Reverend Ann's Letter

December 2025

Rejoice always, Christ is born. 

Are you rejoicing right now as you read this?

I have been reading Psalm 126. In it the Psalmist writes: “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad”. Back then it seems God did things, God saved us, God acted definitively, and there was much rejoicing.

What about now?  Where do we see signs of God doing things?  Well, let’s start with our own lives and recognize how, in the past year, God has blessed us and when he has comforted us and maybe seen us through difficult painful times.  Then let’s look out at our communities and see all the good being done within them. Then let’s look at our broken world and see all those who are working for peace, those who are providing food, shelter and safety for those in desperate need, those working through environmental projects to bring hope for the future.  It would be easy to despair in these troubling times, but with God there is always hope.

The writer of Psalm 126 is part of the telling and retelling of God’s work in history, so that we may recognize it when it breaks into the world in the form of the Christ child.

Because, whatever our circumstances this Christmas, God has become Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, and he is still breaking into our world offering us glimmers of light and hope.

What better light could we possibly have this Christmas than the Light of the World being born into a poor family in an occupied and troubled land.  What better hope could we possibly have than ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth’.

God became a human so that he could enter entirely into human experience and never be parted from us.  If this isn’t worth rejoicing at Christmas, then what is?

So please do have a Happy Christmas and let us live in the hope of the Christ child, born, as the carol says, ‘to raise the sons of earth, born to give us second birth’.

Rejoice always, Christ is born.

Ann