The creative, defining, loving Word of God

Today was the second ecumenical exchange that has been organised recently between St Andrew's Wickford and Christ Church Wickford with Revd Moses Agyam and I taking each others services. Revd Moses led the All-age Eucharist at St Andrew's I led the 10.30 am service at Christ Church (see below).

Here's the sermon that I preached at Christ Church:

Abracadabra, Open Sesame. If you’ve hired a children’s entertainer who did magic then you’re likely to have heard those words recently. They’ve been reduced to fun phrases for children but they represent our long-term belief in the power of words. If you’ve watched the climax of the BBC TV drama Merlin, then you’ll have seen Merlin, Morgana and Mordred muttering spells in an ancient tongue before their eyes flash and magic occurs.

Words have power. That’s what human beings believed in the past. We tend now to associate that thought with fantasy and yet it is an indication of the huge power that words actually carry. Each of us each day of our lives use words to make things happen and, while it may not be magic, it is powerful nonetheless.

The Bible teaches us much about the power of speech. Words are creative. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. God said, ‘Let there be …’ and life itself came into existence. Words also describe and define what has been made. In the Genesis account of creation, God divides light from dark and names light as ‘Day’ and dark as ‘Night’. Similarly he separates land from water and names the land as ‘Earth’ and the water as ‘Sea’. One of the first things he teaches human beings to do is to name what they see around them.

The creative, defining speech of God is wise. In Proverbs 8 we are told that God created Wisdom as the first of his works and that Wisdom speaks excellent words. God’s words, we are told, always accomplish what he purposes. When he sends them out into the world they never return to him void.

Yet, as Simon Small reminds us in his book ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’: “Thoughts and words are merely descriptions of reality. They can be wonderful, beautiful pointers to truth; they can evoke the experience of truth; and they can mirror the light of truth. Thoughts and words are necessary to help us open to the experience of truth. But they can never be truth itself. Thoughts and words, at best, can only be alarm clocks that wake us up to what was always present.” Words can be helpful or unhelpful, but they are not ultimately the reality or truth which they describe.

In the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1. 1 – 14), Jesus is described as being God’s Word to human beings; he is in himself the message that God wants to communicate to us. This Word is a real person, not simply a description of God or a statement of the truth about God. What this means is that the truth about God is found in a relationship with Jesus and not in a set of statements or beliefs about him. Truth is not a prescription that we can swallow but a relationship in which we live.

When Jesus is described to us in the Prologue to John’s Gospel as being the Word of God, we can see then that John is bringing all these thoughts about speech and words into play. When he writes that Jesus is God’s Word, he means that Jesus is the creativity, the definition and the wisdom of God; all wrapped up and revealed in human form and flesh.

Jesus’ creativity is seen in the new way of being human that he reveals to us. In him, the divine and the human come together enabling us to see all that human beings can potentially be; all that we can potentially become. In him we see the best of humanity because in him we see God fully expressed. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

God is love and, in Jesus, we see pure love expressed without reserve and without self-seeking: the way of compassion instead of the way of domination; the way of self-sacrifice instead of the way of selfishness; the way of powerlessness instead of the way of power; and the way of giving instead of the way of grasping.

Therefore to follow in his way is to experience divinity in our lives; to move towards the divine. When we see him call his disciples to follow him that is what occurs; they leave their old way of life behind in order to begin to experience a new and divine way of being human. As the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, God himself becomes their Father.

In doing so, he is also the Word of God which describes and defines us. The Prologue to John’s Gospel explains Jesus’ ability to define us in terms of light and darkness. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. God sees all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

In 1 John 5. 20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we know the true God.” He is, therefore, also the wise Word of God because, through him, we understand and know the true God as he truly is. Not only that but we see and know ourselves realistically as well.

Ultimately, the Word that God speaks to us in and through Jesus is ‘Love’. In 1 John 4. 9 – 10 we read, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.”

