“A joyful Christmas to you. I’m here in the Cathedral in Inverness having just celebrated the Eucharist on this Christmas Eve. We’ve been gathered here to allow the sacraments to be distributed to those places across the diocese where they will have a service tonight, or a service tomorrow but have no priest. And so it’s that lovely sense of sending the sacrament on its journey, its journey towards the corners of the diocese: something about that Christmas journeying. And this building tonight will be filled as it has been on various nights in the last week as people have been gathering together, and gathering together in greater numbers.
“Some see that as a sign of new birth, but others see it as a sign of anxiety. People turn towards faith, turn towards religion when they’re anxious. Anxious about the news, anxious about the things which are very certain to them, being a little bit shaky. And this year we’ve experienced so many of those things, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the appalling situation in Gaza, the ongoing inhumanity of one part of the world to the other. We sit and wonder what is it that we can do. But of course what we can do is what we’ve always done, is to offer prayer, is to gather together, to offer friendship, to offer a hand, to offer a word.
“There are those who tell me that, ‘what’s the point?’ Well, the point is that when you gather, when you share, when you offer, you do something for the other person and that enables the sense of hope, hopefully, to grow. We will gather here again this evening. We will sing our carols. We will rejoice in the knowledge of all the uncertainty and anxiety and the knowledge of all the pain and hurt, but in the knowledge that one birth, one child, just made such a difference.
“I hope and pray that as we remember the birth of Christ today, as we give thanks for that moment, we are able to reflect upon what we need to do, the words we need to speak, the actions we need to take so that we can truly follow the Christ child, enabling one another to walk together for that extra distance, enabling people to turn the other cheek rather than simply attacking, enabling those who have more than they could possibly ever need to share with those who are struggling. And if we can only do that in our own community, then so be it. We are people of hope. The world needs our hopefulness. Have a joyous Christmas.”
