The Foodbank is an independent charity, registered in England and Wales no 1154217, founded in 2013 by Churches Together in Cobham, Oxshott, Stoke D’Abernon and Surrounding Areas.

The Foodbank subscribes to the national network of over 400 food banks co-ordinated and advised by the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity in Salisbury. Trussell has devised, and Cobham Area Foodbank follows, a system whereby people who find themselves without the wherewithal to buy food, for whatever reason, can obtain a food voucher from a voucher issuer, who may be a school welfare officer, a Jobcentre, a housing benefit officer, a minister of religion or other professional, who will be able to verify the need expressed. The voucher details the number and ages of people to receive food, and records the reason why their need has arisen. These details are fed into a national Trussell Trust database.

The Foodbank has collection bins in all the local churches and some other premises including Waitrose, Starbucks and Sainsbury’s, and it invites donations of non-perishable food, which are collected in the Foodbank van (pictured) and taken to the Foodbank warehouse at Brook Willow Farm, Leatherhead, where it is weighed and sorted by types and best-before dates. The Foodbank does not distribute fresh or out-of-date food.

Every Friday morning the van collects sufficient food for the week’s distribution, which takes place in the Foodbank’s ‘pop-up café’ at Cobham Methodist Church, open from midday to 1.30pm. In the last year we have distributed on average 1/3 tonne of food per week, providing food for 960 adults and 732 children – an average of 32 people per week. We are noticing an increase in numbers – around Christmas there were weeks where we provided food for between 60 and 70 people, and distributed over 1/2 tonne of food.
All the clients live locally, in Cobham, Oxshott, Stoke D’Abernon, or Downside. The area served by the Foodbank has been extended in the last year also to include East and West Horsley, Ockham and Effingham. St Martin’s, East Horsley, Horsley Evangelical Church, Effingham Methodist Church, and Posh Wash dry cleaners are all now collecting food.
Where people for whatever reason cannot come to our distribution centre, we deliver their food at home. The volunteers who serve in the distribution centre and those who do home deliveries all undergo special training in order that they treat clients appropriately, warmly and with respect.
The governing principles are ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, and Jesus’ great second commandment, to love thy neighbour as thyself. The Foodbank does not judge or advise its clients in any way, save only that there is a display of ‘signposts’ to various forms of advice and assistance.
The Foodbank does not impose any limit to the number of food parcels any client can receive. The only criterion is need. Particularly where many clients are working, but in low-paid and uncertain jobs, living in privately rented accommodation where rents rise but housing benefits have been cut or capped, (or are otherwise harmed by government austerity, as graphically shown by the recent award-winning film ‘I, Daniel Blake’), the Foodbank trustees consider that ideas of reducing ‘dependency’ are usually cruel and to be avoided. Most Foodbank clients have no chance of getting themselves out of poverty.
There are around 60 active volunteers working in the Foodbank, in transport (drivers and mates), warehouse and the distribution centre. There are no paid employees. The Foodbank is administered by a General Manager, Hugh Bryant, who also manages transport and is assisted by a volunteer coordinator and distribution manager, Christina Van Roest, and a warehouse manager, Jane Olsen. Hugh reports to a board of trustees chaired by Revd Godfrey Hilliard, including Hugh, Christina, Peter Wall and the treasurer, Claire Smith.
The Foodbank is most grateful for the support it receives financially from the churches, from various grants and generous individuals. It needs around £15,000 per year in order to meet its costs for warehouse rental, hire purchase and depreciation of the van, insurances and periodic needs to purchase food, where donations have not provided items needed in order to provide nutritionally-balanced food parcels. Bank details and a Gift Aid form may be found on the website http://www.cobhamarea.foodbank.org.uk.
Hugh D. Bryant

9th February 2017

Text of letter to Dominic Raab MP through Avaaz, 1 February 2017

Dear Mr Raab,

You and I have already corresponded about your failure to represent your constituents’ 60-40 majority against Brexit. Even if, which I do not accept, you are able to get away with your unrepresentative position, I understand that you say you have a proper care for the best interests of your constituents. 

I would therefore urge you to support the giving of a vote in Parliament to approve or disapprove the Brexit settlement which HM Government says they will have negotiated, before any notice under Article 50 is given.

Further, I would ask that, until or unless terms are obtained which either retain our membership of the single market and customs union, or provide equal trade benefits, consisting in the absence of tariffs, which membership of the EU provides, you do not vote in favour of steps to leave the EU, as, unless such terms are obtained, leaving the EU would be catastrophic for our economy – and particularly the economy of the City of London, where many of your constituents earn their living.