Jesus came into our world as the Word of God to live a life of self-sacrificial love as a human being. He shows us what true love looks like and he shows us that human beings are capable of true love even when most of the evidence around us seems to point towards the opposite conclusion. But he did not come solely as an example or a description of love. He is love itself, the reality of love, and, therefore, as we come into relationship with him we come into a true relationship with love. This why he came, that we might receive him; that we might receive love. He is then in us and in him. Love in us and we in love.

In the beginning Love already existed; Love was with God, and Love was God. From the very beginning Love was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. Love was the source of life, and this life brought light to people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

“God is love. And God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.

Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4. 8 – 12).

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Parchment - Son Of God.

Light that enables us to see ourselves and our world

Here is yesterday's sermon from the lunchtime Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

In today’s epistle (Ephesians 5. 8 - 14) we are told that we were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord. So we are called to ‘live as children of light … and find out what pleases the Lord.’ What does this involve?

Jesus, our Lord, is the light of the world. We are given the image of Jesus as light to help us grasp the reality that he is the one by whom we come to see. Light is not something we can see directly but something that enables us to see ourselves and our world. This is what Jesus does for us through the incarnation; he is God fully revealed in human form, so shows us what God is actually like as well as revealing all that we, as humans, can become. For the very first time in the history of the world a human being lives a fully human life.

We come into the light of Christ by comparing our lives to his. As we do so, inevitably we find that we fall short; that our capacity to do what pleases him (by living out all goodness, righteousness and truth) is less than his capacity for these things. Our reality, as our Gospel reading (Luke 11. 14 - 26) makes clear, is that we are divided people. As St Paul states in Romans 7: ‘… what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’

When we see ourselves and our world in the light of the life of Jesus, what we see is our failure and inability to be the people that we were created to become. In the light of the way that Jesus lived his life, we see our lack of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, remain in darkness, and there is no truth in us. But when we live in the light, seeing ourselves as we really are, then we become honest with ourselves and with God. By coming into that honesty we confess our sins and are purified; we make our humble confession to Almighty God truly and earnestly repenting of our sins.

But the light of Christ does not just expose and make visible our fallibilities. When we learn what pleases our Lord (which is all goodness, righteousness and truth; or, as our confession says, intending to lead a new life by following the commandments of God, walking in his holy ways and living in love and charity with our neighbours) we are then illuminated by him and become a light to others. This is what Jesus means when he tells us to let our light shine before others, that they may see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven.

In business terms we would call this being transparent. One business dictionary definition of transparency is a “lack of hidden agendas or conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making.” The true purpose of transparency is not simply to appease regulators, to increase profits, or to please shareholders. The true purpose of transparency is authenticity. This is the quality of being genuine, and ultimately of being trusted, which allows our message to be heard and believed. For this to happen – for us to ‘be a real agent for God to connect with [our] neighbour’ – we need self-awareness; ‘each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself.’

Light enables us to see all that is around us. As a result, we can then also see others around us and when we do this, looking around us and see other people, creatures and objects, we can grow in understanding of ourselves by undertaking an exercise in comparing and contrasting; thinking to ourselves I’m similar to this and I’m different from that.

There is a South African word ‘Ubuntu’, which means ‘I am because you are’. It is only as we see others, in the light of Christ, that we truly come to know ourselves. Jean Vanier, creator of the L’Arche communities, also speaks about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another. 'We do not discover who we are, we do not reach true humanness,' he says, 'in a solitary state; we discover it through mutual dependency, in weakness, in learning through belonging.' Similarly, St Anthony the Great said ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’ and, as a result Rowan Williams states that 'only in the relations we have with one another can the love and mercy of God appear and become effective.'

Once we were darkness, but now in the Lord we are light. So, live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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John Tavener - Darkness Into Light.

Transparency and authenticity

Today's sermon at St Stephen Walbrook was entitled Transparency and authenticity. The podcast of this sermon can be found in the sermon section of the London Internet Church website:

In May I will be leading the Memorial Service for Robert Fell at St Martin-in-the-Fields. In 1974 Fell became the first Chief Executive of the Stock Exchange and later went on to help regulate Hong Kong Securities.

