26th. December. 2021. Service.
First Sunday after Christmas
Prelude “The Holly and the Ivy”
Bible Introit 813 “All praise and thanks to God”
Opening Prayer
Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen..
Hymn 104 “The Lord of heaven confess
Praise the Lord from the heavens and in the heights.
Praise God, sun, and moon!
God’s name alone is exalted.
God is above the earth and heaven.
Young and old together, all creatures great and small,
Let us praise God’s holy name, now and evermore!
Prayer
God of glory, angels called to shepherds with songs of your good news. Mary pondered the mystery of your goodness in the tumult of new birth. Wise men travelled to worship the Saviour. Your splendour shines from a manger where the Light of the world was born to pierce the darkness. In the fragility of human life, you reveal yourself to us face to face. Thus, we are here together in worship praising you our Creator, Redeemer, and Guide; our Father, Brother, and Friend; perfect and eternal, now and always.
Let us confess to God our sins:
God of compassion, you have given us the light of the gospel to live by, but still there is often too much darkness in our lives. You promise new life, but we confess that we find it hard to change the ways in which we have always lived; it is easy to hold onto and nourish old hurts, nursing hatreds that hold us hostage, and fantasies that restrict our living. Laziness that prevents us from being different. You show us unconditional love, but we reject and condemn our neighbours and live apart from you and one another in so many ways. Only your Spirit can recreate us in the image of Jesus whom we claim as Saviour give us the gift of surrender to your love and repentance from all our sins as well as insight to see ourselves as you see us and for your glory’s sake forgive us.
The mercy of our God is from everlasting to everlasting. Hear and believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, God’s generous love reaches out to embrace us. We are forgiven and set free to begin again. Let us forgive one another just as God has forgiven us. May the peace of Christ be with us all.
Prayer for Understanding
Almighty God, in the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
On this day of discovery and light, we wait to hear your holy Word Open our ears to the call of your voice. Let us see ourselves the dawning of the day of renewed life and fill us with anticipation of our future within your kingdom through Jesus Christ in whom we pray,
North Queensferry
Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever. Amen.
The Intimations
Messy Church
Our next Messy Church will be from 2-4 in the afternoon on Saturday, 15th January in the sanctuary. Everyone is welcome, especially families. All children must be accompanied by an adult.
The C-Word
Following on from Messy Church, the next C-Word will be at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, 19th January in the Children’s Church room. Continuing our examination of “Creed”, we will be discussing “Jesus Christ…who was born of the Virgin Mary”. All are welcome.
Invitation to the Offering
The letter to the Colossians reminds us that whatever we do, in word or deed, we do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. May our offering this day show our gratitude to God in Jesus’ name.
Prayer of Dedication
God of love, we give thanks for the many blessings you have given us throughout our lives. We are grateful that we may celebrate the birth of your greatest gift, our Saviour Jesus, once again. Bless the offerings we give in his name and use them and us to serve you well in the coming year. Amen.
All Age Talk
Have you ever been at a festival or event and lost one of your family members in the crowd? It reminds me of a story about a boy named Matthew, who got lost while his family was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping at the mall. Matthew’s family was terrified! Why do you think they were scared?
All the family members went looking in different directions, and do you know where they found the little boy? Matthew was in the candy shop, looking at all the delicious candy. He didn’t look lost. He didn’t even know he was lost. After all, he was right where they left him!
- Did the place Matthew was found surprise you? Why or why not?
- Think of a time you got lost. How did it make you feel?
This story of Matthew reminds me of a time Jesus’ parents lost Him. Think about how it wasn’t surprising that Matthew was found in a sweety shop. Now, think about what you know about Jesus.
When Jesus was a young boy, His parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. After the feast was over, Mary and Joseph were traveling back to their home when they realized Jesus was nowhere to be found. When they couldn’t find Him, they turned around and went back to Jerusalem to look for Him.
Where do you think Jesus might have been when His parents lost Him?
Do you know where they found Jesus? He was in the temple. Like Matthew, Jesus wasn’t worried or frightened. When His parents found Him, He said to them, “Why were you searching for Me? Didn’t you know I had to be in My Father’s house?”
Do you ever feel like you lose touch with Jesus?
Sometimes we get so busy that we stop thinking about Jesus or spending time with Him. The good news is, we can always find Him. Maybe reconnecting with Jesus means stopping to pray, going to church, or reading the Bible. When we go looking for Jesus, He’ll be right there waiting for us!
Dear Jesus, when we have lost sight of You, help us remember that You are still there, waiting for us to come back to You. Help us make you a daily priority. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Hymn 169 “Praise the Lord with the sound of trumpet”
Reading: Luke 2:41-52
41 Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. 42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. 43 After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44 Thinking he was in their company, they travelled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.’
49 ‘Why were you searching for me?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?’ 50 But they did not understand what he was saying to them.