I do not believe that a majority of those who voted nationally to leave the EU voted for us to leave the single market and customs union. The choice on the ballot paper was simply to advise Parliament of a wish to leave the EU or not: nothing else. Mrs May’s stated wish to interpret the vote as a vote for more restricted immigration, even if this necessarily implies leaving the single market and customs union, is not something for which any democratic sanction can reliably be claimed. Given that catastrophic harm to our economy would be caused by such a ‘hard Brexit’, I call on you for once to listen to your constituents and vote in accordance with their wishes, at least insofar as the need to stay in the single market and customs union is concerned.

Hugh Bryant

___ 
Note: Your constituent Hugh Bryant sent you this message as part of an Avaaz campaign to ensure citizens and MPs have their say on the final Brexit deal. 

1) Sermon for Mattins on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany, 15th Jan 2017
1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’ Are you clear about that? Do you know what John the Baptist was on about? Certainly a man from Mars might be struggling.

I want to talk this morning about seeing things, or rather people, for what they really are. John the Baptist said – twice – that he didn’t know who Jesus was at first. Then ‘he that sent me to baptise with water’ said to John that whoever he saw being descended on from heaven by the Spirit, ‘the same’ – that one – ‘baptizeth with the Holy Ghost’.

Park that scene in your mind for a moment. Before we start to wrestle with things descending from heaven, or lambs, or even lambs of God, I just want to pause and suggest that perhaps we ought not to be too worried about what happened 2,000+ years ago, when there is so much to challenge us happening now. 

Perhaps people come to church almost as a way of getting away from the cares of the world. Brexit. Trump. The NHS crisis. What do we Christians do? We have a nice soothing service commemorating something in the church: the son of God, say. Manifesting, showing himself. Behold the lamb of God. Sounds comforting. A lamb. Almost cuddly. Much nicer than ranting politicians and worrying news bulletins.

But think about the man from Mars. Or maybe there’s someone new here in church today, someone who honestly doesn’t go to church much. Well, if you’ve never come across it before, frankly, what is a lamb of God? What’s the relevance of these rather odd sounding ideas to modern life?

Ever since Bishop John Robinson published his book called ‘Honest to God’ in 1963, thoughtful Christians in this country have realised that God isn’t very likely to be a man with a white beard sitting on a throne above the clouds. So if God isn’t ‘up there’, how likely is it that He will send angels down as messengers from above? 

Charles Wesley’s ‘Lo, He comes, with clouds descending’ may be lovely words to have in a hymn – and of course they reflect the passage in St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (4:15-17) where at the last trump, St Paul says that Jesus will descend from heaven, the dead will rise from the grave, and together with them we will all rise to meet the Messiah in the sky: but it surely don’t describe how we think that God might work today. We really don’t believe in a ‘Spirit in the sky’ any more, if we ever did.

So what about the lamb? It is the old Jewish idea of a scapegoat. See Leviticus 16:7-10. You metaphorically unloaded your bad things on to the back of a poor goat, who was then pushed out into the wilderness to fend for itself. It somehow took away the bad behaviour and hurt and alienation, by suffering for you.

Sometimes I’ve been to church services – the last one was called a ‘U2charist’, a Holy Communion where all the hymns were songs by the rock band U2, at St Martin of Tours in Epsom – where the congregation are invited to pick up something, like a pebble, say – and put it into a big bin or some other receptacle, and throw it away – as it were sacramentally, with the idea that the pebble was something, something you felt or did, that you wanted to get rid of. 

Obviously it’s better to chuck away a pebble than to turn a poor goat loose in the desert without shelter, food and water. But the idea is similar. The scapegoat, or the scape-pebble, is metaphorically taking away whatever it is you feel burdened by. I suppose if you accept the idea behind it, it might do you some good: who knows?

The idea is sometimes called ‘substitutionary atonement’. Someone takes someone else’s punishment for them. ‘Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Or much more recently, Fr Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar in Auschwitz, who volunteered to take the place of a man selected at random by the Nazis to die by starvation in reprisal for an escape.

Some people say that what Jesus did by dying on the cross was the same sort of thing. He died, it is said, as a sacrifice, a propitiation, to make up for our sins, so God would be pacified, would be content with the sacrifice and would spare us. That’s what John the Baptist might have had in mind when he called Jesus the ‘Lamb of God’. 

