Snow slows us down. Just as we were poised to post presents and prepare for parties, snow came down and slowed us down.
Some people decided this was a time to sledge and snowball. Others more cautiously stayed put, relying for supplies on family or neighbours. Some carried on regardless, inching along icy roads; getting into school or work late, leaving early. But, one way or another, snow slowed all of us down.
And maybe, though inconvenient, that's not inappropriate. For though almost certainly Jesus was not born in the bleak midwinter - sorry about that, Christina Rossetti - his mother Mary must have found preparing to bear a child slowed her down. Like us, struggling in the snow, she had to give her full attention to the here and now, for safety's sake, and not to miss out on any of it.

Leviticus 25:47-50; Hebrews 9:1-14
Did any of you hear or see the news this morning, about the 33 Chilean miners being rescued, after more than two months stuck underground? It's been an amazing operation, ever since they were discovered to be alive. A communication shaft was laboriously dug, allowing them to receive food and letters from outside. And now they're being winched up a rescue shaft, encased in biosuits designed for astronauts. They've even been given media training to enable them to face the huge interest in their story. Those miners would never have been able to afford such resources to escape themselves, yet Chile has footed the huge bill to save their lives and bring them up to the surface.

What's in a name? Shakespeare reckoned that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but what if it were renamed the Lesser Stinkwort?
Recently I had a conversation about the blessing we sing at church when someone is baptised or married:
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Leuenberg, Fellowship and the Dishonest Steward
Our consultation this week, as you know, has been on the theme of ‘church fellowship'. I should have loved to be in dialogue in this sermon with some of the ideas I have heard in the last few days; but, as you know, it had to be written a while ago so that it could be translated in advance into some of the languages spoken by this esteemed gathering. Cumbersome though this process may be, in itself this is an act of fellowship, as I who speak and you who listen are all doing our best to understand one another's language and culture, different though we are, and to make our own standpoint comprehensible to others. This is one small example of the visible fellowship described in Leuenberg Thesis 15: an expression of commitment to each other; a testimony to our mutual obligation and a confession of the catholicity of the church.

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?