He writes in his memoirs: “My first meeting … was on the consequences of the Burmah oil collapse. The next day, my first full council meeting was about how to deal with the financial crisis. Two days later, on January 6th … was the day of the City’s Epiphany Service. I attended with the Chairman and Deputy Chairman. As we walked down the aisle the Deputy remarked that he did not see Burmah Oil on the Order of Service. But when we reached our pew no three men ever knelt in more fervent prayer … As I knelt I could hardly have anticipated that my regulatory experience (over the next decade) would encompass the ‘hammering’ of one major London firm and the suspension of two others, the murder of a banker, three suicides … the jailing of two exchange chairmen and an assortment of bankers and, as a last straw, the sentencing to eight years imprisonment of the Crown Prosecutor who dealt with most of the commercial crimes I had uncovered.”

Most of what he was referring to happened whilst he was in Hong Kong. A cartoon published in Hong Kong depicted him as a knight in shining armour riding to the rescue of the banking system. He was called ‘a one-man cavalry’ who brought corruption into the light, even when it was dangerous to do so, and by doing so saved Hong Kong’s financial reputation from international oblivion.

In today’s epistle (Ephesians 5.1-14) a similar level of transparency is being commended for our own personal lives: ‘… you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light … and find out what pleases the Lord.’

Jesus, our Lord, is the light of the world. He is God fully revealed in human form, so shows us what God is actually like as well as revealing all that we, as humans, can become. We come into the light of Christ by comparing our lives to his. As we do so, inevitably we find that we fall short; that our capacity to do what pleases him (by living out all goodness, righteousness and truth) is less than his capacity for these things. Our reality, as our Gospel reading states, is that we are divided people. As St Paul so accurately states in Romans 7: ‘… what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’

So coming into the light of Christ initially reveals our fallibilities and failures to be Christ-like. As a result, if we are to be transparent in the light of Christ, we make our humble confession to Almighty God truly and earnestly repenting of our sins.

But the light of Christ does not just expose and make visible our fallibilities. When we learn what pleases our Lord (which is all goodness, righteousness and truth; or, as our confession says, intending to lead a new life by following the commandments of God, walking in his holy ways and living in love and charity with our neighbours) we are then illuminated by him and become a light to others. This is what Jesus means when he tells us to let our light shine before others, that they may see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven.

In today’s business terms we would call this being transparent. One business dictionary definition of transparency is a “lack of hidden agendas or conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making.” That is essentially what Bob Fell brought to his work in the City and in Hong Kong. The true purpose of transparency is not simply to appease regulators, to increase profits, or to please shareholders. The true purpose of transparency is authenticity. This is the quality of being genuine, and ultimately of being trusted, which allows your message to be heard and believed.

The Church of England has recently been accused in the press of hypocrisy – a lack of authenticity – over its statements on the Living Wage. When told that the Church was full of hypocrites, Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Chelmsford, replied, "Not full – there's still room for one more." Of course the Church doesn't always live up to the standards of the Gospel. That’s why we regularly and consistently confess our sins and shortcomings.

But, as Canon Dr Angus Ritchie has written, “I'm glad the Church is speaking out on these issues. If it wasn't for the lead of our Bishops – and the powerful grassroots work of churches … many more people would earning poverty wages and living at the mercy of Britain's loan sharks … It would be a disaster if the Church stopped speaking out, silenced by fear of the next negative headline.”

May we, like Bob Fell and our Bishops, continue to practice transparency and authenticity, while acknowledging our own shortcomings, and do so even in the face of accusations of hypocrisy.

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Crux Fidelis Kng John IV of Portugal.

The Word of Love

Abracadabra, Open Sesame. If you’ve hired a children’s entertainer who did magic then you’re likely to have heard those words recently. They’ve been reduced to fun phrases for children but they represent something of our long-term belief in the power of words. If you’ve been watching the climax of Merlin, then you’ve seen Merlin, Morgana and Mordred muttering spells in an ancient tongue before their eyes flash and magic occurs.

