Bishop Richard's Weekly video Message - Transcript 19.12.2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. This is my last one for this year. I didn’t think the market would be that strong for Christmas day and New Years Day, both of which fall on a Thursday. So, this is a video to reflect on and wish you a particularly happy Christmas. I haven’t a Christmas jumper to share, but this rather fetching shirt made for me when I visited Uganda on sabbatical earlier this year will have to do.
Each year clergy struggle to find something new to say about Christmas. However, the Christmas stories in the Gospels provide a rich series of themes. This year, I’ve found myself especially drawn to Joseph’s part in the story, for reasons I’ll explain later. In Christ’s life he appears infrequently and only in the first few years, disappearing after the incident where Jesus is left behind in the Temple by mistake. Joseph is described as a righteous man.
Righteousness is a rare but essential quality. It combines dedication to God, being set apart for His purposes, kindness, integrity and moral purity. In the accounts he manifests this in an act of profound kindness to Mary his betrothed. Marriage codes at the time were strict. Couples were promised to each other from an early age by their families. Such betrothals were binding. If Mary had become pregnant in the normal way of things it was a terrible breaking of social convention and moral failure. However, even before the angel’s revelation of what had really happened, he is minded to respond to her kindly. To have exposed her to public disgrace would have been to cast her on the mercy of her family who would most likely thrown her out to avoid family shame. The prospects for such a vulnerable, pregnant teenager cast adrift from family support were unthinkable.
Joseph is not a child of the social media age. I look at Facebook occasionally, but it isn’t very good for my soul. I abandoned Twitter/ X some time ago for the same reason. They promote visceral responses to issues without rational thought. The wise response that there are always two sides to every story is not encouraged, neither is the charitable assumption. Joseph would have been within his rights to make a spectacle of her rather than act with mercy. Such action would have missed the angel’s revelation. This was not what it seemed. God was at work in a miraculous way in this supernatural conception. Only a profound spiritual experience and clear revelation could have adjusted his course.
I was drawn to Joseph’s example through listening recently to the 2025 Reith Lectures by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. In them he calls the West to a moral reformation and rediscovery of virtue in politics and the life of society. He is actually calling for a righteousness like that of Joseph. But to describe Joseph as righteous is to say he felt accountability to a higher authority than mere social convention. If we seek to be righteous; to respond rightly in every circumstance, we cannot do so in a framework which leaves God out of the equation. Such a secular model cannot give a reliable account of reality.
Unfortunately, despite being the son of a Pastor, Bregman’s thesis gives insufficient weight either to God’s revelation of what righteousness is nor deals with the reality of human sinfulness. He proposes typical secular solutions of deploying our best minds to the problem or making virtue fashionable! In citing the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the 18th century as an example of what can be achieved by small groups of people working subversively to undermine conventional wisdom, he seriously underplays is the importance of their Christian and specifically
Evangelical faith in this endeavour.
The account of Jesus birth in Matthew chapter 1 essentially tells us that if we want Joseph’s righteousness and the moral reformation that accompanies it, we need saving from our sins. This is what Jesus came to do. This is what Jesus makes possible in his life, death and resurrection and our response to it by faith, trust and obedience. All the problems our world faces today, be they war, climate disaster, racial injustice, economic inequity and many others are rooted in that fundamental problem. We can achieve wonderful things as beings made in the image of God but unless the sin is dealt with, we will always muck it all up.
The heart of the Christmas message is that is what Jesus came to do. Forgiveness and reformation is possible, not through our own efforts, but through the grace and mercy of God. May we all know that grace and mercy afresh this year.
+Richard