Sermons

We haven't had one for a while, but I do love watching a royal wedding. When you have a royal wedding, usually you have one member of the royal family marrying somebody else who is also rich and famous—possibly a member of a royal family of another country, or just somebody with substantially good upbringing.

Part of the reason why it's fun to watch a royal wedding is that it is not about you. You are watching how the other half live, and you are watching a ceremony that you know would never be yours. But there's something magical about it.

Have you ever missed out on something that you were really looking forward to happening? I think back to when we were coming out of the various Covid lockdowns and where you were allowed to meet up with friends and family from all over the country, provided everybody was in a perfect state of health, and I can think of more than one occasion when we had something planned to meet up with various branches of the extended family, and then at the last minute someone had some symptoms or a test and we were not able to go to whatever it was that the rest of the family would be gathering at.

Can you think of the last time you felt homesick? I imagine most people in this room have known that experience at some time or another—whether it was your first time spending a night away from your home, or if you had to spend an extended period of time away for some reason.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have done something that has left a bad impression on somebody else, and then later you needed the help of that same person, and you had to go back with your tail between your legs to ask for help, knowing they will remember? I asked our young people before the service if they had any recall of this, and there were quite a few nods around the room, and quite a few hands went up when I asked if anybody had a story along those lines they would like to share. Well, these were stories people preferred to keep quiet. It's embarrassing.

When you apply for a job, as I did years ago before coming here, one of the questions they ask you is to list your hobbies and interests. Here's what I put. I can’t remember if it's on the application form for this job or not: the best quality coffee in the world, hiking and running, the books of John Le Carré, and the films of Laurel and Hardy.

I wonder who here has made a New Year resolution, because in a little over 12 hours it's time to start to keep the resolution that you have made. Interestingly, when I met with the youth before the service, only two of the people in the room had at that point picked any New Year's resolutions. The others were either leaving it to the last minute to decide which ones to go for, or decided that this is an out-of-date practice that only oldies like would have an interest in. They were too polite to tell me which of those two was what was really going on.

It is easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining. What do you do when it isn't? If your life begins to fall apart, perhaps fall apart in connection with your family, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your health, what do you do then? Now, as we've worked our way through this letter of James, we've seen that he's been helping us think this through. And today, in the final verses of his letter, he brings the various threads of his letter together to try to give us an answer of how do you keep going with Jesus when life feels like it's falling apart.

We're blessed in this church to have a great many people who work in the medical world. We have doctors, we have nurses, we have various other people who actually work in roles in the medical world, and that's a good thing, because when you become sick you need a doctor, assisted by a great many other medical staff who can help find out what is wrong and tell you what can be done to deal with your sickness.

Let me ask you a question: Do you need to be good in order to go to heaven? Do you have to do good works, good deeds, to get to heaven? That is a really important question, is it not? Because where you spend eternity really matters. This life we live in now is short; the most any of us will get is probably 100 years, relative to which eternity is a very, very long time. So where you get to spend eternity, well, there is no more important question for you than that.

Well, like almost every grown-up, I have forgotten almost everything they taught me when I studied for my GCSEs. However, when we did GCSE English, we had to read some novels of a 19th-century author called Thomas Hardy. Not to be confused with the present-day actor of the same name.