January 2022 - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

Fresh Wine and Springtime: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 16th January 2022 (The Second Sunday after Epiphany)

17 January 202216 January 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 1 Corinthians 12: 1–11, John 2: 1–11

Everyone serves … the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.

A zoom on some of the detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana (1536) by Paolo Veronese, which hangs in The Louvre.

I think you all know me well enough by now to know that I enjoy the good things in life. So, clearly, did Jesus. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus turns water into wine on an industrial scale at a wedding. The water filled six huge jars, each holding “twenty or thirty gallons”, which by my calculations would make more than 900 bottles of wine – which the guests found to be of superlative quality. This is a lot even for a seriously boozy wedding reception. It is so much wine that even the people at Friday evening lockdown parties at Number 10 Downing Street might not have managed to finish it all.

God wants you to enjoy life to the full. There are going to be enough tough moments in life as it is – the last two years, for example – so there is nothing wrong in making the most of the times when things are going well. Indeed, if you have been generally fortunate in life, do what you can to help others, but also be grateful, rather than being guilty, for your blessings, for your gratitude can inspire a wonderful lightness of life but your guilt helps no-one.

As well as enjoying the good things in life, most of you will also know by now that I like to preach about how Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly human, and how God loves us in our humanity. Our Gospel reading this morning presents a very human scene, which takes place in a real human culture: a Jewish one. If I made a film about this scene, I would cast Maureen Lipman as Mary and Adam Sandler as Jesus. Jesus is clearly annoyed with his mother for trying to get him to intervene and keep the party going; Mary completely ignores Him and tells the staff to do whatever He says. Jesus, completely outfoxed by his mother, complies with her request.

So here we have Jesus, God made man, enjoying and helping others to enjoy the best of what it means to be human. What does this mean for us and for today’s Church?

Your Beautiful Bodies: Sermon Preached at George’s, Belfast, Sunday 2nd January 2022 (2nd Sunday of Christmas)

2 January 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial

Readings – John 1: 10–18, Ephesians 1: 3–14

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

One of my favourite activities when off work in the dark depths of midwinter is to go onto YouTube to watch television advertisements from commercial breaks of decades long past. I have a particular fondness for 1970s adverts for pipe tobacco; they really get across how much society has changed in the last half a century or so. Not so much because they showed men smoking their pipes on the telly, but because of how plain and sometimes even ugly the men in them were. Bald men in late middle-age, often a little tubby, sometimes with wrinkly foreheads or even unmanageable hair. In adverts for DIY superstores, these plain middle-aged men inevitably had plain middle-aged wives that they sat with in the ordinary kitchens of ordinary homes.

Watch a TV advertising break today and it is a different story. Everyone is beautiful; everyone has perfect hair and perfect teeth; nearly everyone is young. Where young people aren’t really appropriate for advertising the product in question – if it’s for a funeral plan, let’s say, or incontinence medicine – the few elderly people allowed to appear in advertising look like they’re just about to pop out for a 10 mile walk, just to wind down from the skiing holiday they’ve just jetted home from.

Half a century ago, advertising executives thought we were most likely to purchase a product if we associated it with people we identified with, with people who were like we were ourselves. Now the theory is that we are more likely to buy products associated with the sort of people we aspire to becoming, or at least have idle fantasies about becoming, in the hope that some of their success will rub off on us in a sort of high-tech cargo cult.

It sounds like a minor change, but it goes to the heart of some of the most damaging social trends of today’s world. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves, negatively, with people who are prettier, richer, and more successful than we are – or who seem to be prettier, richer, and more successful than we are.