St. Edmund’s in Oslo, hosted and led the Church of England weekly online Sunday service this week. Revd Canon Joanna Udal, Senior Chaplain to the Anglican Chaplaincy in Norway, sermon can be read below. The news article relating to this sermon can be read via this link.

The bleak midwinter has come early to Oslo this year. Even before the end of October we had snow fall and in the last few weeks the temperatures have been chillingly low.

It can be hard to imagine the realities of climate change except in the huge fluctuations we’ve experienced in recent winters: the temperatures going up and down like a yo-yo and critically going up above freezing and then down again so that the ground risks becoming a great ice rink. You have to watch out!

It’s far more serious if your livelihood depends on the snow quality like for reindeer herders in the north of Norway. The reindeer rely on the powdered snow to push their noses through to get to the vegetation underneath. But if a lair of ice develops, they’re in trouble, as are the other arctic animals which rely on the annual freeze and ice flows for the feeding patterns.

The impact is everywhere, but as in many parts of the world it’s those on the margins who are affected most. Action is needed and it’s long overdue that they should receive loss and damage support provided by those carrying greatest responsibility for the damage. We all have an urgent part to play with the choices we make and the influence we may have on policies to mitigate the climate crisis.

In a much-loved carol the English poet, Christina Rosetti, describes a bleak midwinter long ago in which “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.”

Yet amid that harsh reality, our God entered the vulnerability of human lives lived at the margins. “Our God, Heaven cannot hold him” so she writes. Yet a breast full of milk and a manger full of hay were enough for him. The stable place sufficed for him. These are signs of how God comes among us in the simplicity of the child born in Bethlehem.

God continues to be amongst us, present in simplicity in vulnerable human lives lived at the margins. This is good news as the angel declared to the shepherds, “I bring you good tidings of great joy to all people.”

The birth of our Saviour is good news for our world, good news for all people, because we are offered a new way of living out our humanity - in peace with God, and with our neighbour, and with the whole of creation.

As the prophet Isaiah foretells, “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters covers the sea.”

This Advent season, as we approach the celebration of Christmas, let us seek to be full of the knowledge of the Lord. Let us seek the true light which lighteth everyone - our Lord Jesus Christ coming into the world. May our hearts be ready to receive his love and simplicity and with them a renewed commitment to those most vulnerable at the margins. May our Christmas celebration be a great joy to all people and may our lives become part of God’s good news for the world.

Amen