Changing plans

Well they did forecast snow! My phone rang at 8 this morning and it was the steward at Boroughbridge giving me the weather situation. We decided to cancel our covenant service. This took some phoning round as it was also a joint service with the Anglicans. But it was sensible to keep everyone safe. The steward at Allhallowgate then also rang to ask we cancel the evening service. So no services at all for me to take today! That sermon took ages to write :)

I put my walking shoes on and walked to Allhallowgate who still had a service this morning. 13 of us were led by Keith Phipps. We all sat on the front two rows. There was a convivial atmosphere and it was lovely to receive today unexpectedly. Keith led us with some reflections on Matthew chapter 1 and 2 of the coming of the Christ child and its setting in history, of a journey of the magi and the threat to Herod. It struck me as Keith shared the number of times in the story plans have to be changed. The magi have to follow a star to an unexpected place. Joseph has many dreams and has to respond. Herod is rattled by a rival king. The holy family can’t return home quickly and have to settle in a foreign country. 

Snow disrupts us. We look out of the window and it looks pretty. As we walk out in it, people speak to us. We share an event. And church this morning had a party atmosphere! There was a lot of laughter! Bethlehem was not where the story should have ended. And as we enter 2025 maybe major things will thwart our script. I never expected to have a preaching free Sunday even though the weather forecast for this area was dead right. We maybe even got more of the white stuff than was expected. 

The snow has come on the eve of the Epiphany. I was going to a service marking that this afternoon. Remember that story has an ending about a different road. Maybe having encountered God, like snow, we have to make different plans or let what has been meticulously prepared for go. 

A light is guiding our path— we need to set out upon a conscious spiritual journey. One that we never expected to take. We need to become the Magi. Load up our metaphorical camels and set out across the landscape of our soul to where it is that the light appears. 

Keep warm. There’s more snow coming overnight! 

The first Sunday of a New Year

Here’s my sermon for tomorrow in case we are snowed in and need to read it instead…

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory…

 

On this first Sunday of 2025, let me put the mighty opening of the prologue to John’s Gospel into the present tense: the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us and we behold his glory – right now, in this moment, in this new year.

 

Friends, it’s said that seventeen per cent of people in this country give up on their New Year resolution within a month. Be that eating healthier or taking more exercise or giving one compliment a day or going a whole twenty four hours without checking your e mails or looking at your mobile phone, or refraining from gossip. That was the list of one of the writers in the Yorkshire Post towards the end of last week and it’s only day five and she’s struggling. The year hasn’t begun well for many people. There’s a lot of flu about, and other horrible viruses, the weather cancelled new year celebrations outside and there’s a threat of snow and ice and as for the world the sad and lowly plains are just as sad as they were before Christmas. And yet, we gather for worship and we confront that negative and gloomy narrative with the story of God’s care and concern. This is still Christmas and today I want to suggest we focus more on God and less on our not being able to keep to unrealistic goals which make us feel worse when we fail and we keep looking for hope. I want to explore that God breaks into time, that God believes in us and that God invites us to join him in whatever God is doing. John Wesley instituted his covenant service as a reminder of the providential care and grace of God despite ourselves and the world. 

Let us look for Christ wherever we go.

Let us never stop seeking. Believing that there is a light that shines in the darkness which the darkness shall not overcome.

 

First then, God breaks into our time. Has God a right time? We are ruled if we aren’t careful with that time we call chronos. Every second counts. In the watchnight service in the cathedral on New Years Eve, Canon Michael used this reflection on time in his sermon:

To realise the value of one year, ask a student who has failed in his exam.

To realise the value of one month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.

To realise the value of one week, ask an editor of a weekly.

To realise the value of one day, ask someone who is given daily wages.

To realise the value of one hour, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.

To realise the value of one minute, ask the person who has missed the train.

To realise the value of one second, ask the person who has survived a car accident.

To realise the value of one milli second, ask the person who won the silver medal in the Olympics.

