Sermon for the 7th of December - Benefice Carol Service

I wonder. It’s lovely to see you…. But why are you here? I mean, was it the prospect of mince pies after the service? Did a friend or family member drag you along…. Perhaps reluctantly! Or was it the idea of a traditional carol service. Or perhaps you’ve simply wondered in from Holland Road! Whatever the reason, you are most welcome. This service always carries its own kind of magic — the quiet movement of people, the play of darkness giving way to light, the ancient words of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, the carols we know so well, and the stunning music.

Faith gives us a particular way of seeing the world. It reminds us that life is, at heart, mysterious — that there is more to our existence than what we can measure or explain. Even in our secular age, when fewer people attend church, I sense a continued longing for something beyond us: a hunger for the transcendent.

The Church at its best opens a more expansive horizon. It offers a sacred space not only of words but of beauty — beauty in stone and wood, in silence, in story, and in song. Beauty has a way of disarming us, of opening something deep within. It can draw us again toward the divine: the One who is both within us and beyond us. Many today who describe themselves as “spiritual” know this instinctively.

Faith can transport us into this spiritual realm. We move beyond the rational, utilitarian, functional world we inhabit, and into a different space. A space that inspires wonder and awe. A place in which we sense, deep down, that we are more than simply material beings. Our spiritual life opens up an spacious vista, a wider horizon, a way of seeing reality more deeply and more clearly. Musicians, poets, and artists often get this instinctively.

There is a word I’ve avoided using so far — religion.
I wonder how you feel about it.

For many, it carries unhelpful baggage: memories of narrowness, judgement, exclusion; an impression of something rigid or outdated. And yet there is another way of understanding the word, one that speaks to a profoundly human need.

Christmas, after all, is about connection.  It draws together what we often keep separate in our Western rational dualist perspective. Christmas embraces eternity and time, heaven and earth, the visible and invisible, light and darkness, the divine in humanity…. All are connected in the birth of Jesus.

At Christmas, God becomes present in our midst. God draws close. And that’s what good religion is meant to do: reconnect us with the divine, reconnect us with one another, and reconnect us with our own deepest selves.

There is, of course, plenty of bad religion — fearful, judgemental, unquestioning, suspicious of other faiths. Many people reject religion because they have only known that kind. But as the late Jonathan Sacks reminded us, the word religion comes from re — “again” — and ligare — “to bind” or “to connect”, as ligaments connect bone to muscle. Religion, at its heart, is meant to bind together what has come apart.

And many of us, whether we regularly attend church, feel most connected to the sacred in other ways — in the vastness of the night sky, in the hush of a forest, in the colours of a sunset. Others find connection in dance, in yoga, in meditation, or simply in a quiet walk without the constant tug of our phones. These small practices make space for the soul to breathe. If you feel distant from God — as I sometimes do — these practices can gently draw us back, helping us reconnect with the Holy who has never left.

Christmas invites us to such reconnection. It invites us to make space — to allow Christ to be born anew in the expectant places of our hearts. To welcome the presence of God, God-with-us, into the ordinary and physical world we inhabit.

May this night, with all its beauty and mystery, open in us a renewed sense of connection: with God, with one another, and with the deepest truth of who we are — beloved, held, and never alone.