Month: April 2022

The Worth of Doubters: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 24th April 2022 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Readings – Acts 5: 27–32; John 20: 19–31

“Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

I wonder when you last heard a friend or an acquaintance described as “a bit of a Doubting Thomas?” Perhaps you have even been described as a “Doubting Thomas” yourself. It isn’t usually intended as a positive assessment. A Doubting Thomas, including the original in today’s Gospel reading can often be presented as a cynic who is committed to nothing.

‘Still Doubting’, by John Glanville Gregory, after Caravaggio.

Yet ‘uncommitted’ isn’t the picture of Thomas we get from other passages in John’s Gospel. To shed light on this and some other things in this morning’s Gospel reading, we need to jump back to the 11th chapter of John. As I don’t expect you to remember what happens in every bit of the Bible by chapter number, let me reassure you that this is a passage of scripture familiar to most of you: it’s the story of the raising of Lazarus. One significant thing about it is that it’s the last miracle and indeed last major “action scene” in John’s Gospel before Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem.

Back then, when Jesus’ life was under threat by stone-throwing mobs, Thomas was the one who responded to His suggestion of a trip into deeply hostile Judaea by telling his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Here we see not an uncommitted backslider but a deeply loyal follower of Christ; perhaps even a fanatic.

Despite his deep commitment, can we blame Thomas for being sceptical, faced with tales from his friends that Jesus had returned from the dead, walking through walls to appear in the middle of locked rooms? We have all experienced people reacting to shocking news, especially to the death of a loved one, with denial. Indeed, I have found myself engaging in denial at times, and I suspect most of you have done so too. It’s a natural human tendency; so personally I have more than a little fellow-feeling with Thomas in this passage when he is wary of his companions engaging in denial.

The Church needs its Thomases, because it needs Christians of all sorts of temperaments and outlooks. It needs its sceptics as well as its enthusiasts, its pragmatists as well as its romantics. And that means that the Church needs all of you, just as you are, otherwise God would not have called you to be here this morning.

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The Gardener of Life: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 17th April 2022 (Easter Day)

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Readings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’

What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?

St Mary’s, Potterne – a lovely place to celebrate my first Easter Mass. © Gerry Lynch

Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?

Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.

Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.

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Switch Off and #TouchGrass

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There is a pear tree next to the back door of the curate’s house. It has been a joy over the last two weeks noticing it change – from having bare branches, to the first green buds, and finally watching the flowers develop and form fully into a riot of subtle whitish greens and pinks.

Pear blossom in my back garden, 12 April 2022. © Gerry Lynch

Last year I didn’t notice it until it was in full blossom. Perhaps I was distracted by the return to church and some minimal amount of socialising in April 2021. At this time of year change happens quickly, but at first subtly. If one does not pay close attention, one is confronted by it suddenly, especially if life is very busy.

Modern life can feel like it has been designed to disconnect us from the natural world. One of the things I noticed in my first week in Devizes was how dark and detailed the night skies were from my back garden, even in late June, with a fine view of the Milky Way. As a city boy who had been interested in stargazing since childhood, this was a surprise treat.  

Even after all these years, I can remember quite distinctly what the northern skies looked like from my parents’ back yard in the mid-1980s. By this period, in a city centre location, the skies were already considerably affected by light pollution. Yet things have degraded further to the point that I estimate that about three-quarters of the stars then visible in Belfast with the naked eye no longer are.

The Milky Way near Shaftesbury in Dorset, 12 August 2016 © Gerry Lynch

Even in Devizes, the night sky is only a pale shadow of what our ancestors’ took for granted. The summertime Milky Way, for example, should be full of structure and complexity – while it is impressively ghostly here, detail is no longer visible from Devizes. Many more stars would have been visible than are today in this country, even in remote countryside; against the dark countryside, the night sky felt bright. I have experienced this, even in recent years, in Dorset where the councils turn many street lights off in the early hours.

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Admit It, You Think Judas is Right: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd April 2022 (Fifth Sunday of Lent)

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Readings – Isaiah 43: 16–21; John 12: 1–8

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 

Admit it, a large part of you agrees with Judas when he asks Jesus this question… keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it!

