Bishops share their Christmas messages

The Right Reverend Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, shares his Christmas message:

"Christmas has been celebrated in Shrewsbury for more than 1,000 years, from the foundation of the town as, indeed, of England itself.

The ‘news of great joy’ first announced in Bethlehem has been our guiding light through all of our history, including its darkest hours.

At this Christmas, marked by so much soul-searching and uncertainty about the future, it is good in this national holiday to pause and return to the peaceful light which Christ’s glorious Nativity has long shed on our path through history.

The news which broke into the darkness of the first Christmas night – “Today a saviour has been born to you … He is Christ the Lord” – has led us as a nation, never to search for other saviours.

The Christian faith has guarded us from placing any undue confidence in leaders or political movements.

We have seen how misplaced confidence in secular, messianic claims left such a terrible trail of devastation in the 20th Century. In the Child born in Bethlehem we have found the One who alone can save us. In the long story of our land, every monarch, all earthly power has been called to bend the knee before this Child ‘born for us’ and the love and truth he reveals. In the light of Christmas, may we never lose our perspective on the passing crises of time nor be deceived by false claims of salvation.

In Christ’s Nativity we see, how God chose to reveal himself to all humanity, in a way which draws the deepest minds as the youngest child who visits the Crib in Shrewsbury Cathedral.

In this mystery we have learnt a greatness of heart. The celebration of Christmas, like the Christian faith itself inspires goodwill towards every person and especially toward the stranger and outsider. It is surely our Christian inheritance, lived at its truest, which, as Saint Paul wrote, leads us to strive to be a people with no ambition except to do good.

Should we ever forget all that we owe to Christmas and our Christian heritage, then in confused times we might become like someone who has lost their memory and are in danger of assuming a false identity. May this celebration of Christmas, help us to see our way in the New Year ahead of us in that clear and gentle light which first shone in Bethlehem and has guided our path through all of our history."

The Bishop of Lichfield, the Right Reverend Dr Michael Ipgrave, shares his thoughts about Christmas:

"For many people, Christmas involves a lot of visiting. You may have family or friends visiting you in your place; or you may yourself be a guest at somebody else’s.

And we will always want to remember those who can neither visit nor be visited by others. On Christmas morning, I will be in a house full of family, mine and my sister’s; we will have Skype conversations with children and grandchildren in Germany, Russia and Canada; and I will be leading worship both in Lichfield Cathedral and in HM Young Offenders’ Institution at Swinfen Hall, a couple of miles from Lichfield.

I will ask the young men there: ‘Do you have any message for me to take to the people at the Cathedral?’ and I expect they will say what they say to me every year: ‘Bishop, wish them a Happy Christmas from us and tell them we are praying for them.’

With others and on our own, in our place and in others’ places, in churches and in prisons, here and around the world, wherever Christmas is celebrated we are telling again the story of Jesus who carries the wonderful name Emmanuel, ‘God is with us’.

The early visitors at the birth of Jesus were a pretty mixed bunch: shepherds from the hillside; wise men from the east; Mary and Joseph, themselves travelling away from home; angels from the realms of glory; and tradition has added the ox and ass to represent all creation. What they have in common is just this one great gift: that God is with them, Emmanuel.

This is a message of hope, unity and peace for our times. When we look around at our society we so often see division, anger and anxiety. But when we look at the crib of Emmanuel we see one who has crossed the great divide that separates us from the God who loves us; and that should encourage us to cross in love the divides that separate us from one another.

Whoever or wherever you are visiting this Christmas, remember that God is with them and theirs as he is with you and yours, because we can all say, in the words of John: ‘He came to his own.’ He has come to us all to make our home his own."