The Prayer of Consecration in the Holy Communion service – on page 255 of your blue Prayer Books – ‘Almighty God .. who didst give thine only son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption… who made there .. a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world..’ – that has the same idea.

It’s not an idea which liberal theologians feel comfortable with today. Why would a loving God want a human sacrifice – let alone a sacrifice of his own son? And anyway, we don’t slaughter animals on altars any more. I can see the sort of logic when mankind was more primitive, maybe living hand-to-mouth in caves. Food – and sheep and goats were walking food – was precious. If God was the most important thing you knew – or at least God was the most powerful, could do you the most good, or harm – then you wanted to keep him on side, to give Him something of the highest value – your walking food, your sheep or goat, ready for the oven – or indeed, if it was a ‘burnt offering’, ready cooked.

Anyway, what is ‘salvation’, these days? Being saved. Saved from sin. I think that some of us might have said, when we were children, perhaps, that ‘salvation’ was all about not really dying, and instead having eternal life. Certainly that comes into it: but although we may well accept that there is a sense in which there is a life after death – have a look at 1 Corinthians 15, for example – it’s clearly not as simple an idea as suddenly stopping the population from dying at the end of their lives.

No, the idea is that you’re saved from sin, from the consequences of your sins. You will be all right on the Day of Judgment: ‘that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’, as St Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians , in the passage that we had as the epistle, the lesson, today. 

Sin isn’t really just doing bad things. It isn’t just breaking one or other of the Ten Commandments. The real sting of sin is that it is separation from God, or separation from God’s way, the right path in life. I get to that this way. If God is the ultimate Creator, and if one can reasonably expect that his creation is good and right and well-conceived, breaking one or other of the Ten Commandments will tend to upset that good order in creation. 

We were meant in creation to have stable lives – families. Children who would love their parents. Murder is obviously against the created order. Stealing likewise, and giving false evidence. That well-run created order will begin to look scruffy, unbalanced. Those sins – the Greek word means ‘missing the mark’ – drive a wedge between us and the well-ordered world which God made for us.

I would suggest that, these days, when we don’t any more have sacrifices, or at least those sort of slaughtered animal sacrifices, what Jesus did, or what God in Jesus did, was to enter fully into human life – and to suffer the injustices that can ruin that life. He was condemned to death for a crime he didn’t commit. God could have saved him: he could have saved himself – think of the temptations in the wilderness (Matthew and Luke, both chapter 4, Mark 1:13).

But God – or he himself, as God – didn’t save himself. Because if he had done, he wouldn’t have been a man, fully human. There were miracles, of course: turning water into wine. Even the resurrection itself. But the point is that Jesus was shown to us, it was his Epiphany to us. God had shown that He was involved with us. ‘God in man made manifest’ (Hymn 90).

Well, that takes us to the point where John the Baptist saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, identifying Jesus as the son of God, and the first people signed up to become followers – or rather, students, of this rabbi, or teacher. And they went round to Jesus’ house, and spent time with him.

So where does that take us? Granted we can work out, with the help of a few commentary books, what the Bible says. But how do we relate to it? How do we become ‘saved’? That’s for you to ponder over this lunchtime. Or, if you look at your pew sheet, you’ll see that the lessons from St John’s Gospel this morning and tonight at Evensong are continuous. They run into each other. 

First the lamb of God and the first two disciples. Then in the next bit, Nathanael, ‘an Israelite .. in whom there is no guile’. What happened next? So you’ll have to come tonight to hear the second chapter of my sermon. Until then, think about what you’d tell the man from Mars, about that Lamb.

2) Sermon for Evensong on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany, 15th January 2017
Galatians 1:11-24; John 1:34-51

This morning at Mattins I spoke about the earlier bit of this reading from the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, and now this is by way of a second instalment.

John the Baptist had recognised Jesus for what he was, the Son of God, the ‘Lamb of God’, picked out, identified, demonstrated to be those things – because that is what the Greek word for Epiphany means – when the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove on to Jesus.

We chewed over what all these rather odd expressions – that the Lamb was in John’s eyes a sacrificial lamb, a sort of scapegoat, following the old Jewish idea that you could somehow unload all your failures and mistakes, sins even, by putting them sacramentally, symbolically, on the back of a goat and sending it out without nourishment to die in the desert.

