Month: June 2023

Fear the Devil: Sermon Preached on 25th June 2023 (3rd Sunday After Trinity)

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Al Pacino playing the Devil in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate. He is smiling towards the camera, Keanu Reeves, his "son" is standing with his back to the camera. They are in a New York subway car.

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 6.1b-11; Matthew 10.24-39

“fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Do you think about hell and the Devil much?

Al Pacino playing the Devil in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate. He is smiling towards the camera, Keanu Reeves, his "son" is standing with his back to the camera. They are in a New York subway car.
The Devil as the coolest dude in town… Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997).

I thought that would be a good way to start a sermon on a glorious summer evening in an adorable little village like Bulkington!

We can scoff at talk of the Devil as ridiculous and primitive nonsense, and I have no doubt that some of you here tonight do. I did for a long time. We can even find ourselves glamorising the Devil – you know, the cool bloke who lets you drink and tells you dirty jokes, instead of making you sit on a cloud playing a harp forever like God (that boring old fart!) Yet whatever we think about an actual personification of evil in the form of the Devil, none of us can escape the reality of evil, obvious every time we hear a news bulletin.

If we believe that we have a soul, then we also need to consider seriously the possibility that it might be damaged or corrupted by evil. More than this, if we take the Gospels seriously as a record of what Jesus taught, then we need to embrace the reality that Jesus taught his followers about the Devil: among other places, in this evening’s Gospel reading. Satan is a recurring theme throughout the New Testament, where we are presented with a picture of Christians in a running battle with forces of evil that, without the grace of God, would be beyond our powers to resist or break.

The Devil is real, taunting us over the battlefields of Ukraine and our indifference to hungry children in a world of plenty. The Devil taunts us over every Saturday night stabbing, over every carefully nursed family feud, and every intentionally bitter dispute over the custody of the children. The Devil taunts us when we scream at the TV that we wish someone would shoot one of our least favourite politicians and when we lash out at the people who love us most because they’re the people we know we can hurt without fearing retaliation.

Most people in this country, unlike Jesus Christ, think the Devil is a silly fictional character that, at best, distracts us from dealing with the world’s real problems. That suits Satan fine; if we think he doesn’t exist it makes it so much easier to worm his way into people’s souls.

A cheerful picture, eh?                                     

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Dare We Risk it All?: Sermon Preached on Sunday 25th June 2023 (The Birth of John the Baptist, Patronal Festival)

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The painting depicts a Bible story from Luke 1:5-80, in which Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, are too old to have children. One day the angel Gabriel appears to tell Zacharias that he and Elizabeth will have a son named John. Zacharias is literally dumbfounded and loses his ability to speak.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Acts 13.14b-26; Luke 1.57-66, 80

“What then will this child become?”

That’s what the neighbours asked when confronted by the strange circumstances of the birth of St John the Baptist. His father, Zechariah, had been struck dumb by God for refusing to believe he had fathered a child at his advanced age. Then he and his wife, Elizabeth, broke all custom by giving their son a name, John, not already used in their family. Immediately after that break with custom, Zechariah’s speech was suddenly restored. Elizabeth and Zechariah were delighted with their bonny boy whose name means ‘God is gracious’, but the neighbours found these weird experiences frightening.

“What will this child become?”, they asked, in their fear.

The painting depicts a Bible story from Luke 1:5-80, in which Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, are too old to have children. One day the angel Gabriel appears to tell Zacharias that he and Elizabeth will have a son named John. Zacharias is literally dumbfounded and loses his ability to speak.
The Birth of St John the Baptist by Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1635), now in the Prado Museum, Madrid.

He became a great man, a man who changed history, but not one who enjoyed success in his life by conventional standards. He lived a wild life, eating insects and wild honey, and dressing in animal hides. Yet more than a thousand years after his death the Norman conquerors who had recently set up a castle thousands of miles away in Devizes named their church after him, and almost a thousand years after that, we meet in the same church and commemorate John as our patron saint today.

Although he was later celebrated by conquerors, John was far from a conqueror during his life. Instead, he came to the attention of the authorities as someone who refused to collude in their lies, was imprisoned, and later brutally executed. The régime that put him to death remained in power. On the surface, he achieved nothing in his life.

We can’t reduce Christianity to a formula for a successful life by the conventional standards of the world. Worldly success may be a blessing that God grants us; but equally, to live a godly life may require us to renounce comfort and instead live a life of deprivation and physical risk. Not just in Christianity: a deep ambivalence about worldly success was also present in the Jewish thoughtworld which remains part of our scriptural inheritance.

That’s clear when we listen to this morning’s first reading, from Acts. This is part of St Paul’s speech at the synagogue in Antioch. Here, Paul locates John the Baptist in the long sweep of Jewish history. So, he says that God “made the people great” – isn’t that a phrase to conjure with in our time – God “made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt.” So, God made the Hebrew people great when they were living as slaves in a foreign land ruled over by often despotic pharaohs. Isn’t that a strange idea – whatever it means to be great here, it isn’t greatness in the eyes of the world.

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