Faith over Fame – Sermon Preached on 14th June 2026 (Third Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

A woman reclines while having her makeup applied by two unseen stylists. One stylist applies lip colour with a brush, while another works on her hair. She has dark, glossy hair swept back, heavy eye makeup with dark liner and mascara, and full, glossy lips. She is wearing a black top with a sequinned neckline. The image is shot at a slight angle, with a blurred red object in the foreground.

Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.

Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.

How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.

If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.

So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.

In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.

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Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

A detail from Veronese's The Feast in the House of Levi. At the centre of a long banquet table draped in white, Christ sits in a rose-pink robe with a faint halo, his long hair falling to his shoulders, reaching toward a dish. He is surrounded by guests in richly coloured Renaissance dress: bearded older men in red, blue and orange, a young red-haired man leaning in at his right, and a servant in yellow raising a glass behind. Two large spaniels sit on the chequered marble floor in the foreground, with pale classical architecture and open sky behind.

An excerpt from Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573), hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

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Unclean Lips – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at All Saints’, All Cannings (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Isaiah 6.1–8; John 16.5–15

“Woe is me! … because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!”

Starting in 1972, the animal psychologist Francine Patterson began to teach an infant gorilla named Koko a modified form of American Sign Language. Patterson claimed Koko could sign a thousand words and understand twice that number in English. I remember seeing Koko speaking on children’s programmes when I was a kid, where we were told that this was absolutely the case (and some people still claim that is so).

Other researchers, however, found that while Koko could indeed use signs to request food, play, or affection, her handlers were, to a large extent, seeing what they wanted to see and ignoring the many times that Koko signed arrant nonsense in search of a reward. Koko could only use signs in a simple, isolated way, with no evidence of the complex, rule-based sentences that even young human children use.

Koko’s life was not in vain, however. She transformed public attitudes to gorillas, previously seen only as dangerous and brutish, just as their habitats were coming under terrible pressure and needed protection. She died eight years ago at the ripe old age – for a gorilla – of forty-six.

Those with longer memories recalled a horse in early 20th Century Germany nicknamed Clever Hans, whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that he could not only spell words by pointing his hoof at a blackboard, but could also tell the time and even do arithmetic well enough to work with fractions. Unfortunately, when von Osten died, nobody else could get Hans to multiply fractions, and the poor creature had a miserable end, drafted into the First World War as a warhorse, where he was either killed in action or, perhaps, consumed by hungry soldiers.

A black-and-white photograph, apparently from the early twentieth century, showing two men and a horse standing in a cobbled courtyard in front of a brick wall. On the left, a young man in a cap holds the horse's bridle. In the centre, an elderly bearded man in a long coat and apron stands beside the horse, which is dark-coated and tall. To their left, a large blackboard mounted on a stand is covered in rows of handwritten numbers and arithmetic problems, including fractions and multiplication sums. Several small round objects, possibly balls or stones, are scattered on the ground at the base of the blackboard. A second, smaller board with abacus-like apparatus is visible in the background.

Clever Hans’ owner claimed he could spell, tell the time, and even work with fractions.

Words are the fundamental thing that separates us from animals. Even animals who have an impressive range of calls use closed systems of communication – we see no open-ended creativity among them, or combining of existing elements to make new concepts. Humans can use the power of language to touch the hem of God Himself. We can use our God-given power over language to speak truth, or we can use it to facilitate deceit. This is not always a case of maliciously and wilfully telling lies. As the stories of Koko and Clever Hans show, people often hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

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Create, Suffer, and Love – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)

2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

A large late-medieval brick town hall dominates the centre of the frame, its dark slate roof punctuated by small dormer windows and crowned by a tall square clock tower with a pointed spire. The tower displays a clock face and is decorated with red and white heraldic shields. Crenellated parapets run along the roofline, giving the building a fortress-like character. The façade features rows of arched and rectangular windows in warm red brick. A small statue on a pedestal stands in front of the building. The surrounding market square is busy with parked cars, a yellow delivery van, and a cyclist in a high-visibility jacket. To the right, a neighbouring building with an orange-tiled roof is partly visible. The sky is overcast and wintry, with bare trees to the left.

I was hoping for a few ales in Kalkar’s Rathauskeller, but it closes at 9 pm! © Gerry Lynch, 5 April 2018.

I was in Germany last week, which enjoyed the same heatwave as we did. I was therefore looking forward to exploring the pub culture as well as the much cheaper German pub prices. I arranged to meet someone I knew from social media but had never met in person, at 9.15 on a Wednesday evening. He lives in a town the size of Devizes, but he warned me that there wouldn’t be a pub open in that town for us to meet in. Instead we had to meet in the larger county town, about the size of Trowbridge, and even that wasn’t exactly lively.

