Are You a Wise Virgin? – Sermon Preached on 8th November 2026 (Third Sunday Before Advent)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings –  1 Thessalonians 4.13–18; Matthew 25.1–13

Walter Kampmann, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1920). Hangs in the Berlin Museum of Modern Art.

Painting in a fragmented, Cubist-influenced style in rust red, deep blue, cream and ochre. In the centre stands a bearded man with dark, shoulder-length hair, wearing a long blue coat with a single column of dark buttons. He holds a single white tulip at his waist and stretches his arms out to either side, with his hands open. On both sides of him, rows of young women with pale, mask-like faces and wide eyes overlap one another in profile and recede into the distance. The woman at the front left raises a hand to her chest. Above them are a curving green hillside and a blue sky, with small clusters of heads along the horizon. The painting is signed “Kampmann” at the lower right.

“…if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”

How much would you pay for a bottle of oil? In Morrisons you can get a litre of vegetable oil for cooking for just £1.45; the fanciest olive oil they sell costs £12.75 a litre. You wouldn’t want to waste that on frying chips. Truffle oil costs even more, six quid for a little three-ounce bottle, a whopping sixty quid a litre.

Even in these war-affected times oil for heating and lighting is cheaper than oil for cooking and eating. Heating oil is almost exactly a pound a litre at the moment. You don’t need to use the fanciest oil if you’re burning it – the ordinary stuff will do.

I think that throws some light on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins that we’ve just heard as our Gospel reading. The oil in their lamps is unlikely to be the fanciest stuff; it’s a commodity that even quite ordinary people can afford to have in their cupboard.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins is all about keeping your faith topped up because you never know when you are going to meet God face to face. Because of that, we tend to worry that it is asking us to have some sort of especially fanatical devotion that is beyond us and we wouldn’t want to have anyway. We’re worried that we’re one of the foolish virgins. But that is not what Jesus is commending here – He is calling for us to have ordinary faith as ordinary people, keeping it in good order because some day He will fulfil the extraordinary promises He has made to us.

We’ll come back to those promises in a moment. For first we need to talk about the hard edge to this parable – readiness to meet God cannot, it seems, be borrowed at the last minute. No-one else can tend it for us. The point is not that you need to have anything exceptional, but that you need to have it to hand at any moment. Ordinary, everyday things and tasks still require care and attention.

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War and Peacemakers – Sermon Preached on 8th November 2026 (Remembrance Sunday)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Micah 4. 1—5; Matthew 5.1–12

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”

Men outside the Duke Hotel in Bratton, Wiltshire, in August 1914, on their way to enlist.

As the November days shortened a hundred and twelve years ago, people were starting to work out that it wouldn’t all be over by Christmas. Kitchener, in fact, had warned the cabinet in August that the war would last for at least three years: they were, to put it mildly, sceptical. In November, his German equivalent, Falkenhayn, also warned his Prime Minister that Germany could not now defeat the allies outright and that a long war was increasingly likely.

Yet when Christmas came, truces broke out up and down the line of trenches that stretched from the Channel coast to Switzerland. British and German troops emerged into no man’s land, often after hearing one another singing carols, and exchanged gifts of booze and tobacco. In some cases, the locally agreed truces lasted until the New Year – then the killing resumed. By the time it stopped, between nine and eleven million soldiers and another six to thirteen million civilians were dead, and twenty-one million soldiers of all nationalities wounded. The world would be at war again barely two decades later. That one was even worse.

When I was a young man, I knew numbers of people who had fought in the second of those world wars or otherwise taken part in them. One of the people who helped me get through my ham radio exams when I was in my teens was a merchant seaman who had volunteered for the Arctic Convoys. They weren’t exactly young men, but many of them weren’t far past their prime. Today, the youngest are nearing their century. It would be easy to start to forget, now.

Indeed, it is more comfortable, in some ways, to forget. So why do we remember? One important reason is the sense of duty that we rightly feel to honour those who made the supreme sacrifice. Another is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

No war on such a scale has afflicted the world for more than eighty years – but the scale of violence in the present ‘local’ conflicts is terrifying enough – the horrors in the Middle East and Ukraine that have filled our screens for years now; the horrors of the wars in Sudan and Nigeria that don’t seem to be considered worthy of the headlines. Humanity has much more powerful weapons than it had in 1914 or 1945. The prospect of them being used on a continental or global scale is horrific.