We live our lives by how much we can achieve in a course of time. Go to Aldi and watch the person on the till throw the stuff at us. It has to be quick. There are apps about how not to procrastinate. Some ministers brag that they never take a day off because they are too busy or are too busy to be adaptable. And yet, if we continue this obsession with the clock and productivity, we will all burn out by February. We will have no time to look for God breaking into time. God’s time is called kairos, time of opportunity. Galatians has it summed up:
“But when the time that God had decided arrived, he sent his Son into the world. A human mother gave birth to him. He was born a Jew, under the authority of God's Law.” The Christmas story is that God breaks in at the right time, when he’s exhausted every other idea to get through to us and he sends us part of himself. We sing of it incessantly before and during December and then we forget it! I think this year we need to look for those moments God breaks in. Where’s the good news? Where are the moments of grace? Where is the hope?

Someone sent me these words the other day:

“Hope has holes in its pockets. It leaves little crumb trails so we, when anxious, can follow it. Hope’s secret? It doesn’t know the destination. It only knows that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.”

God breaks in.

Then God believes in us. Enough to invest in us. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Matt Haig in one of his writings suggests that as a New Year turns it isn’t good for us to be okay. He writes: The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-aging moisturiser? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”

And yet, God loves us enough to send us Jesus. Not just as a guest but incarnate. Here with us always. We don’t wait until we are perfect, he comes as flesh to as Wesley would put it change our vileness into almost divinity. John tells us that the Word became flesh and lived among us. Became human. The whole character of God wrapped up in a baby who was born in poverty, was a refugee and lived fully in community. He did not cease to be fully God but he was God wrapped in our clay. How could this happen? Well we need to go back to John’s Gospel to complete the image.

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. 

Jesus emptied himself – one commentator says that meant he made himself vulnerable to the battering by evil forces that we face. But what he could never rid himself of was God’s nature which is grace and truth.

That’s why, at every turn in his public ministry, it is always grace that wins. In encounters with outsiders such as lepers, excluded women, even the dead, God’s grace and truth breaks through and reveals itself.

It’s why the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, the downtrodden are lifted up, the unjust are challenged, those who twist religion are taken to task … and why Jesus’ disciples are taught that their task is to do the same thing.

 

So maybe this year part of our promise back to God is to not just believe in him because he believes in us but convince others who are struggling in the darkness that they are held in his embrace too. The covenant God breaks in and believes in us and then invites us to join him in what he’s up to.

 

We have to take notice of him again. We need in our meetings in church to pause and ask what is God doing or saying?

We all get letters or e mails we have to respond to. And if we ignore God and we wonder why things aren’t going well then I think God looks at us and says I made it so easy all you had to do was turn to me and you did anything but…

 

Lancelot Andrewes’ Nativity sermon, preached for King James on Christmas Day 1622 is worth revisiting today. In that sermon, Andrewes said the Magi readily undertook “a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey” to follow the star to the Christ child. Then looking out on the royal court that formed his congregation, Andrewes said that people of his own day were so complacent in their faith that they would not likely travel to the manger if they were as close by as the shepherds, much less as far away as the Magi.

Andrewes went on to speak of his mid-seventeenth-century fellows, saying that they make great haste to other things, but not to worship God. If Christmas were to involve a long journey begun in December, Andrewes said, “Best get us a new Christmas in September; we are not like to come to Christ at this feast.” For Andrewes the travel, the journey, the seeking, amounted to nothing in themselves. The only motivation of the Magi was to find and worship the Christ with all their souls, their bodies, and their worldly goods. Andrewes said our goal should be the same.

We are encouraged to set out this year giving our best, keeping our eyes and hearts open, and trying not to be discouraged. Friends I can’t fix whatever a second Trump presidency will do or Syria or Ukraine but I can help you and others around me. I’ll end these thoughts then with the late Jimmy Carter. President Carter only did one term as President of the United States in the 1970’s. His Presidency was mostly about peace or lack of it. But he was a good Christian man from a Baptist background in Georgia. For decades, you could walk into Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, on some Sunday mornings and see hundreds of tourists from around the world crammed into the pews. And standing in front of them, asking with a wink if there were any visitors that morning, would be President Jimmy Carter – preparing to teach Sunday school, just like he had done for most of his adult life. And I noticed when they showed part of his inauguration in 1976 he quoted for all the world to hear this call of God from the prophet:

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation.

As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles." 

Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: 

"He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."

The first Sunday of another year of God’s grace invites us to remember the grace of God, his breaking in, his belief in us and our responsibility if we profess any faith at all to respond. If we remember and respond then I think whatever this year brings it can be a happy one. Friends, let’s start well and start with God. Amen.