Well, dear friends, it is a great joinee to to be back with you at all Saints Arm Fort and Helen and I are very grateful to Grant and Yolanda, for their hospitality. And to you all for your warm welcome to us today. It’s a particular delight. To be celebrating with you your 10th anniversary as a church community and as a grandparent might say embarrassingly to their 10-year-old grandchild, they don’t see as often as they’d like.
My how You’ve grown the story that has been one of remarkable growth as you have known the grace and faithfulness of God in your first decade. I well remember your conception as a church. It had become evident that Holy Trinity, you trekked just wasn’t big enough for its congregation. Many of its members lived in Armor sport or around this area, and so All Saints, Psalmist Fort was created as a daughter, church of Holy Trinity, and sent out with much love.
And generous financial support. I recall taking a confirmation service in your first home Haka, which was a huge building back in 2016, with in fact, a huge congregation as well. You moved to newer Irvin in 2019. You became a fully independent chaplaincy. Two years ago, you received with gratitude this building from our friends in the Catholic apostolic community and committed to the refurbishment of this place, something you did yourselves 10 years on from your birth.
You are by the standards of our diocese, a big church with one of the highest numbers of young people and children. Of any of our chaplaincies, and it’s great to see so many younger people here today. There is a huge amount for which to give thanks to God. As we celebrate today, we’re gathering at a special time of the year.
This is the last Sunday of Advent, the conclusion and climax of a season of waiting, expectation, and hope. Christmas is nearly upon us. In just a few days, we will celebrate the birth of Jesus today. Our Bible readings invite us to ponder who is this Jesus whose birth we shall shortly be celebrating? What is the identity of this special baby?
We’re given a passage from the gospel of Matthew. That explores this question by way of an encounter with Joseph who was and yet was not his father. Together with the opening of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, which puts the beginning of the child’s earthly life in the context of its ending and suggests how we are related to Jesus Christ.
I always find, I always find St. Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus. A bit disconcerting, a bit discombobulating. We’re so much more used to hearing St. Luke’s account with its focus on Mary, the placing of the child in a manger, the arrival of the shepherds and so on. All the things that go into our Christmas nativity scenes.
But Matthew focuses on Joseph rather than Mary. The actual birth is hardly mentioned and the climax of the account is not the birth, which is passed over quite quickly, but the naming of the child out, the angel tells Joseph Mary will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus. Because he will save his people from their sins.
Jesus was actually quite a popular boy’s name at the time, still a popular name in some parts of the world. It was a shortened form of the Hebrew name Joshua. Joshua was the great leader who’d completed the work of bringing the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, into freedom in the Promised Land.
And the baby named Jesus will be God’s agent in bringing his people, both Israelites and Gentiles into spiritual freedom as adopted children of God. But this first name, Jesus is balanced by a second name. The child will be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. Emmanuel is not a personal name. It describes the work this child is going to perform.
He will bring God to us. There were many children named Jesus, but there is only one Emmanuel. Matthew makes this point very deliberately. His gospel begins with the birth of Emmanuel God with us, and ends chapter 28, verse 20, with the words of the risen Jesus. Lo, I am with you always to the very end of the age.
The God who is with us, the God who is with us, and these two names convey who the baby is. The name of this boy child is God saves us and God is with us. God’s actions in Jesus are always aimed at rescuing people. In Jesus. God is powerful to save, but he doesn’t just say from a distance at arm’s length, from somewhere up above the world in Jesus.
He is God with us. God himself gets involved in the sometimes very messy and confused realities of human life. Including even a human birth with its unusual or perhaps dubious circuit, yet it is fitting that the earthly career of the Messiah begins in a way if you are pardon the English pan, a way that is conceivable because it demonstrates that with God, nothing is impossible.
In Jesus, God is at work at close quarters to save by all kinds of ordinary and extraordinary means, and he’s still at work to save and to redeem and to heal and to make new while turning to Paul’s letter to the Romans, we get another and complimentary perspective on the child’s identity. Paul describes a Jesus who as to his human nature, was a descendant of David and who through the spirit of holiness, was declared with power to be the son of God by his resurrection from the dead.
Jesus is both son of David and son of God. He is human and divine, but in Paul’s terms. The divine identity is only disclosed at the very end of his life. It’s only in the resurrection that we see and understand who the is. I’ve sometimes been to funerals where all sorts of things about a person’s life came together and made sense only after they had died.
And for those of us who follow Jesus, we know the significance of his birth, the significance of Christmas, only by reading back his life from the perspective of his death and resurrection from the perspective of Easter,
Paul says to his readers, you are among those called to belong to Jesus Christ, who are loved by God and called to be saints. The church. This church is the community of those who follow Jesus, the one who saves us from our sins and who? Who is the Emmanuel God with us? We are those whom God loves and invites to be the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.
Paul says in those opening verses of the letter, you are called to be saints. To be made a part of God’s Holy People and your community here in Amsersfoort has indeed taken its name as All Saints. The name is important. It emphasizes that each person is called to be a member of God’s Holy People. This is a church for all.
To come and find Jesus the God who is with us. Your name stresses that you are being shaped as a church by holiness and love, and since your church was planted, you have framed a vision which expresses how you will live that looking up to God. In worship and prayer looking inwards in strengthened community and discipleship and looking outwards in service and evangelism locally and globally. And that vision has generated a particular inward focus on young people and children and lovely to have so many children and babies with us.
I think you have the highest proportion of young people. Children of any chaplaincy in our diocese, what a great blessing that is an inward focus, the nurture of the next generation of Christian believers and a particular outward focus on the persecuted church, especially through links with open doors and, and my, my diocese.
The diocese in Europe goes a long way east as far. As Kyiv and Ukraine and as far as Moscow and Russia and I visit those places where life for Christians is tough, and I appreciate your outward focus onto areas of the world where Christians do not have the blessing of meeting in freedom and peace as we do here now.
The message of the Christmas story according to Matthew, is that God has sent his son into the world, and that son is one who is known through his names Jesus and Emmanuel. Jesus because he comes with power to save Emmanuel because he’s truly with us even to the end of the age. As we celebrate Christmas in 2025, we are aware that we live in a world that is confusing and that feels increasingly dangerous.
I hope and pray that we will know amongst us that God who is mighty to save and promises that he will always be with us over scary our world. Feels, and as all Saints moves into its second decade, may you be built up as a community of holy people, united in love, centered on Christ, committed to service and evangelism in the world, our men.
Amen.