Month: June 2022

Recapturing the Imagination of Our Culture: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26th June 2022 (Patronal Festival)

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Readings – Isaiah 40: 1–11; Luke 1:57–66, 80

A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’

Some of you will by now know of my fondness for financial crisis movies. One, called The Big Short, tells the tale of the few who saw in advance the coming American mortgage crash of the late 2000s. They were a ragbag collection of outsiders – an autistic genius, bright young things with no stake in the system, and even a man so honest about his own greed that had no illusions about the probity of others. They were scoffed at for years, but they were right, and betting against the market made them earthly riches at the very moment when others were losing their shirts.

A photo of Christian Bale acting as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.
Eccentrically brilliant – Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.

Outsiders often perceive truths too disturbing for those comfortable with the existing order. Yet the line between genius and madness can be thin and it can be hard to tell those voices crying profound truths into the wilderness apart from the cacophony of those howling at the Moon. Is it is always safest to herd ourselves behind conventional wisdom, because then at least if we are wrong, we will have plenty of company in our mistakes.

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Our first reading presents us with a vision of God nurturing and feeding His people after a time of trouble. This is from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, the introduction to the second of Isaiah’s three distinct blocks of writing, and it was written in Babylon, probably towards the end of the half century of exile from Jerusalem. It sought to reassure people who had suffered much for their faith that God had not given up on them and would soon allow them to return home.

One verse is quite difficult and often glossed over. While Jerusalem’s “penalty is paid” that is because “she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” There is no attempt here to avoid the idea that the exiles, mostly from the ruling elite of Jerusalem, were themselves largely responsible for their own misfortune. Instead of justice, they chose selfishness, idolatry, and the path of least resistance. They silenced and persecuted those who told them difficult truths they didn’t want to hear. They had lost the Kingdom and they had blinking well deserved it.

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Jubilee and the Holy Spirit: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th June 2022 (Pentecost)

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Readings – Acts 2: 1–21; Romans 8: 14–17; John 14: 8–17, 25–27.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”. 

Seventy years and a few months ago, a young woman was on an exotic holiday with her husband in Kenya. She was staying in the Treetops Hotel, which was literally a very fancy and well-serviced treehouse, watching the big game animals play on the savannah below, when she heard the news that, half a world away, her father had died.

The death of a parent, as many of us know, is a wrenching moment in life, when one’s own personal world is knocked off its axis. What was different for this young woman was that she not only had to grieve as any child does a parent, but she also had instantly to become a Head of State, for this was the moment when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI.

Among the many tremendous changes that have taken place over the seven decades since, perhaps the most profound has been that in the status of women. The world of 1952 was still a man’s world. Women in positions of power were rare: Elizabeth’s first cabinet had not a single female minister. It was essentially unheard of for a young woman – and Elizabeth was only twenty-five – to be in any position of authority in society except with respect to children.

It took remarkable strength of character to thrive in that context – and she did thrive, through staggering changes. Her reign began as head of an Empire that stretched from Malaya to Jamaica, and continues into the age of Brexit. China was an impoverished global backwater seventy years ago, while the now-disappeared Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers. The Queen has seen two female Prime Ministers come and go, something unimaginable when she took office. Her reign began when homosexuality was against the law yet eventually saw marriage opened to couples of the same sex. In 1952, the Pill had not been developed, Elvis Presley and John Lennon had not been heard of, human beings had yet to set foot in Space, and the world’s few computers occupied vast sheds of tape reels and valves.

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