In the little poem 'Contrasts' I read earlier, I drew a contrast between the Gods and Goddesses of classical antiquity - the lofty Olympians - and the humility of the one true God. I want to bring that down to earth, and talk about the contrast between the ruler who is named in the Christmas story, Caesar, and the Prince of Peace, who was born, in the Christmas story.

Caesar held a census so that he could tax the people. Caesar decreed from afar that everyone should up sticks and move at his convenience, so that he could exact something from them - he was enrolling the world, so that he could take from the margins, and enrich the center - in Rome.

Meanwhile, even as this decree of a census is given out, another king - the king of kings - wants all the world to be enrolled. Why? He knows all things as God; His knowledge is always the knowledge of the great creator, looking down on creation. But now He gets the inside knowledge of hearts that hurt - the knowledge of what it is to be 'in the dark'. You might say it's one thing to write Hamlet, quite another to be Hamlet.

In contrast to Caesar, who stays in the centre and expect us to move for him, Jesus came to us and to come to know us. This wasn't registering in the sense of an outer registration, but God became human so that He could register with Himself all the things that we can feel in the flesh. Caesar registered to exact; Jesus to share, and to give...

The Christmas story is about light and darkness, both good and evil. There is a tendency to subvert the story and make it out to be just about joy and happiness. However, this becomes an exercise in denial and pretense. If we make it that, it doesn't last. We can deny the darkness of this world, we can pretend that everything is sweetness and light, but denial and pretense collapse and reality comes crashing in - even perhaps before the Christmas celebrations are over.

Christmas is about light and darkness; it is about how the light shines in the darkness, and how the darkness can never overcome it. It is about good and evil; it recognises that there is much evil in the world. It is about how a strong and resilient kind of goodness was planted in this world, and is working to redeem it.

Matthew and Luke both have the same take home message - there is darkness, but it doesn't overcome the light...

The church gets too preoccupied with what people think about Christ; there's a time and place for a theology of Christ, but it's not what I want to focus on this morning; instead, I want to focus on the experience of Christ. After all, it's our experience of Christ that transforms us, rather than what we think about Him.

I want to look this morning at some of the different ways in which people experience Christ. Some of you may know the book William James 'The varieties of religious experience'; what I have to say this morning could be a sort of appendix to that book: 'the varieties of the experiences of Christ'.

There are people to whom Christ appears - as He did in the gospels. You may think that only happened in New Testament times, but it doesn't: it goes on to this day. One such appearance happened not far from here, in Trumpington Church, about 50 years ago, when Christ appeared to a recently widowed lady, and wept with her as He stood in the sanctuary.

Sometimes Christ can appear through representations of Him, His radiance shining out from a picture. Sometimes Christ appears to people who are very ill...

Last time we spoke about Julian, we did an overview of her life and talked about her most remarkable achievement - she was the first woman to write a book and have it circulated in her own lifetime. Her book was an astonishing advance in theology - a tremendous gospel of compassion, just when England and the church was being riven by dissention; she was a woman of extraordinary vision, praying to Christ that she might be made ill to participate in the sufferings of those around her that were dying of the plague.

This time we focus on Julian's parable of the servant. The parable of the servant can be examined in (1) in its universal sense, as a clear revelation about the fall of humanity and its restoration; we will also look at it (2) in Julian's own, historically context and finally (3) in the context of the sad divisions in the church today.

The parable describes a servant who stands before his Lord, who goes to do his will, who falls into the pit, who suffers, and to whom the Lord promises a restoration. In a sense it's a retelling of the fall of Adam, but it focusses on sin as a form of woundedness that prevents us from seeing what is truly there and what should truly be...

What is the church? The church exists on two levels: at one level it is a human organisation; at another level it is what the prayer book calls the 'blessed company of all faithful people' - the mystical body of Christ which is 'the blessed company of all faithful people'.

So there are two sides to the church - the spiritual side and the human side. In much the same way, a piece of needlework has two sides - the working side where you can see the rough ends, and the picture on the other side, which is the point of it all. The working side is necessary but it's not what it's all about.

The human organisation side of the church is not what it's all about, (even though it's essential), but it has a tendency to take over. The church needs constant renewal: it needs to remember that it is above all a spiritual community.

The church is subject to a number of temptations: power easily corrupts the church; 'extremist' purity, where we fail to acknowledge our own impurity; pride, and particularly spiritual pride, and a tendency to get pleased with itself - pride here is ultimately self-defeating.

The church needs to move beyond these temptations: it must be the mystical body of Christ...

Where shall wisdom be found? What is wisdom? Is wisdom more than clever people or scholarship? If so, how is wisdom different from learning and cleverness?

The discoveries that clever people make are often ephemeral: things need to be rethought as time goes by. Wisdom in contrast is concerned with eternal truths: truths that transcend particular times and places and paradigms.

Learning and cleverness are no guide to how to live. Clever people can be unwise and immoral. Wisdom in contrast is linked to goodness; if you want to become wise, you also need to become a good person: the paths to goodness and wisdom go side by side. In contrast to cleverness, wisdom has moral implications for how to live.

Wisdom knows its limitations. Clever people are inclined to be arrogant; the human intellect operates on the assumption that it can get to the bottom of things. But wisdom is probing at a deeper level where there are no easy answers. It ponders, for example, the 'unfairness' of life. Cleverness always assumes it can get on top of things; wisdom admits there are some things it will never understands. It grows deeper by pondering unfathomable mysteries...

Each century sees progression in Christian understanding. There were several developments in the 20th century; for example, there was a deeper understanding of the suffering of God, and His identification with our own suffering. Another development of the 20th century concerned the role of doubt, and its contribution to faith.

We are complex people: none of us are entirely believers, or entirely doubters. Most of us are a mixture of the two. The faith of a person who has also known doubt is stronger than that of someone to whom doubts have never occurred. Doubting Thomas journeyed through doubt to faith, and finally to the point where he could say in a truly heart-felt way 'smy Lord and my God'.

So to those who have doubts: doubt is alright; doubt is part of the journey to faith.

How can doubt benefit faith? Relationships are often strengthened through testing times. So it is with doubt.

Doubt at least shows you are taking things seriously; you are thinking them through. Further, it's not just what we believe, but how we believe that is important. This is the contrast between a merely intellectual faith, and a faith that is heart-felt. Doubt gives us the time to explore things thoroughly and to make them our own...

We take the opportunity once a year to think about the reformation, particularly in and around this church, a time when new translations and scholarship became available, and people began to blow the dust off their New Testaments and find the Word illuminating all. Last year we talked about Latimer; this year we will focus on Cranmer.

Cranmer was at Jesus College and may have preached from the pulpilt of St Edwards. He was a generous and an accommodating man.

With respect to his being accommodating: he had both the strengths and the weaknesses that go with that word. An accommodating person makes room in his mind for multiple points of view in a time of real foment and controversy. Cranmer didn't rush to a single point of view. He was also accommodating in the literal sense, particularly to wayfarers from the continent, literally providing house-room for them. His accommodating mind made him a very good teacher and scholar, and was part of the genius of his work on the liturgy - if you want a book called `Common Prayer' then it must be rich and large enough to accommodate and make room for all the many different thoughts and feelings that a congregation may be having when using that liturgy. Cranmer also accommodated both the new and the old - and included in his book of Common Prayer the traditional and the novel...