And I know what you’re thinking – what on earth does this have to do with the Holy Trinity? Did the Rector get heatstroke, or perhaps have too much of the unholy sort of spirit when he was across the North Sea?

Well, let’s park that for a moment, and return to it once we’ve had a chance to talk about what it means to be human, and what it means to be God.

To create, to suffer, and to love – these are three of the deepest experiences that human life contains. Creating, suffering, and loving are central to making us human.

They are also central to what God is – God also creates, suffers, and loves.

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Dream the Impossible – Sermon Preached on 24th May 2026 (Pentecost)

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 2.1-21; John 20.19-23

“…your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…”

A stylised illustration depicting the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. Three smiling soldiers in olive green uniforms and berets stand in the foreground, holding rifles adorned with red carnations. A woman embraces one of the soldiers joyfully. Jubilant crowds surround them, some holding carnations, others waving Portuguese flags and signs reading "Viva a Revolução" (Long live the Revolution), "Democracia" (Democracy), and "Liberdade" (Freedom). The setting is a recognisable Lisbon street scene, with terracotta-roofed buildings, balconies decorated with flowers and flags, a yellow tram marked No. 28, the Elevador de Santa Justa visible in the background, and shop signs for a café, livraria (bookshop), and sapataria (shoe shop).

An old friend of mine back in Belfast, who died some years ago, had a girlfriend in the 1950s, when he was young. She was his first serious love, until she dumped him – for an Englishman! – a schoolmaster, who taught overseas in schools for British expatriates. She soon married the schoolmaster and accompanied him to his next job, in Lisbon.

Despite being jilted, my friend remained good platonic friends with his ex, and they corresponded for some years. To keep her in touch with her home town, my pal sent her copies of the Belfast Telegraph. Portugal had by then been under the grip of an authoritarian dictatorship for a quarter of a century, the Estado Novo of António Salazar. While it avoided the worst aspects of fascism and certainly couldn’t be compared with Nazism, it was hostile to free expression, and its secret police, experts in the use of psychological torture, suppressed anything and anyone that smacked of liberalism, socialism, or secularism.

Now, the 1950s Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the Ulster Unionist establishment, wasn’t exactly a well of liberalism, socialism, secularism, or any other form of racy radicalism. Still, my friend’s ex-girlfriend would receive her copies of the Belfast Telegraph with many holes cut in them, stories Salazar’s secret police would rather the Portuguese didn’t know about.

By the 1970s, Portugal was caught up in a quartet of bloody end-of-empire wars in Africa and its main export was its people, yet the Estado Novo continued, seemingly secure, just like Franco in next-door Spain. Then one April night in 1974, a group of army officers, fed up with sending young men die in unwinnable and cruel wars, launched a coup. The radio told people to stay at home, but instead they came out onto the streets to celebrate with the soldiers, pushing carnations into the barrels of their guns. The Estado Novo fell without a shot. Portugal then had a bumpy spell of brawls and even riots between socialists and conservatives, but eventually left-leaning and right-leaning parties found enough common ground to manage a transition to a free democracy, and eventually to prosperity. And nobody saw it coming – not the experts and not anyone else.

We never really know what is around the corner. I could have told a similar story about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Less positively, we could all share recollections of the way that coronavirus crept into our news bulletins and then crashed into our lives in the first months of 2020. But there are always plenty of people telling us to worry about the ways our lives and the state of the world might change for the worse. We sometimes forget that things do often get better, in dramatic ways that nobody predicted, often when things seem to be at their darkest.

Pentecost is the feast of things getting better in dramatic and unforeseen ways. Pentecost is a story about two things – about the Church, and about God.

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Risen, Not Restored – Sermon Preached on 17th May 2026 (Sunday After Ascension)

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11

“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” 

The upper portion of Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, photographed looking upward. Christ sits enthroned at the centre within a pointed mandorla outlined in gold, wearing a pale white robe. His face is angular and gaunt in Sutherland's distinctive modernist style, with dark features rendered in bold, almost sketched lines. Both hands are raised, the right in a gesture of blessing. The background is a striking vivid green, woven in broad, uneven brushstroke-like bands. Flanking Christ on either side, set within smaller rectangular panels, are two of the four living creatures representing the evangelists — stylised, energetic figures with wings and haloes, depicted in earthy tones against darker backgrounds. Fine vertical lines from the tapestry's warp threads are visible across the surface, emphasising the monumental textile's handwoven character.

The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.

No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.

They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.

But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.

And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.

That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.