We thought that a good and kind God would not really want such a cruel sacrifice. That perhaps the prevalence of this idea of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the Bible and in our liturgy rather reflects an earlier age, where there was powerful symbolism in giving away to God, sacrificing to him your main source of food in animal sacrifice. 

We can understand that idea in theory, but, just as we now don’t take literally the idea of ‘heaven’, and God with a white beard sitting above the clouds, we can decide to take the idea of the sacrificial Lamb as a symbol. There is no gory end here. The lesson which we take from this image, the Lamb of God, is, instead, the reason why we describe our faith as ‘revealed’ religion. God in Jesus, in human form, has been revealed, shown – the Epiphany word again – to us. Just as we suffer injustice sometimes, so did Jesus. He was one of us. 

The first part of our two lessons from St John, this morning’s part, ended with the brothers Simon and Andrew leaving John the Baptist’s followers and joining Jesus’ ‘gang’. Now in the final bit of the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, we read about the next disciple coming in, Nathanael. 

I remember when I was 5, between the ages of five and eight, I attended the Nottingham Girls High School pre-prep department. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that I have changed sex. It is one of the strange things that schools used to do. In girls’ schools, when you were small enough, there were a few boys as well. There were six of us: Richard Stillman, Simon Stocker and his brother Mark, John de Ville, Nicky Boneham and me. Our class was therefore divided into six gangs. We, each of us boys, invited girls whom we thought suitable for our gang to hang around with us and in playtime our usual idea was to organise a pitched battle between our gangs. Only occasionally did we do things more peacefully, playing in the sandpit. Innocent things in the sandpit, I assure you. With a rather good model tractor, in my case.

Well here we are reading about the call of the first disciples. In this second part of the story, Jesus invited Philip into his ‘gang’: he said, ‘Follow me’, and he did. And Philip in turn brought his friend Nathanael in. There was a certain amount of rudery between the disciples about where each one had come from: the sort of thing that I as a Brummie had to get used to, all those years ago when I was working in Liverpool. It’s the same sort of thing that all non-Londoners have to encounter down here in the soft South. How can there be anything good north of Watford? ‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Well, Philip said, ‘Come and see.’ 

So the disciples were starting to group together. The gang was being assembled. But as so often in the Bible, when you look at things a bit critically, you realise that there are massive bits of the story missing. In John’s Gospel there is none of the birth story: no shepherds, no manger, no wise men, no Herod. When we first encounter Jesus, he’s grown up. We don’t know a lot more about what he has been up to. There is, of course, in Luke the time when he gave his parents the slip and turned up in the temple where he seemed to have been holding a seminar – and he was only 12 years old (Luke 2:43f). But now, fully grown, he has been recognised as the Messiah, as the Son of God, and he has started to get his own disciples, his own gang.

The really big gap which I would like to mention to everyone for further consideration is this: what did the disciples do next? Or, for that matter, what did Jesus do next? There they all were: the team is together. They are going around together. To some extent they will be doing some studying. They will be listening to Jesus explaining the Bible to them. But honestly, do you think that is all that it was? Do you think that they were just a bunch of travelling scholars? I would suggest to you that, if that had been the case, we really would not have heard of Jesus Christ and all the huge history of the Christians down through the last 2000 years. What were they all about?

St Paul wasn’t with the early disciples, actually accompanying Jesus: but still Jesus was ‘revealed’ to him, as he says in his letter to the Galatians: ‘But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to  reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; ..’ we remember how St Paul was made blind on the road to Damascus; how he had a conversion experience and went from being the Christians’ chief persecutor to being their leading missionary. He had witnessed a huge epiphany. A huge showing of God in the person of Jesus. And what did he do? In St Paul’s case, he went about preaching. Indeed in Saint Matthews Gospel Jesus gave the disciples the great commission – but I think that is later on. 

I’m interested in what they did when they had Jesus with them. It’s generally reckoned that it lasted about three years. This morning I mentioned Bishop John Robinson and his rather revolutionary book, Honest to God, in the early sixties, and how he had challenged the idea that God was a little old man with a beard sitting on top of the clouds. Indeed, John Robinson followed the German-American theologian Paul Tillich in suggesting that a better way of understanding the nature of God was to think of God as being, as well as the ultimate creator, the heart of our being, the life force, the ground. Without God, without us being able to anchor ourselves in the ground, we would not have our life. 

