Our community Christmas carol service on Thursday 4th December was a fabulous lunchtime celebration of Advent and Christmas with Lloyd's Choir. We welcomed workers from surrounding offices as well as members of the Aldgate Ward Club.
Here is the message given by our Priest-in-Charge, Revd Josh Harris, at this 2025 carol service:
I am sure you, like me, are becoming busy with holiday preparations, Christmas parties, and finding something in budget and on trend for the work secret santa. But today, through song and scripture, we pause, reflect, and rejoice.
There is something about a carol service that feels like opening a window in a crowded room: suddenly there is air again, space again. We remember who we are and what this season is really for.
The Christmas story speaks of a humble birth, angels proclaiming peace on earth, and shepherds and wise men coming to a child who holds out the promise of peace. At the heart of the story is a message of hope — a hope that came into the world, not as a mighty king, but as a fragile baby.
It’s quite a risk, isn’t it? To stake the future of the world on a little child.
Against the backdrop of a bleak world, hope can feel fragile. Sometimes it feels improbable, even slightly absurd.
And yet we discover at Christmas that we can find strength in the fragile, hope in the weak, light in the darkness. Rowan Williams once said, “The Christmas story doesn’t tell us that life will be easy; it tells us that God is with us even when it isn’t easy.” That is the heart of our hope.
In the carol Once in Royal David’s City, we sing of God who came down from heaven, whose shelter was a stable and whose cradle was a stall. Longings for peace, love, and the healing of the world’s hurts were answered in the birth of a tiny child in a poor, lowly stable. In that child, God reached out to us. Not from a distant throne, but by entering our world.
The Gospel of Luke captures the scene of Christ’s birth. Mary and Joseph, unable to find room at the inn, lay their newborn child in a manger. Then, outside the city, angels appear to shepherds, the outcasts of their day, smelly and socially excluded. Yet they are the ones entrusted with the good news: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.” The message is clear: peace, joy, and hope are born in this child. Not just for the mighty, but for the lowly, the humble, the ordinary workers of their day, who become the first evangelists.
Good news emerges from unexpected places.
This is the pattern of hope we find in the Christmas story. The world isn’t being turned upside down: it’s being made right. And sometimes that right-making begins in fragile places.
In Japan, there is an art called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The cracks don’t disappear; they become the most precious part of the bowl. Christmas is God’s kintsugi: God enters the cracks of the world: not to erase them, but to fill them with glory.
The Christmas season brings joy, but it also highlights struggles in our lives and in our world. We long for healing in broken relationships, peace in a world torn apart by conflict, and comfort in times of grief. The message of Christmas is that God is not afraid of the mess we get into but enters it with us, bringing hope, bringing glory, healing the cracks but never hiding them.
As we sing our carols, let us remember that our music is not just a celebration of the past but a living expression of the hope, peace, joy, and love that Jesus brought into the world. We are called to carry the message of Christmas forward into our families, our communities, and the world. The world longs for hope, and it is through us that hope, that healing, is shared.
Hope may be fragile, but it is not weak. It has survived stables and empires, darkness and doubt. And it meets us again this Christmas, in Jesus.
May God bless you this Christmas season, and may the peace and joy of Christ fill your hearts today and always.