51 Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
Hymn 331 “Unto us a boy is born”
Reading: Colossians 3:12-17
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16 Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Amen, this is the word of the Lord, to Him be all glory and praise.
Hymn 326 “As with gladness men of old”
Sermon
And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
I read an article in the paper this week by Emma Beddington entitled, Schmaltzy, saccharine or sinister? A brief guide to the worst Christmas carols. In this rather woke piece she selects some favourite carols s that are dramatic and quaint such as, From the dread caverns of the grave, From nether hell, thy people save, This is from the original second verse of “O come, O come Immanuel,” duly sanitised in our CH4 version.
Here is a verse from “We three kings” Myrrh is mine: Its bitter perfume breaths a life of gathering gloom. Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb. Beautifully chilling.
Beddington continues: As for the bad, I don’t want schmaltz and easy sentimentality: earn my tears, dammit. Away in a Manger is saccharine (and the “fit us for heaven” bit is sinister); Little Donkey perhaps even worse. Yes, I will almost certainly cry at Silent Night, but I will be furious at both myself and the carol (and good luck getting that “peace” bit at the end of the first verse not to sound like a beast in pain)
The quote that resonated most with me was this: Once in Royal David’s City’s “Christian children all should be / Mild, obedient, good as he” is the worst kind of Victoriana: I imagine – doubtless unfairly – its author writing the line while an urchin cleaned her chimney.
Our Christmas carols are, of course, the heritage of two thousand years of reflection on and expression of the story of the nativity of Christ in all its aspects. The story is a strange mixture of light and dark, of love and fear, of faith and unbelief. It mirrors the human experience. Peace on earth is proclaimed against the backdrop of the imperial might of Rome with its deep undercurrent of violence and oppression. The very peace that enabled the propagation of the gospel throughout the empire was maintained by around thirty legions of between 4200 and 5200 soldiers at any one time. Three hundred and fifty thousand people, one third of the population of the city of Rome were slaves at the time of Jesus’ birth and there were many more all over the empire. That says nothing of what was going on around the rest of the world at the time.
Jesus was born then in difficult times and the impression we are given by much of the Christmas mythology is that, because he was the Messiah, somehow his humanity was extraordinarily good.
Maybe we have been singing “Once in Royal David’s City” without thinking of the implication of the words. Preceding the words we quoted are: And through all his wondrous childhood, he would honour and obey, love and watch the lowly maiden in whose gentle arms he lay. Ergo, Christian children should be the same. But, as every grand-parent will tell you, they rarely are, and if they were to be, we would worry. Our key to understanding Jesus in his humanity is found in the final verse of our gospel reading today: And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
The mystery of Jesus’ divinity and humanity makes it difficult for us to grasp who he is. To the ancient mind this was less of a mystery. The Egyptians and the Romans were very familiar with the concept of intermingled humanity and divinity. Their Pharaohs and Emperors were considered to be human-divine hybrids. It is possible that the gulf between what they, in their royal and priestly roles, could accomplish and what their ordinary subjects and slaves could do was vast. As priestly representatives of their people before their gods these rulers were happy to claim to be imbued with divine attributes. This enhanced their power to control their people. At the same time however, the people did not imagine that their rulers’ divinity made them physically immortal, and more than once they killed their ruler-gods. Rather they embodied in this life the inherent divinity of the human soul which surely comes from and returns to God.
It was therefore not difficult for the early Jewish Christians to hold to the God-Man status of the Messiah. It was hinted at in their prophetic tradition, The Messiah would come from God; He was God, and He would return to God.
John in his gospel expressed Jesus’ divinity in a way that the Greeks could understand, but he also developed the idea. For the Greeks a god mating with a human produced a demi-god. Also, for them mortals could be deified, but they did not perhaps conceive of God becoming man in the way that Jesus’ humanity is understood. They could imagine a god hiding his divinity in human form, but only temporarily as stories about Zeus-Jupiter show.
We lean much more to the idea of god-made-man, as producing an ideal man, without sin, without fault or blemish. But even that makes us uncomfortable because that idea seems to impugn Jesus’ real humanity. The “mild obedient good as he” command makes us uncomfortable because to achieve it we must be unrealistically more than human, either denying our robust zest for life, or achieving superhuman control over our shadow or negative selves.
Fortunately the scriptures tell us very little about Jesus childhood. We don’t know if he was a terrible toddler or a cocky, seven-year-old know-all. The gospel of Thomas and some non-canonical gospels do describe the young Jesus as a somewhat arrogant wonder worker showing off his miraculous powers, which is why these gospels were rejected by the church. The picture we do have here is of a child with a formidable mind, open to spiritual truth, who is able to converse with adult men about spiritual reality. At the same time we have a glimpse of a thoughtless twelve-year-old worrying his parents. Their priestly community seems to have been quite safe where the children were minded by everyone, and this was what allowed him to follow his passion. The only thing we can take away is that in his precocity Jesus assumed that his parents would understand his motives.