And I was saying that salvation, saving us from sin, consists in getting us back in touch with God, bringing us back, grounding us in his love. Sins are the things that take us away from God. If the creator and sustainer of our world has demonstrated that he is interested in us, by sending Jesus, God is not just an impersonal unmoved mover. He is a man, was a man, like us.

That must mean that the kingdom of God isn’t some Shangri-La above the clouds, but it is a world where there was a new Jerusalem, ‘a new heaven and a new earth, the holy city, new Jerusalem made ready like a bride adorned for her husband. Now at last God has his dwelling among men. He will dwell among them and they shall be his people and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be an end to death, to mourning and crying and pain; for the old order has passed away.’  

And again, it’s what we pray for in the holy communion service in Common Worship: ‘send us out in the power of your spirit to live and work to your praise and glory’ or, ‘Keep us firm in the hope that you have set before us, so that we and all your children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise your name.’ Or in the Eucharistic Prayer (E):
‘Lord of all life

Help us to work together for that day

When your kingdom comes

And justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.’
It’s very practical. It may not be that we somehow win our place in the kingdom by doing good works: but as St Paul explained later on in his letter to the Galatians, you become ‘under the Spirit’: he says, ‘.. the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.’ Those must have been the qualities that the disciples were demonstrating.

If you start to be filled with the Spirit – which is one aspect of God, after all – in this way, then people will start to notice. People will start to feel the power of the Good News, of God with us.

So we will become like Nathanael, ‘without guile’, good people. Then, with John the Baptist, they saw Jesus, the Lamb of God. Now much later, in Jesus’ gang, then among his disciples, now as members of his church, in ourselves, in each other we can see him again, in his Holy Spirit at work. Let’s make room for Him. God is with us.

Dear Mr Raab

Please would you read this piece from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/08/an-absolute-warzone-nhs-doctors-describe-their-week-in-ae?CMP=share_btn_tw.
What do you think about the situation described? Do you care?

It is vital that we get back to spending at least the European average, i.e. around 10% of GDP, instead of the current 6-7%. Your party’s dogma, that public spending should not exceed 35% of GDP, is harming our country. Mrs May’s vacuous speeches pretending that you care about poorer people are arrant nonsense in the light of the damage your party is doing to the NHS, let alone anything else.

The NHS is something on which your constituents, whose wishes you so loftily ignore in relation to the disastrous Brexit nonsense, would, I am confident, prefer you to spend your time. Or is there some privatising hidden agenda being followed by you and J. Hunt? Are you not ashamed?

Yours sincerely
Hugh Bryant

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 18th December 2016
Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25

Some of you will know that, despite my youthful appearance, I am now a grandfather. My elder daughter Emma and her husband Joe were blessed with the birth of a son, James, on 10th November. He weighed in at 7 lb 5 oz, (or 3.3 kg), and he is a bonny and fast-growing baby.

Having a baby seems to colour the lives of all around you for quite some time. Obviously as a grandparent I am spared the sleepless nights so far and the nappy changing, although I have said that I am perfectly willing to take my share. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone really believes me, although I do mean it, honestly.

Something of that baby halo is perhaps the reason why Advent and Christmas are such a happy time for most of us. I went out yesterday to do my last minute present shopping – well, really, just my normal present shopping, as I always leave things rather late – and I have to say that I had a very pleasant time in Kingston, even though there were quite a few people about. The atmosphere was very jolly. There were carol singers and music students playing their instruments very beautifully as buskers on the corners. Everyone in the shops was very courteous and friendly. I even managed to park very easily.

Christmas is in the air. Saint Paul has it rather well in our first lesson [Romans 1:1-7]. There are in effect two types of baby celebration. What you could call normal babies – wonderful babies like my grandson James, who are, nevertheless, just ordinary human babies, so in Jesus’s case, ‘made of the seed of David according to the flesh’, according to the flesh, just a normal, flesh-and-bone, human baby, and the unique, special baby, whom St Paul recognised as the Son of God. St Paul recognised Jesus as the Son of God as a result of his resurrection from the dead: ‘declared to be the son of God with power, …, by the resurrection from the dead’. It slightly begs the question whether St Matthew, in writing his gospel, might have been adding a bit of a legend in telling us all about Mary and Joseph and their encounters with angels before the birth of Jesus.

Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, recognised Jesus as being divine as well as human, not because of the circumstances of his birth, but rather because of his resurrection. Maybe this doesn’t matter hugely, because it is all, really, beyond human understanding. After all, if God is omnipotent, if God can do anything, then surely he can arrange for a baby to be conceived supernaturally, in the way described in two of the gospels.

