Short Talks
This section of the website comprises short stand-alone talks and articles on different aspects of the Christian Faith, including the teaching of Jesus, the seasons of the Church’s Year and Feasts and Festivals. More talks/sermons/homilies/articles will be added in due course.
The section of the website entitled The Christian Faith provides more extended teaching on larger content areas, such as the Creed and the Sacraments.
Christmas
Christmas (Christ’s Mass) is the Feast of Our Lord’s Birth. The liturgical colour is white, symbolising joy. It was being celebrated at Rome in 354 AD but had already been observed fairly widely in the West before this date, perhaps before the end of the third century in some places. (1) The Gospels provide no evidence as to the exact date of Christ’s Birth. However, St Chrysostom preached a sermon in Antioch in around 386 AD in which he encouraged all the people to celebrate Christ’s Birth on December 25th, in line with the practice of the Western Church. (2)
The soul's own Christmas
She laid him in a manger (Luke 2:7)
The murky stable, the crude manger, the shadowy animals – what a setting for the Holy Babe, for the Lord God!
Faith and joy
“The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” (NRSV, Luke 2:20)
For the shepherds, the memory of the events that started that night in the fields outside Bethlehem must have stayed with them for the rest of their lives. They were unconcernedly keeping an eye on their sheep when all of a sudden an angel appeared in their midst and announced that the Saviour of the human race had just been born in the nearby town of Bethlehem, and was even now lying in, of all places, a manger.