Thought for the week - 7 December 2025

If we are to live fully as human beings, we have to acknowledge our mortality, our joys, our faults and our internal pain. All these things together make us who and what we are, and they combine into the song of never-ending love that we can sing with certainty and joy – when that song is sad and when it is full of life, it is still our song and speaks of who we are. So we need to sing, and to remember the songs of those who we come here to mourn today, because they also live still, in us and in the life which is yet to come.

We are here to celebrate the gift of love, but love is risky. To love is to enter into the certainty of loss. And what a loss those of us here have suffered. So much of life is beyond our control. Cancer emerges; tumours grow. Death is still at work in our world. People find themselves in situations where they can see no way out. Our mental or physical health may decline and none of this means that there is no love, and none of this means that there is no love from God. We may grieve the future that could have been, with trips not taken, meals not shared, songs not sung. But if love is risky, it is worth the risk, for who would have not known love?

So tonight, we are acknowledging a fact that is sometimes lost on many people during the celebration of this season—the reality that not everyone’s Christmas is a merry one. There are people for whom this time is one of sadness because a sense of loss in their lives becomes magnified. There are feelings of emptiness because of the absence of loved ones who have passed away.

Jesus’ birthplace, a stable, was actually a cave. His burial-place, his tomb, was a cave as well. The first cave was prepared by Joseph, the poor carpenter from Nazareth. The second cave was also prepared by a Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea. At his birth, Mary wrapped Jesus’ body tightly in cloths for swaddling clothes. At his death, Mary also wrapped Jesus’ body, in linen cloth, for a burial shroud. She placed his body in a manger, a feed box for grain. He would give his own body as food, feeding his flock with his flesh and blood. Who first heard the news of Jesus’ birth? It was shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem – the light of the world, the source of love, calls us all at all stages of our lives and offers a final call as well, which requires the courage to answer and the faith to hope.

It is for and through those who are hurting, though, that the real meaning of Christmas comes through. In fact, only a deeply “sanitized” reading of the Christmas Story would lead anyone to think that Christmas is “just only” about joy. Christmas is all about real life and God coming to us so that He can give us that real life. When we realize this, we receive the comfort we need that brings us the hope that we want and that gives us the joy that want to feel.

Yet one problem with this is that there are some who often wonder: Does God knows my pain, does He know what I’m feeling, is He able to appreciate what I am going through in this life and living that seems to be all too often tempest-tossed? And Christmas holds the answer to these questions: Yes He does. In the person of Jesus Christ, the One who came to be Immanuel—God with us—God Himself entered into our world and became one with us by being one of us. In Jesus, God knows the hurt and pain of our lives because He shared in it. We have a God who knows our pain and grief, who has gone through our sufferings, and who knows what we need to heal broken, torn, and wounded lives.

And this comfort that God brings to us gives us hope—a hope that we must have in this life that we live day by day. We need hope because we look around us and see and know that things are still “less than perfect”, including ourselves. Just the very fact that we are here tonight to acknowledge grief, suffering, sorrow, and pain makes this point clearly. Yet, why we are also here tonight is to acknowledge that there is hope, that there is a Source for this hope.

Tonight, each of us knows the hurt, the pain, the grief, the suffering that we are going through. What each of us feels is real and no one can deny or convince us that this isn’t so. Yet, even though our feelings will be with us and will even be a part of our Christmas, what needs to be even greater than our feelings is the sure and certain knowledge that you still have a song to sing that is beautiful, that is your own and which unites you with the ones you have loved and still love. No matter how we live and no matter how we die, the love that we have is manifest here tonight, by the manger, under the tree, in your song, in your heart and in this building which is built to say one thing – love wins, and even death has been defeated. Fear not, Jesus says, I have overcome the world.

Have a happy Christmas and keep on singing with love and hope.