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That We Might Not Fear the Reaper – Sermon Preached on 1st November 2026 (All Souls’ Commemoration)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Isaiah 52.7–10; Luke 24.13–31

The risen Christ soars upward out of a stone tomb, holding a white banner, in a shaft of light breaking through dark storm clouds. Angels in billowing robes swirl around him, and more figures glow faintly in the brightness above. Below, Roman soldiers sprawl on the ground or reel back in terror, shielding their faces, their spears and helmets scattered.
Sebastiano Ricci, The Resurrection, ca. 1715-6. Hangs in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Sometimes, we don’t see things as they truly are until someone does something that draws our attention to them. In the famous story set on the Road to Emmaus, two followers of Jesus, fleeing Jerusalem after His execution, don’t recognise Him until He breaks bread with them. Then their eyes are opened and they know that He has been raised from the dead.

The world of the 2020s does much to distract us from the spiritual side of our nature. The screens that now follow us everywhere, bringing us unlimited opportunities for entertainment and amusement, mean that we scarcely have a moment to draw breath and contemplate our ultimate destiny. Along with that, those who hold a very narrow view of science tell us that there is nothing more to us than flesh and blood. Emotions, thoughts, and choices, in this view, are nothing more than products of chemicals and electrical signals bouncing around our bodies.

Yet something in us rebels against the idea that we are just walking bags of chemicals controlled by the computer made of meat in our skulls. Instinctively, we know that we are creatures of soul as well as body. Every human culture creates elaborate ceremonies and objects to remember its dead. This is something that distinguishes humans from animals. Something in us knows that death is not the end.

We also know that a universe without judgement is a universe without justice. Stalin and Chairman Mao died in their own beds as free men at a ripe old age, and so did Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. If God is just, and Christians have always said that He is, then He must hold those who have got away with wrongdoing in their earthly lives to account. Christians have also always said that God knows and sees all.

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You’re a Saint – Sermon Preached on 1st November 2026 (All Saints’ Day)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne; Christ Church, Worton; and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – 1 John 3.1–3; Matthew 5.1–12

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God”

A crowd of haloed saints in bold colours with heavy black outlines. At the centre, two figures in green and white robes embrace. Around them are a saint on a white horse with lance and shield, a crowned saint, and a figure wrapped in a pale shroud. An angel blows a long golden trumpet over a city of onion domes, a crucifix stands on a green hill, and a dark moon hangs in the sky.
Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints Day I (1911). Hangs in the Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Which is your favourite saint? Is it St Agur, known for his blue cheese? Or perhaps St Ivel, dedicated to the more humble margarine and yoghurt? And who could forget my favourite saint, St Bruno – the patron saint of pipe-smokers?

The funny thing about all those famous saints from the labels of consumer products is that none of them exist – except for St Bruno, who was one of the most austere monks  in the history of the Church! Why is it that naming a product for a saint is so popular that marketing men will make up entirely fictitious saints for the sake of branding? Is it something about the sense of wholesomeness and age-old tradition they invoke?

Yet most of us would run a mile at the idea that we are saints, or should be saints. We know we aren’t saints: we’ve all cheated when we were playing Patience – sometimes Scrabble and Monopoly too – and we pick our noses when we think nobody is looking.

Saints? No, not us. We just muddle along and hope the Big Man is going to be kind enough to do right by us when we pop our clogs.

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Gutsiness and Gentleness – Sermon Preached on 25th October 2026 (Last Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 2. 1–8; Matthew 22. 34–46

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

♪ There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. All you need is love (x3). Love is all you need. ♫

A painting in muted greys and whites, crossed by a broad diagonal shaft of pale light. At the centre, Jesus hangs on a white cross with his eyes closed and a halo behind his head. He wears a cloth headcovering and, as a loincloth, a white prayer shawl with black stripes. A Hebrew inscription runs beneath the letters INRI at the top of the cross, a ladder leans against it, and a lit menorah stands in a pool of light at its foot. Above the cross, four robed figures float, weeping and covering their faces. On the left, a mob carrying red flags charges towards a village of overturned houses, some burning, and a crowded boat of people raise their arms. On the right, a synagogue burns while a man in a brown uniform ransacks it. In the foreground, a man in a green coat with a sack on his back steps past a smoking scroll, another man clutches a Torah scroll to his chest, an old man wears a blank white sign, a woman holds a child, and open books lie scattered on the ground.
Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion (1938). Hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Painted in response to Kristallnacht.