Words have power. That’s what human beings believed in the past. We tend now to associate that thought with fantasy and yet it is an indication of the huge power that words actually carry. Each of us each day of our lives use words to make things happen and, while it may not be magic, it is powerful nonetheless.

The Bible teaches us much about the power of speech. Words are creative. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. God said, ‘Let there be …’ and life itself came into existence. Words also describe and define what has been made. In the Genesis account of creation, God divides light from dark and names light as ‘Day’ and dark as ‘Night’. Similarly he separates land from water and names the land as ‘Earth’ and the water as ‘Sea’. One of the first things he teaches human beings to do is to name what they see around them.

The creative, defining speech of God is wise. In Proverbs 8 we are told that God created Wisdom as the first of his works and that Wisdom speaks excellent words. God’s words, we are told, always accomplish what he purposes. When he sends them out into the world they never return to him void.

Yet, as Simon Small reminds us in his book ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’: “Thoughts and words are merely descriptions of reality. They can be wonderful, beautiful pointers to truth; they can evoke the experience of truth; and they can mirror the light of truth. Thoughts and words are necessary to help us open to the experience of truth. But they can never be truth itself. Thoughts and words, at best, can only be alarm clocks that wake us up to what was always present.”

Words can be helpful or unhelpful, but they are not ultimately the reality or truth which they describe. In the Prologue to John’s Gospel, Jesus is described as being God’s Word to human beings; he is in himself the message that God wants to communicate to us. This Word is a real person, not simply a description of God or a statement of the truth about God. What this means is that the truth about God is found in a relationship with Jesus and not in a set of statements or beliefs about him. Truth is not a prescription that we can swallow but a relationship in which we live.

When Jesus is described to us in the Prologue to John’s Gospel as being the Word of God, we can see then that John is bringing all these thoughts about speech and words into play. When he writes that Jesus is God’s Word, he means that Jesus is the creativity, the definition and the wisdom of God; all wrapped up and revealed in human form and flesh.

Jesus’ creativity is seen in the new way of being human that he reveals to us. In him, the divine and the human come together enabling us to see all that human beings can potentially be; all that we can potentially become. In him we see the best of humanity because in him we see God fully expressed. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

God is love and, in Jesus, we see pure love expressed without reserve and without self-seeking: the way of compassion instead of the way of domination; the way of self-sacrifice instead of the way of selfishness; the way of powerlessness instead of the way of power; and the way of giving instead of the way of grasping.

Therefore to follow in his way is to experience divinity in our lives; to move towards the divine. When we see him call his disciples to follow him that is what occurs; they leave their old way of life behind in order to begin to experience a new and divine way of being human. As the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, God himself becomes their Father.

In doing so, he is also the Word of God which describes and defines us. The Prologue to John’s Gospel explains Jesus’ ability to define us in terms of light and darkness. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. God sees all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

In 1 John 5. 20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we know the true God.” He is, therefore, also the wise Word of God because, through him, we understand and know the true God as he truly is. Not only that but we see and know ourselves realistically as well.

Ultimately, the Word that God speaks to us in and through Jesus is ‘Love’. In 1 John 4. 9 – 10 we read, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.”

Jesus came into our world as the Word of God to live a life of self-sacrificial love as a human being. He shows us what true love looks like and he shows us that human beings are capable of true love even when most of the evidence around us seems to point towards the opposite conclusion. But he did not come solely as an example or a description of love. He is love itself, the reality of love, and, therefore, as we come into relationship with him we come into a true relationship with love. This why he came, that we might receive him; that we might receive love. He is then in us and in him. Love in us and we in love.

In the beginning Love already existed; Love was with God, and Love was God. From the very beginning Love was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. Love was the source of life, and this life brought light to people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

“God is love. And God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.

Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4. 8 – 12).

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The Bee Gees - Words.