And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
That last sentence says to me that in Jesus’ formative years he was becoming wise as well as growing physically. That is the primary meaning of “stature,” but of course it also means acquiring status, or reputation. There was normal, though perhaps unusual, growth and devel0pment
But how does one become wise? By living, by using the resources of our minds, our souls, which surely have innate knowledge as well as acquired knowledge, and by observing and understanding the people we live with.
Within his Jewish priestly family Jesus would have absorbed the history and wisdom of his people, and by a disciplined submission to the divine spirit within him. he would have learned obedience to God His Father. The challenges and temptations of human experience were as real to him as they are to us, but he also was very aware of the inner presence of the Spirit, the enabler who inspires with the love and power of God. The perfection of his sinless state was realised because he was able to maintain unbroken fellowship with his father, something which we find very difficult to achieve because it entails surrendering our selfish wills.
We acquire wisdom when he learn to surrender our struggles and failures to God, when we recognise that only God can supply the grace, love and compassion we need in all our dealings with each other. The natural ego is strong, it is part of our survival equipment, but it also what puts us into conflict with others until we surrender it to God.
When we do this, God lives within us, and we become restored to our eternal divine-human state. We become as Jesus Christ is and we are enabled to participate in his redemptive work in the world.
In this life we do not lose our sinful or shadow side, but we learn to contain it and channel its energy for good. Like Jesus, we can still be angry, but not sin, we can confront evil without fearing it, we can become fully human and live the divine life of eternity here and now. In sum,Christ came to us to restore us to God.
St Paul tells us quite clearly how this comes about in the letter to the Colossians (2:9-10): For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10 and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He means that in Christ our humanity is endowed with the fullness of Deity. That is why he calls us to engage in the process of transforming that fullness into reality in our lives thus:
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Colossians 3:12-14. That is our task.
Since I have explored what bothered me about the verse in “Once in Royal David’s city,” I can sing it without feeling awkward. I see it as an expression of a cultural understanding of the gospel that we have moved beyond and can enjoy its quaintness as part of our heritage. It is more important that we understand how Christ’s humanity and divinity can be realised in our own experience. Amen.
Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession
Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, With glad and grateful hearts come with our prayers for others in this season of hope and joy.
We thank you for your image set within us all, calling us to love one another and to care for your creation.
We thank you for the gift of your Son who redeems us and guides us as we serve you in the world.
We thank you for the energy and inspiration of your Holy Spirit, who equips and strengthens us to meet the challenges of our lives.
By the same Holy Spirit, give us grace and determination to show your love to all the people for whom we pray today:
We pray for your Church and the people who lead in it, as they work to rebuild ministries around the country after all these months of restriction. Bless our local Presbytery and all its members and office bearers with you wisdom and guidance in the coming year.
We pray for the world that you have tasked us to care for as it faces the challenges which the climate crisis has caused.
We pray for the people who rule in the nations of the world, that you will still their fears and hold back aggression, greed and militarism that they may attend instead to the needs of their most vulnerable people and all who cry for justice in their lands.
We pray for all who serve as teachers, instructors, and mentors, and their students as our young people are confronted by the complexity of a world of constant change and challenge . . .
We pray for those who look after people in their roles as healers and caregivers. We pray specially for all who are feeling exhausted by the demands the pandemic has created on them and their workplaces. We commit the world’s healthcare systems which are under pressure to your providence, guidance and power. We remember with shame the countries where too few have been vaccinated.
There are so many people struggling with poverty, homelessness, and hunger, and who have few resources to help them recover in difficult economic times.
We pray for people who are mourning the loss of someone dear to them this Christmas and those who are lonely, neglected or fearful of the future.
We pray for folk who have been imprisoned for defending truth and justice, and for everyone experiencing exclusion, powerlessness and oppression.
As this year draws to a close, and we look back at changes, loss and anxiety, give us grateful hearts for what has been loving and life-giving; give us peace about the things that have caused us pain.
and focus our attention your love and mercy and draw us closer to you and to each other.
Keep us faithful in all we do in the name of Jesus Christ, our friend and saviour and receive our prayers in his name. Amen.
Hymn 327 “Brightest and best of the sons”
Or
Sending out
Go on your way with renewed spirits, rejoicing in the Holy Friend who meets us in this house of prayer and will be with you through every hour of this week. We shall never walk alone.
Enter the New Year with expectation. There is nothing that God is not prepared for, and nothing that can resist his divine grace; and we are more than conquerors through Christ who loves us.
Benediction
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit and may the blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit descend upon you and dwell in your hearts this day and always. Amen.
“May God’s blessing surround you each day”
Postlude Berlioz « L’enfance du Christ » Trio