The important thing to note is that both Mary and Joseph didn’t behave in the way that you would expect normal people to behave when presented with an unexpected pregnancy. So far as I know, they didn’t have milkmen or window cleaners to blame in those days in Bethlehem. So Joseph’s magnanimity is even more impressive. All we can say is that clearly something very special happened, and a baby was born.

This idea of being on two levels, human and divine, is something that Saint Paul goes back to on other occasions. There is that very famous passage in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, which people often have as a lesson at funerals. Talking about the resurrection, to which we look forward in the creed, he asks, ‘How are the dead raised?’ Saint Paul makes a distinction between earthly life and heavenly, celestial, spiritual life.

‘There are … celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’ (1 Corinthians 15:40)

It’s a challenging concept for that baby to be, on one level, just another human baby, and on another level, to be the son of God. These are familiar words to us, but supposing we were men from Mars, we might be brought up short and ask a lot more questions than perhaps we are inclined to do, because the Christmas story is so familiar to us.

For instance, what does it mean, to be the son of God? You will recall that there was a huge controversy in the early church because of the teachings of Arius that, if Jesus was the son of God, he was somehow created by God and therefore he could not be God himself. So even today, some people, when they say the Nicene creed, in the communion service, when they get to ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the son, who with the father and son together is worshipped and glorified..’, when they get to that bit, they miss out the words ‘and the son’ (in Latin, ‘filioque’) because they think that it implies that there is a kind of hierarchy with God at the top and the son in the position of a dependent creature.

Too much detail, you might say. Surely there is a way of understanding the godhead, as it is called, which simply says that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, are one in heaven – in the celestial world, as St Paul puts it. The baby in the manger represents and is part of the earthly world, but in the miracle of Christmas that baby is also of God and in God – and is God.

We say that God is all-powerful, all knowing; ‘immortal, invisible, God only wise’: the creator, the unmoved mover. But all those things are rather dry concepts. They are not what you would expect would produce the warm glow of goodwill which comes over us all at Christmas, and has been coming over us for the last 2000 years, at this time of year.

There is a temptation to see this miraculous time as a sort of get-out-of-jail card. People rejoice that Christmas is a time of goodwill and happiness. Somehow through our focussing on that baby and all the happy baby things that must have been going on in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, just as they were in Saint Michael’s Hospital, Bristol a month ago, our minds are able to be diverted from the harsh realities of the human condition.

People were singing carols in the market place in Kingston: and at the same time terrible things were still going on in the Middle East, in Syria, in Aleppo in particular.

Under our noses, on Friday in the Foodbank, we provided food for over 50 people, all living within a 3 mile radius of this church, because those people, in the midst of plenty, did not have enough money to buy food.

The NHS is recommending that hospitals cancel all routine operations over Christmas, because they have not got enough money to pay for the doctors, the nurses, the operating theatres and so on. This is despite our being in the fifth richest country in the world.

In this borough, Elmbridge, we have so far welcomed – how many refugees, do you think? Well, I’ll tell you, none. Although 30 years ago we welcomed a lot of people fleeing from the war in former Yugoslavia, so far we have not welcomed any Syrians, even though thousands of them, including hundreds of unaccompanied children, were huddled in the camp in Calais, 70 miles away, for months.

By contrast, just up the road from here, in Woking, they are committed to taking 12 families a year for the next five years. They already have their first five families. So it is not the case that nobody can do anything.

Life goes on, life is gritty and challenging. It’s the world that the earthly baby inhabits. Look at what Mary said, in the face of all this. She also faced both up, to heaven – and down, to earth.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord; and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour.

For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his hand-maiden.’

So far, what you might expect. Mary looks up: she is grateful to God, who has singled her out. But then she looks down, to the problems on earth. And what she says could almost be a revolutionary manifesto!

‘. .. he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ (Luke 1)

Mary and Joseph spent two years on the run from the Egyptians. They were effectively refugees themselves. And yet: there were those angels, and the shepherds, and the wise men. All that wonderful Christmas story.

It is a special time. Heavenly, and earthly too. Glory to God on high, and in earth peace …. and food for the poor, and justice for the afflicted. A humble refugee baby – and a heavenly babe, in a carol.

I pray that this Christmas it will be heavenly, but also heaven on earth, for you and for all those you love, especially babies. Even among the nappies.