Hark, the glad sound - the Saviour comes!

Sermon preached at Lincoln Cathedral, Candlemas 04/02/18 Micah 3: 1-5 Hebrews 2: 14-end Luke 2: 22-40 +May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our salvation. Picture the scene when Mary, Joseph and Jesus arrive at the Temple. To start with, it’s impressive. Like the cathedral, it’s up on a hill – the Temple Mount. And it was a huge building. You could see it for miles. It was new, as well – in fact, it was still being finished. So when Mary and Joseph went in, it would have given them the same feelings of awe and wonder that visitors to the cathedral experience – perhaps more. There were no other buildings of the same scale as the Jerusalem Temple in the country. The Temple was constructed as a series of courtyards. First you entered the Court of the Gentiles, and from there you went into the Court of the Women. Next was the Court of the Israelites, then the Court of the Priests. Fi...

The week before Epiphany, my colleague preached a very hard-hitting New Year sermon about Bonhoeffer and the cost of discipleship. When I came to meditate on my Epiphany readings for this sermon, Bonhoeffer was echoing around my mind - not just Bonhoeffer on discipleship but the later Bonhoeffer in the prison letters, with his emphasis on God pushed out of the world onto the cross, on recognising the world as it really is. This led me to Hannah Arendt's "dark times". So I was approaching the Epiphany readings with a sense of Jesus being born into dark times; Jesus revealed as God with us in dark times. Can that be brought out in an Epiphany sermon? I did my best... What are the key parts of the Christmas story? I expect most of you would say: the stable, the shepherds, the angels; Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem (not forgetting the donkey!) and baby Jesus, asleep in a manger because there was no room in the inn. And that is indeed the Christmas story (ap...