Sixty-Second Sermon
Getting ready for Christmas; don't you just love it?
Will you find the must-have go-go hamster in time?
Will anyone eat their sprouts?
Will your nerves survive the family gathering?
Who's going to pay for it all?
On the first Christmas Day it was quite different.
Dressed all in blue, Mary cradles her smiling newborn son, watched devotedly by dewy-eyed cattle and respectful rustics, while alleluiaing angels hover overhead.
Oh yeah?
Well, maybe on the planet Krypton.
But Christians believe that, amazingly, God chose to become human, not Superman. So let's add a bit of realism here.
A teenage mother exhausted after a long journey and her first child. A man who's not quite sure where he fits in. And cattle and rustics alike making the stable's atmosphere much more ripe than romantic.

Melanie's loved Christmas ever since she was a child. Now she has children of her own, it's even better. But how's she going to afford all their presents this year, since Kevin's lost his job?
Peter's got a heavy cold. Or it might be swine flu. He doesn't want to do anything but go home and be cossetted by Mum, even if he does get dragged out to church on Christmas Day. But believe in Jesus? Are you serious? That's like Santa Claus, isn't it? Just for little kids.
If it wasn't for Christmas, Briony's bookshop would be dead. She takes half the year's profits in December. But standing all day in the shop is just murder on her feet. If only she could take a bit of time off!
Malcolm's glad of the Christmas break. He can do his own research for a change, instead of all this undergraduate marking. He might even turn up at midnight mass. But really, Christmas is all sentiment - it's just a convenient pause in the semester.

The students are coming, hurrah, hurrah! I bet that's what you're thinking as traffic jams thicken and night-time noise levels rise. Many people who see students as the lowest form of life have children at college. But of course that's different.
I used to know an old lady who thought black people should go back where they came from - and she didn't mean Birmingham. But not the Nigerians next door, who helped with her shopping. They were her neighbours. And that was quite different.
One of my favourite stories about Jesus is when a foreign woman wanted him to heal her daughter, and he said no and called her a dog. ‘But even dogs eat the crumbs from the family table!' she retorted. Suddenly, she wasn't the lowest of the low, but a human being needing his help. And that was different.
Jesus healed her daughter. He had learned from his experience. I hope we can, whether or not we're labelled as students.

I don't know about you, but I find it frighteningly easy to adopt a kind of tunnel vision and dismiss whatever's outside my immediate sphere of interest. Every Saturday evening there will be cultural delights on offer in the city centre - but you'll guess what I'm focussing on: getting my sermon written! The spring weather has been lovely recently, but I've not really noticed it - because I've been too busy preparing for our Holy Week and Easter services. Of course, more organised people would start that sort of work much longer in advance than I do, but I suspect you may wrestle with similar tensions. Putting your head down will fulfil your immediate goal - but may also make you miss out on whatever's happening in the wider world.

Last Tuesday night between 11pm and midnight I found myself reading aloud from the book of Leviticus, as part of the URC Yorkshire Synod's Big Bible Read. On Wednesday evening at church, it was the end of 1 and the beginning of 2 Samuel that a few of us read together. And it was instructive on both occasions to remember some of the parts of the Bible we don't generally read out in church.
Leviticus was all about regulations: how the priests should offer what sacrifices (lovely for a vegetarian to read!); who and what should be considered unclean under what circumstances and for how long. It reminded me of more than usually complicated committee minutes. Samuel was all about national and international politics: who fought whom, who won, how the losers died (horribly), who took responsibility and who evaded it. It reminded me of recent news reports from all around the globe.

As we ministers from CTBB gathered last month, we asked: what shall we do in Lent this year? And Sue Hobley said, ‘At St Mark's we're going to think about covenant.' Now I'm not too proud to borrow an excellent idea from a colleague - and I don't feel too bad about borrowing this one, for the whole idea of covenant has been important in our tradition of Reformed Christianity. So as at the beginning of March we survey the Lenten landscape, let's unpack that a bit.
Covenant is one of those off-putting theological words. We vaguely feel we should know what they mean, but in ordinary life they don't arise much. Until the arrival of Gift Aid we used to set up covenants to get tax back on charitable donations, but that can't be the same, can it?

Sometimes it's a nuisance having a month's timelag between my writing this letter and you reading it. But just now I should very much like to be out of date. If only, by this time next month, political and military crises in Gaza, Zimbabwe, Congo and elsewhere were to be completely solved, leaving their inhabitants only the normal problems of everyday life to cope with! But sadly, problems that have built up over generations will not be so easily resolved. So my question this month will still have relevance to you next month: how should we as Christians in Sheffield react to such terrible events in the world beyond our doors?
Should we decide that such crises, however horrible, are too far removed from our experience to have any connection with us and our lives? But that's not actually the case, for the world is an ever smaller place, and people from Zimbabwe and Congo regularly worship with us and use our building for their services.

It's another new year for us to welcome in, and for many of us at St Andrew's, another Hogmanay to celebrate - for any Sassenachs, that's the Scottish name for New Year celebrations, and celebrations is definitely the word! I have to admit that when I was studying at New College in Edinburgh, I'd always arrange to be away for Hogmanay - the street party outside my door on the Royal Mile was just too loud and enthusiastic for me to cope with!

I've been having to think about Christmas harder than usual this year, for as well as our own festivities, there's also a Muslim-Christian dialogue at the beginning of December (on Sunday 7th December at 2pm at the Broomhall Centre, in case you're interested) on the subject of Festivals: what are our Christian festivals, and what do they mean to us? So this year I'm asking myself what Christmas may look like from the outside, from the perspective of another faith community which worships the same God as Christians, but understands its relationship with God very differently from the way we do. By December Muslims in Sheffield, like everyone else, won't be able to ignore the fact that Christmas is on its way. The adverts, the lights, the decorations will all clue them in to the season. But I wonder how clear it may be to someone looking in from outside that this is a spiritual occasion as well as a boost to our national economic life. For seen from the outside, what is Christmas?

With all the marketing of Hallowe'en these days as a ghoulish festival of trick and treat, it's easy to forget that originally All Hallows Eve wasn't as important as the two days following it, All Hallows or All Saints' Day and All Souls Day: the first celebrating those who have made it in the Christian life, and the second remembering everyone else who hasn't yet made the grade. Neat! Except for one detail: no one knows, and no one can know, which is which.
I have known of a woman, in a town far from here, who made her daughter's life an absolute misery, breaking down her self-confidence, wrecking any relationships she might have had. But this bitterly twisted woman was a pillar of her local church, admired for all her good works; no one in her local congregation would have believed the face she showed at home.