MY NEXT SERMON

I AM  PREACHING NEXT ON SUNDAY 11 JANUARY 2026 - at ST MARY'S PARISH CHURCH, WEST DEAN, WILTSHIRE - 9.00 a.m.  - THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST

SERMON 229 - THURSDAY 25 DECEMBER 2025 - CHRISTMAS DAY

Sermon at St. Mary’s Church, West Dean - Christmas Day Morning Communion – Sunday 25 December 2025 (Adapted from Sermon 209)

Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20 

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may the words which I speak be a blessing to all who hear them. Amen.

“Are you all prepared for today’s celebration? Turkey in the oven, potatoes and brussels pealed, presents opened already or under the tree waiting to be unwrapped? Prosecco in the fridge chilling?  Do you know what films you will be watching after the King’s Speech or games you will be playing?”

That is how I started my Christmas Day sermon last year and the year before that when I led the service at Farley and it is a great honour and privilege to be with you here at West Dean on this very special day. It really doesn’t seem a year since last Christmas Day – and how the world seems to have changed, and not for the better, over the last twelve months and I feel that, more than ever, there is a great need for the Christian message of Good News to be broadcast, not least within our own country.

Christmas is a time of great joy, expectancy and celebration. Yet, all too often, we lose ourselves in the preparations and miss the sacredness of the season. Why does it matter? Because it’s this holiday on which we honour the birth of our Saviour. It’s this time of year when people are open to the things of God. And it’s precisely this season when Christians most often lose sight of what’s available to them in Christ Jesus.

We are all people created in God’s image. We have access to his presence and his promises. So why all the strain and stress? Dare we ask ourselves what honestly matters most to us this Christmas?

Advent is a period of waiting and preparation – and now, today, is the day of on which all those preparations come to fruition and after today we enter that period of Epiphany which is a time available to us for some rest and reflection.

God invites us to push away the clutter, turn down the noise and offer him the sacred space in our lives so that the King of Glory may enter, take up residence and radically change us from the inside out. We can race through our holiday season more stressed than blessed or we can slow down, ponder the reality of Christ within us, and respond to his miraculous work.

At that first Christmas, God sent Jesus into the world as a Man, to be God himself incarnate to dwell among us and after His resurrection and ascension, Jesus went on to leave the Holy Spirit in each and every one of us willing to accept and acknowledge Him. To truly live within us.

In fact, it is good to remember that God sent Jesus into the world for all Human Kind not just the chosen. We should all work together as a Team not divided by greed, envy, conflict, poverty, race, creed, colour or any of the other many things which separate us.

The one great message or result of Christmas, the coming of Christ, is that it is meant to banish one word from our language, “them”. There should no longer be “them and us” anymore.  To illustrate this, I would just like to share the following with you to reflect upon over this next week:

The twentieth-century English mystic Caryll Houselander (1901–1954) describes how an ordinary underground train journey in London transformed into a powerful vision of Christ dwelling in all people: 

“I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too … all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.  

Houselander’s vision of the intimate presence of Christ in each person continued as she walked along the city streets:  

I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ…. 

I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning [their] sin, which is in reality [their] utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in [them]. And this reverence must be paid even to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are His tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ…. 

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life…. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life. 

After a few days the “vision” faded. People looked the same again, there was no longer the same shock of insight for me each time I was face to face with another human being. Christ was hidden again; indeed, through the years to come I would have to seek for Him, and usually I would find Him in others—and still more in myself—only through a deliberate and blind act of faith.”

 

This Christmas and New Year we see the world in chaos and the potential escalation of many local conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South America into a major war. We daily read in our newspapers, hear on our radios and see on our screens, the inhumanity of Humanity. We hear and view the dreadful news coming from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, even now Australia and many other parts of the world and the triumph of brutal and tyrannical leaders.

The king of the universe is not a tyrannical leader. He’s the saviour of the world. Although we hear the Christmas story every year, again and again, it isn’t old news. It’s good news. It’s now news! Salvation isn’t just an addendum to the end of our life and Christmas isn’t just a quaint little story with shepherds and wise men coming to a stable in Bethlehem. When Jesus was born, God’s kingdom came to earth! so we ought to celebrate with joy. Jesus came, and he’s coming again. Let us worship the king of glory, with hymns, carols and prayers, but also, let us also worship him by the kindly and empathic way we speak and act towards others over this Christmas period.  For many, too, Christmas is a difficult time especially for those recently bereaved, and, this year, there seem to be more deletions from my Christmas card list – a time to reflect, perhaps, on our own mortality too.

