Readings – Isaiah 52: 7–10; Luke 24: 13–31
Heaven in Our Hearts: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes, Sunday 30th October 2022 (Commemoration of the Departed for All Souls’)
Month: October 2022
Accepting Our Limits: Sermon Preached on 23rd October 2022 (The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)
Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – 2 Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14
“…the time of my departure is at hand.”
On Tuesday, I went for a long walk on my day off, as is my wont. It was an extraordinary day for the time of year, almost cloudless and with temperatures in the high teens. As I walked over the fields into Bishops Cannings from Devizes, I was confronted by a magnificent sight – two trees at the very peak of their autumn colour, framing that majestic parish church and lovely village pub with a riot of reds and golds. The light was absolutely superb.
Yesterday, I drove through Bishops Cannings and noticed that those trees had lost some of their leaves in the storms of Friday, and that their colours were losing a little of their lustre. Although the temperatures remain extraordinarily mild for the season, it was a cloudy day, without the translucent light of Tuesday morning. It was still a pretty scene – but no longer possessed of the sort of transfiguring beauty it held just four days before.
Autumn is a particularly transient time of year. Fresh beauties emerge from the landscape and vanish again in a matter of days. Soon will come the bare trees and bare fields of winter. That is also the pattern of our lives. Everything has a finite end, a limit. Nothing lasts forever, and many things that enlighten and energise our lives are around only for a very short span.
The present moment is all we have.
In our epistle reading this morning, St Paul is near the end. He clearly expects to die soon – he has run his race. This has not made him a perfect person, and he still seems to have energy to vent his spleen at those who he feels let him down in his hour of great need, in the passive-aggressive tone Paul often adopts.
I love Paul, and I love his writings, but I can definitely see why almost everyone seems to have lost patience with him at one time or another. Even the man who was perhaps his closest companion, Barnabas, a man so sweet-natured that he was nicknamed ‘The Encourager’, took his leave of Paul once in Antioch when his constant arguing became too much.
Paul was not perfect but, to be fair, at the core of his writings is the idea that salvation is not a reward for passing a particular standard of goodness but something that God gives us as a free gift, because God is love. And for all that Paul was a man with obvious faults, he was also a man with tremendous gifts. Here, he contemplates the end of his life without fear, absolutely trusting God will receive him in heaven.
Are You A Leper?: Sermon Preached in St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 9th October 2022 (Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)
Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19
“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.
Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.
In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.
What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.
Strange outbreaks of positivity over Northern Ireland
I was published in Unherd over the strange emergence of good vibes about breaking the EU-UK bad blood over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
“After nearly two years of ugly in-fighting over the Northern Ireland Protocol, there has been a sudden outbreak of positivity from key players in London, Dublin, and Brussels about the possibility of a deal to amend or replace it. Even self-styled “Brexit hard man” Steve Baker, now a UK government minister in the Northern Ireland Office, told Tory conference-goers he was “sorry” his behaviour had weakened Anglo-Irish relations. He later asserted to BBC Radio Ulster his willingness “to eat a bit of humble pie” to achieve a deal.
[…]
“Although real gaps remain to be bridged, most parties have an interest in a deal being done. Above all, it would remove the risk of a UK-EU trade war erupting during a winter where it would be of primary benefit to Vladimir Putin. More subtly, it would be of assistance to both London and Brussels in the war of values, hard evidence that free democracies are better than autocrats at finding solutions in messy territorial and ethnic disputes. An agreed and flourishing post-Brexit Ulster would be a fine counter-blast to the hell Moscow has made of the Donbas.”
To read the rest, please click through to Unherd – it’s free.
Worthless Slaves?: Sermon Preached in Christ Church, Worton, Sunday 2nd October 2022 (Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity)
Readings – 2 Timothy 1: 1–14; Luke 17: 5–10
“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know about you, but I could have done without a Gospel reading like that. We are told to be like the poor slaves toiling in the fields all day, then as soon as they come home ordered to prepare their master’s dinner before they get the chance to eat and drink themselves. It’s not exactly the most encouraging text in the current circumstances.
I am tired after the last two and a half years of Corona-Christianity, of the endless chopping and changing of regulations and routines, of the closures and the re-openings, of putting huge effort into learning new skills that became obsolescent a few months later. It was blooming hard work, made more exhausting by being constantly told that the pandemic had forced the Church to confront that it has no money and that we need to get used to a leaner Church more dependent on volunteers. This comes on top of decades of the lay people in the villages, the Poor Bloody Infantry of the Church of England, being amalgamated into ever bigger benefices with ever fewer clergy even as the demand for share goes up. Of course, every clever reorganisation presents itself as the solution to the current problems, but ends up being superseded by the next clever scheme a few years down the line.
There is money in the system, but it’s never for churches or benefices like this; only ever for churches in student towns and big cities promoting a style of worship that is a million miles away from village Anglicanism. Strangely, those churches often seem to promote a sort of theology of success that is also a million miles from the Gospel Jesus is proclaiming this morning, where the reward for hard work is yet more hard work. It is enough to make you lose faith.
Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair
A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.
I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.
I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.
Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.
But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.