Carol Service by Fr Jack

Carol Service 2025

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin…

Stories are such powerful things, but so often we treat them as childish. We tell stories to children, and we perhaps unwittingly act as if stories are only for children.

Between Mr Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times proclaiming ‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts’ and Sgt Joe Friday in the 1950s TV programme Dragnet famously asking for ‘just the facts please, Ma’am’. We can so easily, consciously or not, fall into a ditch of ‘facts’ over here, and ‘story’ way, way over here. Consciously or not, we can lose sight of the monumental power and reality of story, at the heart of our humanity.

The stories we are told, and the ones we tell ourselves, as children and adults, as communities and societies. As corporate entities/Livery Companies/Schools/Charities. So much of the political crises we are experiencing and the disintegration of the social fabric and geopolitical instability that people talk with me about all the time can be seen, through one lens, as a matter of the stories we have told of ourselves, and the ones we have failed to tell well.

Bards sat round Anglo Saxon or Viking fire pits, between wattle and daub, singing ballads and telling stories.

Go back further, Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the others, sat warming themselves after a day on dusty roads, telling stories about Jesus, what they saw, and how it was.

Even further back, the earliest artistic drawings of pigs and deer and hunts, tens of thousands of years ago on cave walls, no doubt drawn alongside stories told of adventures. We are story telling beings; and stories aren’t just a leisure activity: telling stories well is desperately important.

This is what I’m really getting at: each of our lives is a story being told. Whether we like it or not, we are telling a story. Or rather (to push against the instinctive and very deeply engrained individualism of recent centuries in the West), together, our lives are telling a story. Each of us a bundle of threads being pulled into this great tapestry, us here tonight, our churches and communities, our homes and families, or work and interests. Our City, country and world. Our firms/Livery Companies/Schools/Charities.

We together are telling a story. Hundreds, thousands of stories, told by how we live our lives, what we chose to value, do and not do, what we say, and pray and write and think. The way we chose to spend our time, money and energy. All of it is telling this story. There is so much inclined to make us strangers these days, but whether we like it or not, we are all interwoven into this story. Much of it is told for us and of us, but we also get to choose what story our life will tell - in small every day choices, and in the big picture decisions of life.

What story is my life telling? What story am I living in?

I say all this, because this building is a 1000 year chapter of this story, a weave that tells so many stories of this little corner of the City. And even it, is a tiny part of the great story of the Gospel. Stories told by Jesus of Nazareth on the other side of the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago. He spent a great deal of time telling stories, and inviting those around Him to wake up and see their story; and to decide to tell their story (to live their life) in ways that would fill them with life and joy: them, and everyone around them.

Because this is no fairy story. No panacea. No comforting lie. If it is, we’re doing it all wrong.

This story (told in the traditional readings, music and carols tonight that we love) is The Story, capital T and Capital S, that breaths life and meaning into every story. I’m a priest, of course I’m going to invite you to come and weave your story in with this story, here or in the little church at the end of your road, because there is no truer way to tell life’s story than woven into this story.

But, in whatever spirit you hear this invitation, as we share so many wonderful tales at Christmas (from St Luke’s Gospel to Christmas Day TV dramas, or reciting The Night Before Christmas to grandchildren before bed)… take a moment, say a little prayer and ask, what story is your life/my life telling? What story am I living in?

I’m not going to keep you from mince pies and mulled wine any longer, I’ll finish with just the end of Sir John Betjeman’s sparkling poem called Christmas. Do go home and read the whole thing. It’s lovely.

‘And is it true?  And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,

A Baby in an ox's stall ?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ?  For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.’