For whom the Bell tolls

  My brothers and sisters, we meet tonight to celebrate the most extraordinary of truths. We meet to proclaim nothing less than the reality at the centre of the universe, that God, the creator of all there is and was and shall ever be, who loved you and me into being and who continues to sustain us without cost, without favour, with nothing more than the beating heart of grace, that this very God was born in a stable, to a forgotten woman, of a despised and imprisoned nation.     We meet to proclaim our faith in the Word made flesh – a Word that was in the beginning with God, a Word that was with God, a Word that was God. We meet here, in this ordinary place, in this ordinary time, to proclaim to the world that against all the odds, against all appearances, impossibly, even, that the extraordinary of God has burst forth into the ordinary of the world, burst forth not in rage or in anger, not in power or in might, but in the simple act of a baby’s birth.    God incarnate, born of the wo

  ‘Woke Christianity will kill the Church of England stone dead’.   So reads the headline of the most recent of the endless, tiresome, and frankly rather silly hit pieces that our newspapers appear to love to print in the run up to Christmas. ‘Congregants don’t want to be preached to about politics, & they certainly don’t want drag queens. What they want is the full-fat version of faith’, it screeches in faux outrage, getting into full pantomime mode. ‘ Drag queens are not the answer’, it tells in increasingly bewildering absurdity. ‘The churches still thriving are those that refuse to pander to the Left’.   Now I will admit that I probably agree with the author that drag queens – at least by themselves – are not likely to be the salvation of Mother Church. In fact, like Jesus, I don’t really have much to say about drag queens at all, except to suggest that the clergy – dressed as we are – ought perhaps to be the last to throw stones. Yet such a convenien