When we set out to be a serious follower of Christ, we’ll often find a thousand excuses to tend to temporary things as though they’re the most important things in the world. But eternal rewards come from eternal priorities. We need to think higher, see deeper. Repeatedly, Jesus urged people to open their eyes and see the coming kingdom. See the story God is writing on the earth through us because of Jesus. Our current season is packed with eternal possibilities to do so.

We can and should change our focus, determine our pace, adjust our priorities and this could be our most life-giving Christmas yet. Whether we already walk intimately with Jesus or see him more like a distant relative, we can be assured, as illustrated in Caryll Houselander’s vision that he’s very near and that he came to redeem every aspect of who we are. That was the greatest gift ever given at Christmas – the birth of Jesus Christ, God Incarnated, in that humble stable in the Holy Land.  Let there be no more “them and us” but just “us”.

Now that is really something to celebrate and reflect upon over these coming days.

Have a great day, enjoy being with family and friends over this holiday period, and yes do eat, drink and be merry in celebration but do use this time also to tell somebody about the true meaning of Christmas and the wonderful good news which is there for everyone and is the real reason for our celebrations.

A very Happy and Blessed Christmas to you all.

 

 

Susie Larson (who inspired this sermon through a daily devotional piece written by her) is a bestselling author, speaker and host of Susie Larson Live. She is the author of more than 20 books and devotionals, and her Daily Blessings reach over half a million people each week on social media. She and her husband, Kevin, have three children, a growing bunch of grandchildren and a pit bull named Memphis.

 

Amen                                                                                                 MFB/229/23122025

 

SERMON 228 - SUNDAY 14 DECEMBER 2025 - ADVENT 3

SERMON AT FARLEY ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, MORNING WORSHIP

– SUNDAY 14 DECEMBER 2025 – ADVENT 3

Isaiah 35:1-10;  James 5:7-10;  Matthew 11:2-11 (incorporating parts of Sermon 178 and 179)

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may my words be a blessing to all who listen to them.

Today we lit the third Advent candle known as the Candle of John the Baptist or Candle of Joy or sometimes Candle of Love, for in love we find joy, reminding us of the proclamation of John the Baptist that it wasn’t him who was the long-expected Messiah but the one who now appeared before him to be baptised by him in the Jordan.

But, we are ahead of ourselves for, like last week, we must return to the period of the Babylonian Exile and the words of that great prophet of that time, Isaiah, from whom we heard in our first reading this morning. Many of the prophesies, at that time, related specifically to the Jews’ return to the Holy Land and the rebuilding of the Temple.  However, the prophesies of Isaiah go well beyond just this more immediate restoration but look to a time when the Jewish people’s long-awaited Messiah will appear – a prophesy and proclamation well ahead of John the Baptist’s!

For many centuries after Isaiah, the Jewish people looked upon many candidates for their Messiah as is recorded in the Apocrypha – those books which plug the gap between Malachi in the Old Testament and Matthew’s Gospel in the New Testament – which are usually excluded from most copies of the bible.

So, for many Jews, the period of waiting had been very long indeed and we read in the Book of Malachi how the people, including the priests, were indolent or casual in their worship of God.  Their Faith had become stale because nothing seemed to be happening and their prayers did not seem to be answered. We read in the Book of Malachi how they offered defective goods as burnt sacrifices and kept the best for themselves.  Their worship was half-hearted and lacking in conviction.

Isaiah, though, tells the Jewish people that “the wilderness and dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly.”  This is a reference to those dry stagnant times described in Malachi when the Jewish people thought that they were in a time of great wilderness. Perhaps we feel a bit like that too as we see the world in turmoil and the difficulties facing not only our own country but those even more dangerous and destructive places like Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Tanzania, Nigeria – the list grows ever longer!

Isaiah gives encouragement to his readers or listeners by telling them that something great and wonderful will occur in the fullness of time and that God’s glory shall be revealed and “he will come and save you”.  What wonderful words of joy and encouragement after many years of captivity in Babylon; and so for us, we now await Jesus’s promised second coming but, like our grandchildren awaiting their Christmas presents, we need to be patient for the greatest Christmas present humankind can ever receive!

This is the message, then of both Isaiah and John the Baptist.  John went around preaching the baptism of repentance by which Jews could seek atonement for their sins.  The actual washing in the river, the baptism, was an outward sign to others that they had truly turned away from evil and washed away their sins. Hence John the Baptist called for people to repent.  You will recall, although it does not appear in today’s gospel reading, that the Messiah, Jesus, would baptise in the fire and spirit – i.e. not simply an outward symbolic gesture of water cleansing the physical body but that, inwardly, people would receive the fire of the Holy Spirit as we will see later at Pentecost, and be cleansed inside as well as outside.

