Month: July 2021

Treasure in Clay Jars: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 25 July 2021 (St James’ Day)

by

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4:7–15; Matthew 20:20–28

“…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

You are all a terrible bunch of Christians! I mean really, really, deeply flawed followers of Jesus Christ; and in the main you have very mixed motives for coming to church this morning and you should repent – repent – of your sins.

The Scallop Shell symbol of St James. © Chris Light and used under Creative Commons 4.0.

I’m sorry for that start to the sermon, but I’ve always wanted to rain a bit of fire and brimstone from the pulpit and this morning’s readings gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. It was worth it to see the looks on your faces.

Of course, you’re all deeply flawed Christians; I know this partly because I am myself a deeply flawed Christian and a deeply flawed priest and, like you, I need to repent of my sins, on a regular basis. That’s why we call our sins to mind and pray together for God to forgive us them every Sunday in the first part of the Eucharist.

I know how flawed we all are for another reason, too. Over the course of my life, I’ve been privileged to get to know well a few people who had a deserved reputation for being saints; and the better I got to know them, the more I saw that they all had real character flaws and could, just every once in a while, be quite horrid or quite hopeless.

I wanted to put that prelude into your minds before we turned to today’s Gospel reading, which is both hysterically funny, toe-curlingly awful, and very true-t0-life. When I play this scene out in my mind as if it were in a film, the bossy mother is always played by Maureen Lipman. What makes the encounter even more cringe-making is that this episode happened very late in Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem, immediately after he told the twelve apostles that he was soon about to be handed over to death.

Read more

A Clergyman’s Diary: Along the Marches Border

by

If you’re here because you heard about my #50kInADay walking fundraiser – click here to find out more and support me.

An invitation to celebrate the Eucharist in a village in the Diocese of Hereford where some good friends live provided not only the opportunity for my first ‘away match’ since my priesting, but for some final preparatory walking before my 50k in a day fundraising effort. A march along the Marches border, as it were.

Herefordshire has some glorious walking country, especially when the thistles and foxgloves and buttercups are at their finest and the countryside is full of dancing butterflies and buzzing bees.

St Swithun seemed in good form on his feast day and we will not have to deal with rain for the next 40 days, it seems. It was, however, a frustrating day of blocked or unmarked rights of way and being forced onto main roads. But 30km was walked as planned, albeit on a different route to that originally planned. Some of it was quite steep.

Friday, which was the feast of St Osmund, was very hot indeed. There were fewer access problems as I walked Offa’s Dyke Path from Kington to Hay-on-Wye, shuffling back and forth across the English/Welsh border. This does not take the most ‘efficient’ route, but spends a lot of time going through sheep farms at the 300m+ level before ascending and descending very steeply indeed when it goes through a village. Idyllic scenery though, and squadrons of Red Kites at times.

Read more

The Baptist’s Wounds: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, 11 July 2021 (The Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

by

Readings – 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6: 14–29                                 

“‘He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.”

In the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head on a platter is one of the most grizzly images in the Gospels. It remains shocking not least because so many Christians have died throughout the ages for telling powerful rulers truths that they don’t want to hear. When you next go to Salisbury, look at the rows of statues which adorn the West Front of the Cathedral – there is a helpful Wikipedia article which has information on each one of the one hundred and ninety-six of them – and note how many of them were martyred for their faith.

The last few decades have added to the numbers of those martyred for speaking truth to power. I think of St Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot dead by members of a far-right militia as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in 1980; or Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Polish priest hunted down four years later by secret policemen of the then Communist regime in his country. In our own Anglican tradition Janani Luwum, the Archbishop of Uganda, was martyred in 1977 by Idi Amin for protesting that dictator’s murderous rule. Few people seem to know of the seven brave Anglican monks of the Melanesian Brotherhood, murdered in 2003 by a warlord in the Solomon Islands as they tried to mediate during a period of interethnic fighting. So, let me remember by name from this pulpit Nathaniel Sado, Robin Lindsay, Francis Tofi, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu, and Ini Paratabatu. 

Nor have these martyrs all been clergy and religious. Brave laypeople have also given their lives for refusing to collude in the lies of repressive régimes, like Steve Biko, the practising Anglican and founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, beaten to death by the police of the apartheid state.

David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch
David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch

Indeed, it was in South Africa that I definitively got to know a prophet: David Russell, who was Bishop of Grahamstown from 1987 until 2004. David radiated the peace of Christ and was very good to me at a difficult time. He could have had a much easier life than the one he led. South Africa-born, he came to England to train for the priesthood and studied to postgraduate level at Oxford. As such an able man, he could have become a Prince Bishop of the Church of England, and campaigned against the repressive government of his homeland from a powerful pulpit. Even in South Africa, he could have ministered in a White suburban parish, and challenged the government from there. That wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable, but it would have been a lot easier than what he chose to do. Instead, he rejected the arrant heresy that a priest must be of the same race as the people he or she serves by ministering in illegal shantytowns on the Cape Flats, home to people banned from living in the second city of their own country simply because of the colour of their skin. This led to several years of house arrest, an actual spell of imprisonment, and being constantly spied upon by the security services. It also led him to meet his wife, to become a highly respected bishop important in his country’s transition to democracy, and in the fullness of time to become an officially honoured national hero. While some prophets face death, David lived to find a sort of Resurrection in his later years.

Read more