God's Tapestry
A sermon for Advent 4 Micah 5.2-5a ; Luke 1.39-55 This year, the Church of England is urging churches and cathedrals to tweet Christmas sermons using the hashtag ‘Christmas Starts with Christ’. There’s also a national advertising campaign with the same strapline – ‘Christmas starts with Christ’. It would be hard to be more wrong. Through the whole of our Advent season, we have been demonstrating that Christmas does not start with Christ but far earlier in God’s plans with his chosen people. As we come to the end of Advent, and as later we light the final candle on the Advent wreath, I want for a few minutes to reflect on what we’ve been doing for the past four weeks. Lighting candles, remembering figures from the depth of the Old Testament and the periphery of the New. For the duration of Advent, we’ve been tracing the links in the chain that lead us to Jesus. We began with the patriarchs, the men and women who are pivotal in the hist