Of course, we do read at the beginning of the gospel passage today that John, having heard of the ministry of Jesus from his prison cell, was still not entirely sure whether he was the true Messiah – God’s chosen.  Had his own ministry been in vain, he must have wondered. There had been so many pretenders in the Apocrypha, as I mentioned earlier, and the Jews seemed to have been waiting for a very long time – time for them to be overrun and occupied by stronger nations culminating with their absorption into the Roman Empire. They must have really been feeling that God had left them to flounder. Jesus’s response to those disciples of John was that they should report back all that he was doing – the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, the dead being raised, the poor hearing good news and so on. John had lived, but only just as we know from the story, to know of the coming of the True Messiah.

In our Second Reading, James in his letter, to the Jewish diaspora implores them to be patient in their waiting for the Lord to return.  He uses the example of the farmer waiting for his crop to grow, waiting for the rains to arrive.  Our house in Downton backs onto a field of various arable crops and it always amazes me how the crop develops from a muddy field into small shoots, then tall shoots and eventually the ears of corn or maize or whatever was planted and to be harvested.  Year in, year out this occurs, with me, in those early days of planting wondering what the seeds the farmer has just sown will turn out to be.

Advent is a time of waiting.  It is a time of expectation. It is a time of preparation and it can also be a time of healing.

A word used a lot by theologians is “liminal”.  It is a word I wasn’t all that familiar with until I started my training as a minister and later, even more so, as a spiritual director.  I knew of its devolved word “subliminal” better in the context of “subliminal messages” – those being messages which are conveyed to you, often in adverts, which are not in the forefront but hidden and conveyed very subtly. A classic one is the smell of bread upon entering the supermarket making you feel hungry and thereby probably putting more foodstuffs in your trolley than you intended!

“Liminal” means “on the edge” or “on the threshold”.  It has been described as the “no longer, but not yet”. It derives from the same root a lintel – that stone that you find above a door separating the outside from the inside – neither itself wholly inside nor wholly outside.  Likewise being in a liminal place means we are ourselves are in the “no longer and not yet” place. That is really where Advent is too. We are “no longer” in a place of despair not knowing if and when our Saviour is coming but in the not yet knowing how long it will be.  Of course, today we know that Jesus has been and we also know, those who believe that is, that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today seated with God in Heaven and he has promised to return. Now we await his second coming and so we are today still in a liminal space with the exception that Jesus and thereby God can be manifested by the Holy Spirit – that same Spirit that John the Baptist promised the Messiah would baptise us in and which came down for all at Pentecost.  

How many of us long for that now?  We live with ever increasing tensions in a world with much hostility towards our fellow humans. We would do well to go back and read the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and recall how Jesus told those in the synagogue that he had come to fulfil the laws and the prophesies not to tear them up. It is no coincidence that the passage Jesus read in the synagogue in Galilee was from Isaiah’s prophesy.

I cannot end this short homily better than by repeating the words of Paul at the end of last week’s reading and by recommending that whenever we feel lost or lonely in our Faith or want to tell others about it, these words may be a blessing and encouragement to us and those around us who need to hear the Good News –

“May the God of hope fill you with joy, love and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

So let us look upon our Third Candle today with the joy and love which it represents. The joy of the knowledge that Jesus remains with us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Let us pray:

Father God

 for whom we watch and wait,

you sent John the Baptist to prepare the way of your Son:

give us courage to speak the truth,

to hunger for justice,

and to suffer for the cause of right,

with Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Amen                                                                                                  MFB/11122025/228

 

 

SERMON 227 - SUNDAY 7 DECEMBER 2025 - SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT

 Sermon at All Saints’ Church, Whiteparish – Advent 2 – Sunday 7 December 2025

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and may these words be yours Lord, and may you bless all who hear them. Amen.

Today we lit the second candle on our Advent Wreath –often called the Bethlehem Candle, which symbolizes peace or faith and is lit, as today, on the second Sunday of Advent. It is, often, typically a purple candle and represents preparing for the coming of the Messiah, reflecting on the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. The candle can represent either peace, as Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, or faith in preparation for Jesus’s arrival.  It is meant to be a reminder to work for peace and at the same time to have faith in God’s promises, reflecting on the journey to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, and the beginning of a New Covenant with God. In many churches the candle is purple in colour being the liturgical colour associated with Advent – symbolising royalty and penance.

Traditionally, also, it represents the character of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, who is described in the bible (in the first chapter of John’s Gospel) as being sent by God but was not the light (i.e. the Messiah) but came as a witness to testify to the light – that the true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.  So many sermons have been preached on the Second Sunday in Advent on the topic of John the Baptist, that I thought, this morning, it would be good to remind ourselves of the reason why God sent Jesus into the world in the first place.