We all know that song by The Beatles. It’s just so sixties, isn’t it? Flower power was going to save the world. All you need is love. Except it didn’t turn out that way. The optimism faded as we found we couldn’t magic away war by sticking flowers into gun barrels any more than we could magic away crime by social science and psychology.

Our own Turbulent Twenties have never been anything other than a dark and troubled time – the era of Netanyahu and Hamas and Trump and Putin. All you need is love? Well, none of us would like to live without love, but is it really all you need? I mean, a drone production industry and a nuclear deterrent are also quite useful.

Surely all this talk of love being what holds up the law is all very well and good for the idealistically minded, but it’s not very practical in a world of serious criminals and political hard men, is it? Well, that’s what we’re tempted to say anyway.

But, hang on, let’s ask ourselves where and when Jesus says that loving God is the greatest commandment, and that the second is to love your neighbour as yourself. It’s just a few days before He’s crucified, in the Temple, the stronghold of the Jerusalem religious establishment, which is already plotting to have Him killed. And Jesus knows all this.

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God, Khrushchev, and St Luke – Sermon Preached on 18th October 2026 (St Luke’s, Day)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Timothy 4. 5-17, Luke 10.1-9

“Only Luke is with me.”

The biography of Nikita Khrushchev by the American academic William Taubman is a doorstop of a book. I mean that literally. It’s so big and heavy I sometimes use it to hold my interior doors open whenever I air the house. It’s 900 pages and runs to well over a quarter of a million words. It’s a very good biography – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in fact – and it’s an enjoyable read, but I’ve only ever managed to dip in and out of it, despite owning it for many years.

Book cover of “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era” by William Taubman. A sepia-toned photograph fills the cover, showing an older, balding man in a dark suit, white shirt and striped tie. His mouth is open as if mid-speech, and his clenched fist is raised in the foreground. Behind him, a blurred dark shape appears to be a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The author’s name is in white capital letters across the top, and a red band at the bottom carries the title in large white letters, with the subtitle beneath it in smaller capitals.
A banging read – William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003). 

Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, has been the subject of nine significant biographies in English, at least another three in Russian, two in French, and one in German. So you might assume that he must have been a very important figure but I think it’s still too early for history to have come to a mature judgement of that. He led the Soviet Union during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall, so I think he will be of interest to historians and enthusiastic ordinary people for centuries to come – in the way that Metternich, or Montezuma, or Charles II still are. But he was a man who was made and ultimately deposed by the winds of history, not one who changed their direction. Will people still call themselves followers of Khrushchev in two thousand years? Or be reading any of his speeches? My dears, they don’t even do so sixty years after he lost power.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, has only four biographies, and three of them use a lot of the same material – together they have far fewer words than William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. We know them as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that’s how they have been known since ancient times, although none of them actually identifies its author in its text. We owe the people who wrote these works nearly everything we know about Jesus Christ and His life, and excerpts from their biographies are read in our church every Sunday, and will be in literally millions of churches around the world this very day. Well over three thousand languages have had at least one of the Gospels translated into them.

Today we celebrate St Luke’s Day. So, what do we know about St Luke? Not very much. St Paul mentions a Luke, “the beloved physician”, in his Letter to the Colossians, and the Church has long believed he wrote both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which are really two halves of one work. He was probably a gentile, perhaps from Antioch, the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He stayed with Paul to the end, as we heard in our first reading. But across his two volumes, which together constitute the largest contribution by any single writer to the New Testament, he never once tells us his name.

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Drumcree March Ban Comes at a Cost to Nationalists

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Thanks to Unherd for asking me for my view on the consequences of the Secretary of State for NI banning the Drumcree march. An excerpt is below – the full article is on Unherd.

