Friday 19th December 12.25 

 w/c Sunday 21^st Dec 2025

Dear Friends,

For some Christmas is a time of joy and celebration, for others a more challenging time.
Whatever this Christmas holds for you, remember that at its heart it tells of the wonder that is Emmanuel – God with us.
Through all the business, the emotions, the festivities, the lasting truth is God is with us because of the baby, Jesus, whose birth we celebrate with thankfulness and gratitude.

May you have a truly blessed Christmas.

Thought for the week

Joseph is in a tight spot. Mary, his fiancée, is pregnant, and Joseph knows he isn’t the father.
For someone in Mary’s situation in her culture, she could, under the law, have been brought to trial, publicly shamed or worse. She is in a dangerous position.
But Joseph seems to be a good man and decides to put her aside quietly.
It would protect both her and him from public disgrace.
But God isn’t to be tied down by human scruples. Instead, He speaks to Joseph though an angel in a dream, and tells him to rise above human convention, to do the harder and braver thing, and marry Mary and raise the child as his own.
What courage it must have taken for Joseph to do this, and more than that, he had to put aside his own feelings of being wronged, his own public humiliation.
No wonder the angel tells him not to be afraid.

 Joseph’s faithfulness – both to God and Mary, are an integral and essential part of the Christmas story.
We often overlook Joseph, yet without him the story would not have unfolded as it did.

God will not be contained by our human social and religious conventions and Sometimes He asks us to take risks.
Sometimes He asks us to trust and be faithful without knowing what the end point will be.
Joseph was entrusted by God with His most precious gift to us all – Jesus, even though He would never know the outcome of his nurturing and faithful care.

Joseph reminds us that God uses the most unlikely, ordinary people like you and me and invites us into situations we have never imagined.
That He asks us to be faithful despite not knowing what will happen next. That He entrusts us in our own generation with His most precious gift – Jesus, to nurture His presence in our own lives, and to share this wonderful gift with others.

Christmas demonstrates the grace of God, who reveals Himself in the vulnerability of a baby, and who we can see and understand only in part at present.
But through this baby we are promised that one day we will see Him face to face. What a wonderful message – what hope in our difficult times.

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a child on earth for me?
John Betjeman

Notices and Diary

• CHANGE OF DATE – Rattery Carol Service will now be on Dec 21^st at 4.30pm
• Concert at St Luke’s Church on Saturday 20th December at 2.30 pm – Christmas Film Music on the organ, by Simon Blades. Free entry, retiring collection for St Luke’s Church and The Children’s Society.

Sat 20^th Dec       St Luke’s Church Concert at 2.30 pm

 Know you are in my heart and in my prayers.
Rev Gina