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Higher Things? – Sermon Preached on 14th May 2026 (Ascension)

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot (Benefice Service)

Acts 1.1–11, Ephesians 1. 15-23, Luke 24.44

 “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” 

A large oil painting set against a darkened basketball arena filled with a blurred crowd of spectators. At the centre, the silhouette of a basketball player rises in mid-dunk, one arm stretched high toward a golden basketball hoop and backboard. Within the player's outlined form, painted in meticulous Renaissance style, is the dead Christ from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross: pale-skinned, crowned with thorns, eyes closed, head tilted back, loincloth draped at the waist. His limp body follows the athlete's upward trajectory, so that crucifixion and slam-dunk occupy exactly the same gesture. Fragments of van der Weyden's red-robed mourning figures and gilded background are visible within the silhouette. Brass nails punctuate the outline, pinning the Christ figure to the athlete's form. At the lower right, outstretched hands reach toward the ascending figure.

Titus Kaphar, Ascension (2016). Circulates around the properties of the 21c Museum Hotels Group.

Higher things. What do we mean when we say, “she was the sort of person who often had her mind set on higher things”? If I said that meant someone who spent her life seeking to do good, serving others, creating and sharing beauty, and contemplating the deepest truths of human nature and the universe we live in – well, I don’t think many of you would disagree with me.

This isn’t necessarily a specifically Christian thing or even a religious one. We all know people of other faiths or no faith whose lives are obviously devoted to goodness, and service, and more profound thought than those of most people. Buddhism calls people to the Four Sublime States of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity; Islam calls people to akhlaq: the practice of virtue, morality, and good character within oneself and in one’s treatment of others. The early Christians themselves drew much of their understanding of the good life from the pagan Greek philosophers whose writings did so much to form the Greek-speaking, multi-cultural societies in which they lived. The highest goods in Christianity have always resonated with all sorts of people; the Faith would not have been capable of spreading if that were not so.

If there is a specifically Christian list of higher things, it is perhaps in the humbler virtues. Now, I can’t set every reading from St Paul in one service, but there is a list we didn’t hear tonight from Paul’s letter to the Colossians about the virtues we should surround ourselves with if we have been raised with Christ: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, mutual forbearance, forgiveness, and love. Higher and more humble at the same time – that’s a good eight-word summary of the sort of lives Christians should seek to live.

And, of course, some Christians struggle with the idea of an actual heaven; can’t quite get their heads round the idea that we’re actually going to ascend to some higher state of being, but still want to form their lives on the pattern of Jesus Christ, or perhaps are just called to worship for reasons they can’t themselves understand. As the Collect puts it, “that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell.” That is a prayer for this life, not necessarily the next: to live life as best we can with our hearts and minds risen and dwelling with Christ.

But St Paul writes in tonight’s Epistle reading that he prays that the people he is writing to “may know what is the hope to which he has called you” – and that is to follow Christ to the higher state of existence to which He Himself rose on that first Ascension Day.

Why do I think that’s a credible hope? Well, to explore that, let’s look briefly at the lower things.

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Faith Can Be Hard Work: Sermon Preached on 10th May 2026 (Sixth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on May 10, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 17.22–31, John 14.15–21

“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him…” 

A close-up photograph of an elderly woman wearing a white habit with blue stripes at the edges, and a small wooden cross on a cord around her neck. She has a deeply lined face and is smiling warmly at the camera. The background is dark, almost black.

Mother Teresa in Washington, 1995, © John Matthew Smith used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Mother Teresa was probably the world’s most famous Christian in the late 20th Century. The ‘Missionaries of Charity’ she founded sought to be an expression of God’s love for the whole human race, beginning by serving the sickest and poorest in the slums of Kolkata, a city where fewer than one in a hundred people are Christian. Initially she was little known outside India, but in 1969 the BBC sent Malcolm Muggeridge and a camera crew to make a documentary about her, and she became world famous. She attracted both admirers and detractors in abundance. Indeed, many people both admired her works and disagreed with some of her attitudes at the same time – I know that, because I was one of them. But there was no doubting her commitment to giving her life to serving people who many would prefer to ignore.

You might think that such works were inspired by an unshakable faith. So it might surprise you that Mother Teresa experienced a profound sense of God’s absence for half a century.

“Even deep down”, she wrote, “there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”

From 1948 until her death in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced this spiritual emptiness with only a five-week respite in 1958. Nonetheless, she pressed on with a life that could have been simpler and more comfortable, clinging to faith through habit and endurance even when her soul had run dry.

In our first reading today, St Paul tells his audience of clever intellectuals in Athens that God made us so we could seek Him, feeling our way towards finding Him; and even though we often experience ourselves as groping towards God like this, Paul says that he is never far from any of us.

There are times in my life when I feel far from God – but not many. Sometimes I’ve been angry with God and told Him so. There was a period when I asked Him to take my faith away from me because I was so disgusted with the Church. But rarely have I felt God to be absent. In the times when I don’t sense God’s presence, it is because I’m distracted and not paying attention – and once I start paying attention, He is there.