Screengrab of the UnHerd Newsroom article “Drumcree march ban comes at a cost to nationalists” by Gerry Lynch, dated 12 October 2026. The photo shows Orangemen in the Drumcree parade: older men in dark suits, white gloves and orange sashes, several in bowler hats, walking along a road past a stone wall and a corrugated metal hall. Union flags fly overhead and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hangs on the hall. A few women stand at the roadside watching. The article is tagged “Drumcree march” and “Garvaghy Road”.

The ban, “was the only sensible decision after the region’s police chief, Jon Boutcher, had written to Bryant formally requesting a review of the Commission’s ruling. The alternative was to let the dispute fester through a long winter and set the context for regional elections looming in May.

[…]

“The decision lets both sides of Northern Ireland’s divided community claim victory. Nationalists — from anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident Republicans, through to Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — were united against reviving the parade. Thousands, including Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O’Neill, descended on Portadown over recent weekends to support locals, who repeatedly showed they could block the road in numbers too great for the police to remove them without a degree of force nobody was prepared to countenance.

“Many Unionists, however, see a decidedly pyrrhic victory for Irish nationalism, undercutting its claims to accommodate Orange and British culture in any future “new Ireland”. They hope it will bolster wavering liberal Protestants — the sort deeply perturbed by Brexit, who have shown intermittent flashes of being tempted by a united Ireland in a future border poll — although this group is hardly known for supporting Orange parades. Unionism can walk away from this crisis seeing itself as the side that boxed clever and took the moral high ground. Rather than shouting “No surrender” and digging in for a long siege as it once would have, it leaves with important legal victories in its back pocket, having avoided unduly annoying the likely swing voters in any border poll: the region’s detribalised moderates and ethnic minorities.

“Nationalism’s victory comes at the cost of a real medium-term risk to the 1998 Public Processions Act which regulated parades.”

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No Judgement, No Justice – Sermon Preached on 11th October 2026 (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings: Philippians 4.1–9; Matthew 22.1–14

“The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”

Today’s Gospel reading is all about judgement – severe judgement at the hands of a powerful king who is clearly meant to represent God the Father – and we don’t like it. We want Jesus to be the meek and mild gentle Jesus who cuddles lambs. Talk of divine judgement scares us. Probably we should indeed have a healthy respect for it, although if any of us is genuinely consumed by fear of it, we’ve either misunderstood Jesus Christ or perhaps misunderstood ourselves.

Close-up, shallow focus, of the lower sleeve of a white clerical alb. A gold-and-cream embroidered band in an interlaced Celtic-style knot pattern runs round the cuff. Below it, a dark navy shirt cuff and a relaxed, slightly curled hand are softly out of focus. The background is a warm, blurred amber.
Image by Alena Darmel on Pexels. Public domain.

We may not like to contemplate judgement, but without it there is no justice. A Christianity without judgement is one where Jimmy Savile and Joseph Stalin get away with it, perhaps after God tells them how very naughty they’ve been. That may be the action of a God who is good, but certainly not a God who is just.

So unwelcome is the idea of divine judgement – especially from this unbending and angry king – that the Internet is full of sermons on this Gospel reading ducking it entirely, saying things like the king isn’t really meant to be God, and Jesus is identifying Himself with the man without the wedding garment cast into the outer darkness. No way, José. That parable is about divine judgement. That should be obvious since Jesus is telling it to the chief priests and Pharisees, the top holy men of His world, in the Temple, which is their stronghold. It is just before the Passover festival in which they’ll plot and bribe one of Jesus’ closest friends to betray Him, and then they’ll have Him killed. They may not have worked out the details, but they know where they are heading. Here, He is warning these holy men that they are embarked on their own destruction, a terrible and violent destruction exacted by God but provoked by their own cruelty, arrogance, and stupidity. A few decades later, Jesus’ prophecy would be fulfilled when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

In fact, this is the third Sunday in a row to give us a parable Jesus told to the Jewish leadership in the Temple in Holy Week. Each warns of the loss of the kingdom, or of destruction..

So this isn’t about us, is it? We aren’t top holy men and we aren’t plotting to have Jesus killed. We’re just ordinary Christians, trying to follow Him faithfully even through our moments of stupidity and moral laziness and all the normal run of human failings. We aren’t perfect – but none of us is beating God’s servants or anything like that, or at least I hope we aren’t.

