ‘Why did God become a human being?
What would your answer be?
THE CREED
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one substance with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son,
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
PRAYERS
Just some bullet points for reflection this time…
Merciful Father accept our reflections for the sake of your Son,
our Saviour Jesus Christ who taught us to pray together
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those
who sin against us.
Do not bring us
to the time of trial
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power
and the glory are yours,
now and forever. Amen.
BLESSING
Christ the Son of God gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.
HYMN –
DISMISSAL
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord
In the name of Christ. Amen