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Grace and Revenge: Sermon Preached on 3rd May 2026 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Acts 7. 55-60; John 14. 1-14

“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” 

On a long flight this week, I watched an extraordinary film from Iran, called It Was Just an Accident. A veteran director named Jafar Panahi, who has been imprisoned for previous films, shot it on location in Iran without official permission. The story follows a former political prisoner working as a mechanic. One day, a customer brings in a car to be fixed, and the hero recognises him by his peg leg: it’s his old torturer.

A medieval fresco painted on a vaulted ceiling depicting the stoning of Saint Stephen. Four figures in colourful clothing — greens, yellows, ochres, and blues — are shown in dynamic, striding poses with arms raised, hurling stones. Clusters of rounded stones are scattered across the ground. At the bottom centre, a partially visible prostrate figure represents Stephen, shown in blue garments beneath his attackers. The painting style is characteristically medieval, with flat, linear forms and expressive gestural energy. Decorative red scrollwork and foliate motifs fill the upper background. The plasterwork shows extensive craquelure, indicating great age. A section of a whitewashed pillar or arch is visible at the lower right. The overall palette is warm and earthy, with pigments that retain considerable vibrancy despite evident wear.

Early 16th Century depiction of the stoning of Stephen, St Lawrence’s Church, Lohja, Finland. © Gerry Lynch, 23 July 2017.

He tracks the secret policeman down, kidnaps him, and takes him out into the desert ready to kill him, but can’t bring himself to do so because he isn’t entirely sure of his identity. Then follows a bizarre drive around Tehran, where the hero collects other former political prisoners to see if any can be entirely sure that the man who is now drugged in the back of his van was indeed their torturer. A very black comedy, the film succeeds partly because it refuses either to sanitise or to dehumanise the villain, who is a ruthless killer but also a loving husband and tender father. The heroes, in turn, must battle to preserve their humanity in the way their torturer has failed to guard his, as they face a choice between grace and revenge.

St Stephen faced a choice between grace and revenge. Just before today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, he had been dragged up before a religious court on trumped-up charges and defended himself in a sweeping speech which concluded by warning his hearers that they are the latest in a long line of Jerusalem Jews to resist the Holy Spirit, persecute God’s prophets, and fail to keep the Law they claim to revere.

This sends the crowd into a violent rage against Stephen, but as they are about to mob him, he sees a vision of Heaven opened, and “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”. Now, Christ is usually depicted as being seated at the right hand of the Father, so this is normally interpreted as standing as an advocate for Stephen, and maybe also standing to receive him.

Perhaps it was this vision of Christ’s presence with him that allowed Stephen to do what he did next: taken out and brutally lynched, his last words are, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” This is the standard of forgiveness by which we are called to live as Christians.It isn’t easy.I certainly don’t manage to live up to it all the time. But it is how God teaches us to act. Such forgiveness is what God is like.

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Not Cowboys, but Sheep: Sermon Preached on 26th April 2026 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Acts 2.42–47; John 10.1–10

“…the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”

A man rides a dark bay horse with a black mane and tail away from the camera along a road, surrounded on all sides by a dense herd of sheep in shades of brown, black, cream and white. The rider wears a green and tan camouflage jacket and a black woolly hat, and sits in a traditional saddle. To the left, two cars — a white saloon in front and a second vehicle behind — are halted on the road, hemmed in by the flock. Scrubby grass and low earthen banks line the right side of the road. In the distance, a range of bare, arid mountains stretches across the horizon under a bright blue sky filled with large white cumulus clouds.

Driving sheep along a major road near Khochkor, Kyrgyzstan, © Gerry Lynch, 27 September 2025

What could be more American than a cowboy? The rough-hewn frontiersman, driving his cattle along the untamed frontier, encapsulates both the American Dream and American nightmares. The courageous individualist risking everything to get the job done in a place far from government support, where the added risk is an acceptable price to pay for freedom, is as American an ideal as it gets. The wresting of the land from the Native Americans to make the cowboy possible was one of America’s original sins.

What could be more Kyrgyz than a nomad? If you went to my photo talk the other week, you’ll have learned that the nomadic pastoralist with his herds of sheep, horses, or yaks is at least as powerful a symbol of national identity in Kyrgyzstan as the cowboys are in America – and the same is true across the Central Asian ’stans and Mongolia. We could also talk about the gauchos of Argentina, Kenya’s Maasai, or the Bedouin of the Arab world.

The idea of the nomadic animal herder as the incarnation of the nation seems remote and alien to us in this more settled country, even though Wiltshire was one of the last places in these islands where this way of life survived, dying out less than a hundred years ago.

But for Jews in the Ancient World, some of their greatest national heroes and holy men had been shepherds before God called them to lead flocks of people – Abraham started out as a herdsman, and Moses famously kept his father-in-law’s flock after he left Egypt the first time.

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