Month: March 2021

A Season of New Life

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This article first appeared in the April 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

I went for a very long walk earlier this week, even by my standards. A whopping 43 km (27 miles for those who prefer pounds, shillings, and pence). The highlight came just after sunset, heading west into the twilight on the Roman Road between the Cherhill Monument and Morgan’s Hill. Silhouetted against the orange sky was something I’d never seen before but entirely unmistakable – a mad March hare, leaping wildly, full of joyful abandon.

The Roman Road between Avebury and Morgan's Hill just after sunset. A ploughed track and an orange sky.
The Roman Road between Avebury and Morgan’s Hill just after sunset, © Gerry Lynch, 23 March 2021

New life is all around us in this season. What will our world look like in the months and years to come? While we can’t be certain of the course of the pandemic, at present our hospitals are emptying and vaccinations are proceeding at pace, so we should plan for a return to normality in the first part of this summer. What sort of things might help us renew our life as a parish community?

I think there are two key elements to this. Firstly, enabling our existing worshippers to deepen in faith and in relationship with one another. Also, to deepen in trust that we really are the people God has called to serve Him in this place. Secondly, giving people who are not yet part of our congregation the chance to engage with us, and for us to provide pathway to faith for the majority of people who think of themselves as entirely secular.

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Clearing the Temple of our Souls: Sermon Preached Digitally for St John with St Mary, Devizes, on Sunday 7 March 2021

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Readings – 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2: 13-22

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I love Giotto’s painting of the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that forms the centrepiece of today’s Gospel. It has a raw edge that defies any domestication of Christ; Jesus, a cold fury on his face, is whirling the whip above his head, but he looks more than anything like he’s about to punch the moneychanger nearest him in the face. 

The reception of this story by the Church in the present moment fascinates me. The Giotto painting is the source of countless memes, little social media slogans, in the churchy parts of Facebook and Twitter, where people say that Jesus angrily whipping the money changers out of the Temple is the Jesus they emulate. The funny thing is the same people find the idea of the wrath of God absolutely taboo, as I suspect most of us do, dismissing it as primitive and theologically dubious. 

We don’t like the idea of God’s wrath in the abstract, but we like the angry Jesus when his fury is directed at people we disapprove of. After all, we’re not the sort of people who would set up a stall in the cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral to sell animals for sacrifice and exploit continental tourists by offering them a terrible exchange rate for their Euros. It’s OK for God to be angry at people like that, the sort of people who make us feel a bit smug and superior, but we’re quite sure God would never be angry at us. 

We only need to spell that approach out to realise how ludicrous it is, a cheap co-option of God as a sort of magic totem who is always on our side. Please God, we’re more mature and self-aware than that, open to understanding that the Jesus who judges the moneychangers has not only the right, but the duty, to judge us. We must know that the God who knows every hair on our head also knows the darkness that rests in each of our souls. We also know that any representation of a human being without shadow isn’t a human being at all but a cartoon, a caricature, and that anyone claiming to be such a flawless being is a liar. If Jesus Christ, who is God, is correct to be angry at the moneychangers in the Temple, then He must also at times be correct to be angry at us.

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New Life After A Sojourn in the Wilderness

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This article first appeared in the March 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

Although summer remains far away and we could yet be overtaken by a genuinely cold snap or even snow, the signs of new life are all around us at present. The snowdrops are magnificent, especially in our local woodlands, and the days are getting rapidly longer: each day currently gives us an extra four minutes of daylight. It soon builds up.

We trust and pray we are also seeing signs of new life after the pandemic. The number of new Covid-19 cases in the UK is decreasing at some speed, the horrifying daily death toll is also mercifully falling rapidly, the number of people vaccinated is going up, and the government has presented its roadmap out of lockdown, promising an end to restrictions by late June. As ordinary citizens, we can do little but trust and pray that our scientists and statisticians have done their modelling correctly and that this will indeed be our last lockdown.

In that light, after discussions at the Parochial Church Council, we are planning a return to services in church on Sundays. There has, however, been a recent and fairly significant outbreak in Devizes, with local infection rates running at 2½ times the average for England. This has gone almost unreported in the local press, but is a reality. Responsibility demands we wait for that to subside before bringing people back into church, other recent local outbreaks indicate we can expect this to happen quickly under lockdown conditions. The PCC has delegated the decision on a date of return to the churchwardens, who will review the situation every week. We will not delay any longer than necessary, and barring truly exceptional circumstances envisage being back in church by Holy Week and possibly some time before. We will contact people by e-mail, or by telephone for those without access to the Internet, on the Monday before any Sunday return.

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