Advent: Time for change

“It’s time for change” was Barak Obama’s slogan in his 2008 Presidential campaign. When we heard in our Bible readings (Malachi 3. 1 - 4; Luke 3. 1 - 6) , “Get the road ready!” “Turn away from your sins!” “Bring the right kind of offerings!” we are being told the same; Advent is a time for change!

These are cries and readings about the need for change because of dissatisfaction with the present. God’s coming does not involve comfort for the complacent but instead is a challenge to change.

Malachi sets out a timetable or schedule for change; first a messenger will come to prepare the way for God himself to come, then the Lord himself will suddenly come to his Temple. Neither coming though will be easy or comfortable.

John the Baptist is the promised messenger and he comes preaching repentance and change as the necessary preparation for the coming of God himself. Turning away from sins and being baptized is the way to get the road ready along which God will come. He calls on the people of Israel to do this, so that the whole human race – all peoples everywhere – will be able to see God’s salvation when it comes in the person of Jesus.

But, as Malachi emphasises, the coming of Jesus is also about challenge and change: “He will be like strong soap, like a fire that refines metal. He will come to judge like one who refines and purifies silver.”

How was this aspect of Jesus expressed when he came? In John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Generally, when we compare ourselves with others we compare ourselves with those we think are worse than or similar to ourselves. On the basis of these comparisons we think we are ok; at least no better or worse than others, at best, better than many others around us. On the basis of these comparisons we are comfortable with who we are and see no need to change. But Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. When we think others cannot see what we are doing, our tendency is to try to get away with things we know are wrong and of which we would be ashamed were they public knowledge. We can see this tendency at work in all the recent major public scandals such as phone hacking, libor-rate fixing, MPs expenses, and so on. When we think no one can see what we are doing, we try to get away with murder but when those things become public that we are then contrite. This is why campaigners call for transparency in business and politics and why their calls are often resisted.

Yet God does see all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

The book I have published was written with Peter Banks, the keyboard player in the rock band After The Fire. One of the best songs by After The Fire is called ‘Laser Love’ and it contains these lines:

“Your love is like a laser burning right into my life

You know my weaknesses, you cut me like a knife

You’re separating all the wrong things from the right

It’s like a laser, laser love.

Your love is like an X-ray there is nothing that can hide

You hold me to the light, you see what is inside

It’s all so clear when it’s there in black and white

Just like a laser, laser love.”

We might wonder what this kind of exposure has to do with love but it is a love which refuses to leave us in the dark and which does everything possible to bring light into our lives. As Malachi states it is a refining love which wants us to become clean and pure.

As the hymn How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord puts it:

"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply.
The flames shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.”

This is the light and love that we celebrate as coming into the world at Christmas. It is tough love and a searching light. When we light our Advent candles or our Christingles or sing carols by candlelight it is easy to think that what we are celebrating is traditional, pretty, unchanging and sweet. But the reality of Christ’s love and light is tough and searching because it is challenging and because it calls us to change.

At Christmas we often ask the question what will we give but before we can answer that question we need to respond to the question posed by Advent which is, ‘How are we going to change?’ It is once we have been changed by God that we then have something good to give.

So how will you respond to these Advent challenges to ‘Get the road ready!’ ‘Turn away from your sins!’ and ‘Bring the right kind of offerings!’ What will you change about yourself this Advent as you prepare to welcome to Christ who comes at Christmas?

One starting point in thinking this through might be to think of what you would want to change in others and then, as the saying goes, to realise that “When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.” Alternatively, you could think of what you would like to see changed within the world and then take on board the challenge of Mahatma Gandhi to “Be the change you want to see in the world”

An inherent danger in thinking about change is our tendency to assume that change begins with someone else.  It is so easy to believe that “we” are doing the right things and that it is “them” that need to change but, as Eric Jensen has said, “The reason things stay the same is because we stay the same.  For things to change, we must change” or, as U2 once sang, “I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me.”

So this year, instead of focusing on Christmas Cheer, let us think of Christmas Change. What will you change about yourself this Advent as you prepare to welcome to Christ who comes at Christmas?

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After the Fire - Laser Love.