As is usual, on the Second Sunday in Advent, our Gospel Reading this morning, narrates the now very familiar story of the ministry of Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist who, we learn, went into all the region around the Jordan to proclaim a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and to proclaim the coming of Christ, the Messiah as foretold by the prophet Isaiah some hundreds of years previously – in fact in the First Reading we had this morning.

Back then, the world seemed to reject God, as we read in the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi.  I do recommend you read it as, in many ways, it seems to foretell how our world is today – lacking any enthusiasm for God our Creator and treating Faith as an irrelevance when we can take control of our own destiny.  Today’s world seems to be about image and control, and money and wealth of course; and, so it was back then.

I have now lived more than my three score years and ten and during that period I have seen enormous changes in the world and in this country in particular; probably none more so than attitudes towards the Church.

As many of you will know, I spend quite a bit of my time giving talks and leading stargazing sessions at sea wearing my other hat as an astronomer. A question I am very frequently asked is how I can reconcile my role as a scientist with that of a church minister? Similarly, with the news constantly seeming to concentrate on scandals and dissent in the Church, how I can continue to minister in the knowledge that religion is so flawed?

My response, first of all, is to say that churches are largely human institutions which often attract the wounded, the vulnerable and, like any human-made institution they will suffer from splits and dissent from time to time. Secondly, the wonders of God’s universe as I observe it from my viewpoint as an astronomer, fills me with the awe and wonder of God’s creation and the sheer awesomeness of it all.  Thus, my strength continues to lie in my Faith which is founded on the Gospel of the Good News of Jesus coming into the world, to lighten and brighten it.  To save the sinners, to comfort the poor and to bring God’s Kingdom to Earth.  In other words, to set aside the religiosity of the church and get back to basics – why Jesus came to Earth and what he said and did. 

For me, the light bulb moment occurred back in 2007 at Spring Harvest when a group of us went to that Christian Festival from Winterslow Church.  I was not entirely sure whether I would enjoy the experience as, having been brought up in a traditional Anglican liturgy, I was concerned that the event might be dominated by “wacky” Evangelical Christians all wanting to tell me how bad a Christian I was!  For me, therefore, I treated it as a cheapish holiday with my two children and if it all got a bit too much for us there was the North Somerset Steam Railway next door in Minehead which would certainly be “my thing”.

However, it was during the second night of the big service in the Big Top that the keynote speaker was Rev. Steve Chalke, the founder of Oasis and a Baptist minister in Waterloo, London. He reminded his congregation that our role as Christians was not being self-centred and ensuring our place in Heaven by being pious and religious but rather being in the community bringing Heaven down to Earth.  For me everything in the Gospel seemed to make sense and suddenly a light had been shown to me just as in Psalm 119:105 we read:

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path; it shows me the way wherein I should go, both night and day”.

That was the moment that I first felt called to ministry – although it did take another five years before I started training.

I love the gospels, because in them we see how “The Light” worked in everyday society. At that first attendance of Spring Harvest we all got “WWJD” plastic bracelets – WWJD standing for “What would Jesus Do” and although I have long since lost that bracelet I still regularly think about that slogan and it is a good mantra to have at times when your Christian Faith might be compromised.

You see, the people of the Old Testament had lost their way as we saw in Malachi. They needed “the Light” – they needed God to come down and talk to them in their own language and to be physically amongst them.

Imagine that you, a Human Being, had created a colony of ants and that the colony no longer acted in the way in which you had created them to be. It would be impossible to communicate with them directly and so you would have to send another ant, your special agent ant, to live and move amongst them to communicate with them and explain how they should behave – in their own language or communication system – that is how and why God Incarnate, in Jesus, came to be born in Bethlehem.

John the Baptist, appeared during the period of waiting for that Light of World to appear and he encouraged people to repent and be saved through baptism. Likewise, as we wait for Christmas, during this period of Advent reflections, let us think about how we might have contributed towards or ignored any darkening in our own lives by not reaching out for the lantern which is Jesus Christ.

We light candles on the Advent Wreath as a reminder of that light. In some churches we would also have had individual candles to remind us that as Christians it is our duty to carry that light of salvation – the way we should go – to all we meet in our daily lives.

Whenever we stray¸ when the world seems dark and cruel, when we feel we can no longer see God, remember he is all around us and by accepting Him and following Him we are in communication with God our Creator who made all things – from the tiniest of living creatures on Earth to the vastness of the Universe itself.  As John the Baptist told us, we need only repent of our sins to be cleansed. If we all followed that mantra then I am certain the world would be a better place.

Through the adherence of our Faith the dimness in our lives can be removed and replaced by the glorious light of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth.

Wishing you all a Happy Advent and Festive Season ahead.

  

Amen                                                                                                 MFB/227/04122025