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Paying the Rent – Sermon Preached on 4th October 2026 (Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46

“…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

A fresco of a crowd in a town square. On the right, a bishop wraps his cloak around a nearly naked young man, who raises his hands towards a hand appearing from the sky. On the left, an older man holding a bundle of clothes is restrained by another man, with onlookers behind them
Giotto, The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, one of 28 scenes of the life of St Francis in the Upper Basilica at Assisi, painted ca. 1296-1304.

Did you know developing countries don’t always make all the money they should from their natural resources, because so many of their products are processed and finished elsewhere, and that’s where the real money is to be made. So copper is sent from Zambia to China to be turned into wires, and cocoa is sent from Ghana to Switzerland to be turned into… Toblerones.

So, the tenants in today’s Gospel reading are really fortunate to have a landlord who hasn’t just let some land to them, but has also provided a winepress – a significant capital investment for their benefit. Rather than just selling grapes, they can sell wine, which is where the real profits are. Are they grateful to him for that? Not at all – they beat up and even kill his servants when they come to collect the rent, which is due in the form of produce of the land, specifically its fruit.

The landlord’s patience with these ungrateful tenants is incredible. Long after most would have hired some hard men to enforce payment, he persists in asking them nicely. In the end, he sends his own son – and they kill him too, hoping to steal his inheritance. Talk about ingratitude!

Maybe the money they’re making has led them to believe they’re landowners rather than just tenants, that they’ve made this profitable wine entirely on their own and haven’t needed help from the landlord.

The landlord is God; his son is Jesus Christ; the tenants are the Jewish leaders, who have not paid God back for what He has done for them. When Jesus told the chief priests and elders this story, they replied that the ungrateful tenants deserved to be put to a miserable death and their land given to a more co-operative tenant. Then they realised He was talking about them – and started looking for a way to arrest Him.

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Hypocrisy is a Bad Thing, Actually – Sermon Preached on 27th September 2026 (Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot; Christ Church, Bulkington, and Holy Cross, Seend

Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32

“…the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…”

Small black-and-white engraving. In the centre, a bearded older man in a long cloak and soft hat stands facing right, his left arm stretched back towards a vineyard where two labourers bend over the vines with tools. On the right, two young men with mattocks over their shoulders stand before a brick wall; the nearer one looks up at the older man and points. A tree overhangs the vineyard, and the number 8 and the monogram PG appear at the top.
Georg Pencz, The Parable of the Father and His Two Sons in the Vineyard, from The Story of Christ (1534-5). In the drawings and prints collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Do you ever catch those little ‘God slot’ reflections on the radio? Things like Thought for the Day on the Radio 4 Today programme? Has any of them ever stuck in your mind?

One still sticks in mine, from decades ago, when I would hear the Radio Ulster ‘God slot’ blearily as I got ready for school. The clergyman presenting it startled me by saying that hypocrisy was a good thing. If you’re a hypocrite, at least you know what the right thing to do is, even if you don’t actually do it. There’s room for God to work with a hypocrite, ran the argument, in a way there isn’t with someone completely blind to what’s right. It was an interesting argument for grabbing the attention of a distracted audience more interested in the Weetabix and the traffic report – interesting enough that I still remember it three decades later.

The problem is that it’s hard to square with what Jesus actually taught, especially in today’s Gospel reading.

“…the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” As attention-grabbing statements go, that trumps even the argument that hypocrisy is a good thing. Any of us would be taken aback, and probably a bit outraged, to have this said to us. And Jesus says it not to a group of randomers, but to the chief priests and elders, on the sacred ground of the Temple itself.

For months our Sunday Gospel readings have been following Jesus around the Holy Land teaching and healing, starting in His home turf of Galilee with the Sermon on the Mount, then into surprising places like the territory of the Syrophoenicians (the descendants of the Canaanites), and finally on Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where He warned His followers He had to die in the Holy City.

Now Jesus’ journey is over. It is the Monday of Holy Week. The day before, He rode into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, as the Scriptures foretold a mighty prophet would, and the crowds flocked out to see Him, singing His praises and spreading palm branches before Him, also just as those prophecies foretold. The tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the common people of Jerusalem knew a prophet when they saw one.

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