A view of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery from the bell tower of St Sophia’s in Kyiv, 13 August 2017.
St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, 13 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch

If you have seen television news reports from Kyiv, you will doubtless have seen the magnificent St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. A huge trapezium of sky-blue with white vertical stripes, all capped by seven golden domes, and next to it an even bigger clock-tower in similar colours with a truly huge golden dome on top. It was originally built towards the end of the 11th Century, a few decades before our own St John’s, and like our St John’s it was developed in fits and starts over many centuries. It was hugely expanded in the ornate Ukrainian Baroque style which make Kyiv’s churches and monasteries a delight during the 18th Century, the period when many of our beautifully carved wall memorials in St John’s were erected.

What I’ll tell you next is hard to believe, although we have learned in recent weeks the depth of hatred Stalin held for Ukrainian culture and identity, but those wonderful 18th Century baroque extensions were used as an excuse for the Soviet authorities to declare the monastery historically “inauthentic” in 1934, and it was demolished, replaced by a modern office block housing the administrative headquarters of Soviet Ukraine. What we see today has been entirely rebuilt over the last thirty years, as faithfully as possible to what was there before.

On one level, buildings are just stones: but they are also things that can move people to tears through their beauty, and be the repositories of the soul of a nation, or a family, or a faith. Stalin, among others, understood how much buildings mattered – St Michael’s was one of thousands of churches destroyed across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as the state tried to destroy Christianity. But he also understood the power of beautiful buildings to lift up and renew. Much of the centre of Kyiv was destroyed during the Second World War, and it was the site of one of the first rebuilding efforts in the immediate post-War years, especially around the famous Maidan, a handsome cityscape of optimistic wedding-cake towers and neo-classical pillars. The aim was to incarnate in stone the beauty of Communist ideals of progress and enlightenment, and inspire the people of Ukraine to play their part in rebuilding the USSR after the depredations of Hitler.

Domes of St Michael's in Kyiv
Domes of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, 10 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch.

Let us turn the clock back even further, before the construction of St Michael’s in Kyiv and St John’s in Devizes, before even the times when Christ walked the earth, to the time when the Scythians were the people who dominated the great Eurasian plain, from Ukraine in the west as far as Mongolia in the east. A few years ago there was an exhibition of their art at the British Museum. The Scythians had no writing, but worked gold with exquisite skill, the equal of the Greeks and Persians of the same period. Complex depictions of Tree of Life, sometimes a foot high, reveal a people with a keen sense of spirituality and the wonder of creation. The instinct for beauty seems to be hard-wired into us.

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The Cost of Love: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th March 2022 (Mothering Sunday)

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Readings – Colossians 3: 12–17; John 19: 25b–27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” 

Let me start this morning’s sermon with a verse of poetry:

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.

So begins the greatest poem of Bill Vanstone, seen by many as the most impressive Anglican thinker and theologian of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. At this time of year, with the weather magnificent and the air full of the scents and new life of spring, even in times as troubled as those we are in, one can be enraptured by this sort of mood, simply by being alive. It feels like heaven! Perhaps indeed it is an intimation of heaven.

A beautiful morning for another away match at Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch

Of course, even in our brightest moments, that is never the whole story. Many of us will come here this morning with serious problems of our own; even those of us fortunate enough not to be in that position will be deeply worried about serious problems faced by people we love.

Love is the greatest gift given to any of us by God. It is the most wonderful and miraculous and life-giving thing about being human. Yet it also has a tremendous cost. It opens us up to feeling the pains of the people we love.  The second stanza of Vanstone’s poem is clear about that cost, as it continues:

Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Some people seem to think that even to celebrate this Sunday as Mother’s Day is somehow excluding and potentially wounding for those without children or whose relationships with their mothers were difficult. Well, as a childless, single man, let me say that it is simply an obvious statement of fact that mothers have a particular and unique relationship with the children they have born in their womb, an intensely physical connection that no male can ever have. Mothers perhaps more than any of us know just how costly and agonising love can be.

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