Dear Friends,

Happy New Year!

Many thanks to all who enabled my period of annual leave after Christmas to be restful. I hope your Christmas celebrations were joyful; and I hope any of you who have been unwell through this time recover good health quickly.

This Sunday we are celebrating the Epiphany - the coming of the wise ones to the Christ child. Throughout Chritsian history these mysterious figures have been understood to represent all peoples, so Epiphany becomes a celebration that Chrits reveals God's love for every person - universal love, for each unique individual. That is a beautiful message but it is also one that as human beings we find it so difficult to receive and live out. God loves me more than I can even imagine, God loves you more than I can imagine, God loves the person I find it difficult to understand more than I can imagine: the same love, for each of us in our difference. Yet what we see in human society is so often that to love one group of people involves not loving another - taking sides - and we see all around us where that takes us. On this feast of the Epiphany of God's love for the whole world let us pray for love to cast out fear where violence rages, where groups are oppressed or discriminated against, where the riches of the world are not evenly shared.

Traditionally this is a time to pray for a blessing of GOd's love to reign in our homes too, by chalking the Epiphany blessing over the door. At the end of my sermon are some prayers you might like to say at home and if you aren't able to chalk the blessing there is a poster to print off and put up somewhere you will see it regularly.

God bless

Samantha