August 2023 - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

Love Your Body: Sermon Preached on 27th August 2023 (12th Sunday After Trinity)

27 August 2023 by Gerry Lynch

A painting by Giovanni Paolo Pannini of St Paul preaching in what purported to be the ruins of Rome, although there wouldn't have been such ruins in St Paul's day!

Preached at St John’s, Devizes and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 12.1-8; Matthew 16.13-20

“present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

On Thursday, when cooking, I gave my thumb a proper deep cut with a sharp cooking knife. It happened as I was getting something ready to put in the slow cooker overnight, so my evening peace was disturbed by frantically finding a plaster to deal with the profuse bleeding. By the time I’d found one, the blood was already showing signs of clotting. Over the 60 hours since, the cut has healed with remarkable speed. I haven’t used any medical aid other than a few plasters; yet the pain has long gone and the gash in the skin is starting to close.

Our bodies are remarkable things. Even the most basic functions of the human body can provoke wonder, and we live at a time when science has unveiled just how wonderful many of the body’s workings are. Yet although the human body in general often provokes wonder, many of us seem to feel our own specific bodies are not good enough.Especially among teenage girls, there is an epidemic of self-harm and depression related to poor body image.

So it can be a surprise to hear St Paul speak so positively about bodies in today’s Epistle reading – we are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, he says, and furthermore, he sees the human body as a model for a healthy Church.

Now, if you ask people about faith, very few will tell you that our physical bodies have much to do with it—whether they are Christians, or believers in other faiths, or non-religious people. Faith is held to be a matter of one’s mental or emotional state, detached from physical reality. Even the most faithful and well-read Christians are inclined to go along with the idea that the body is a prison for the soul, a soul which longs to be united with God in a relationship in the world to come that is undisturbed by material things.

Yet, Christianity is a religion of the physical at least as much as of the spiritual. We worship God who became human in the person of Jesus Christ—eating and drinking, getting cuts that healed and viruses that made Him sneeze. We worship a God who even went to the toilet; and a God who ultimately died a death of brutal physicality on the Cross. God lived a human life in the person of Jesus Christ, a life just like ours, except without sin.

Jesus Making Us Uncomfortable: Sermon Preached on 20th August 2023 (11th Sunday After Trinity)

12 August 202620 August 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Romans 11. 1–2a, 29-32; Matthew 15. 21–28

“He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’”

We often hold to a stereotype that Paul’s letters are full of judgement and chauvinism and sexism, while the Gospels show Jesus to be a paragon of tolerance who is only ever nice to people. This morning’s readings show that stereotype up for the misreading of the Bible that it is. In our Epistle, St Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, a very mixed group of Jews and Gentiles, that while he remained proud of his Jewishness, God did not discriminate between different groups of people – and indeed that God allowed all of us to sin, so He could be merciful to everyone.

A woman kneels before Jesus' feet clasping her hands, while to his left, a bearded man with his hands held out aggressively pleads with Jesus. — *Jean-Germain Drouais, Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1784). In the collection of the Louvre, Paris.*

In contrast, in this morning’s Gospel reading, where Jesus encounters a Canaanite woman seeking healing for her daughter, Jesus is rude, and a bit of a bigot, calling the Canaanites “dogs”. Now, by this time, the Hebrews and the Canaanites had a history of bad blood that went back more than a thousand years. Two peoples sharing the same piece of land for a long time sometimes develop a strange sort of relationship – a hatred that seems particularly intense to outsiders, but which sits alongside great mutual familiarity, indeed an intimacy that can exist even in the absence of love or good feeling. People from Northern Ireland are familiar with this phenomenon.

For Jews, Canaanites were not merely polytheistic pagans – and that would have been bad enough, but the nasty stench of child sacrifice also still lingered over them in the Jewish imagination. The Jews, moreover, believed God had given them the whole region as their homeland more than a thousand years before—but the Canaanites still showed no sign of leaving. So, if Jesus were just another wise teacher, just another Jewish holy man, we might not feel so shocked to hear Him dismiss the Canaanites as ‘dogs’. We all have our off days, don’t we? But it’s quite another thing to hear God incarnate, God made human, display such prejudice. If Jesus’ words and actions here make you feel uncomfortable, don’t try to smooth away either your feelings or the biblical text, but bear with the discomfort for a while.

I wonder what would happen if this encounter took place today, and was recorded by a passer-by on their mobile ‘phone. As we all know, saying the wrong thing while being recorded—and we are recorded more than anyone until recently would have thought possible—can end someone’s career, even if it’s only a single incident, an ‘off-day’ in an otherwise blameless life. In today’s culture, if Jesus referred to another nationality or ethnicity as “dogs”, he’d probably be ‘cancelled’. We are not always a very merciful culture.

Can You Walk on Water?: Sermon Preached on 13th August 2023 (10th Sunday After Trinity)

13 August 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes

Readings – Romans 10. 5–15; Matthew 14. 22–33

A painting of Jesus rescuing Peter after he fails to walk on water, a scene from the section of Matthew 14 the sermon is preached on. A dark ship is in the background. — Jesus and Peter on the Water by Gustave Brion, 1863. Now hangs in the Museum of Art, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Did you know that the next Rugby World Cup kicks off in less than four weeks’ time? When I was in my early teens, I briefly entertained thoughts of playing in a Rugby World Cup someday. I would be open-side flanker for Ireland, and in the final, I would burrow through the opposition pack using my low centre of gravity, and score the winning try, under the posts, as the dying seconds ticked away against England (of course against England).

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything goes the phrase. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. If God wanted me to play in the pack in international rugby, he may have made me bigger than five-foot-five. And given me better hand-eye co-ordination. God, presumably had plans for me that were different than having me put England to the sword in a Rugby World Cup final, although hopefully He has those plans for someone else in a green jersey.

We all have different gifts – and Peter’s gifts didn’t include walking on water, any more than my gifts included being able to play international rugby. I gave you that intro because the story of Peter trying, and failing to walk on water, is one of the most annoyingly misread passages of Scripture.

So let’s work our way through the story to look for things that are often missed.

The first thing to ask is when this took place—that is immediately after the feeding of the five thousand. So, before this morning’s reading starts, Jesus had sailed off on his own to a deserted place, but the crowds followed Him, like fans chasing a superstar. Although Jesus clearly needed some space, He spent all day healing members of this crowd, then feeding them miraculously. This is the last sentence in Matthew’s Gospel before this morning’s reading starts—“those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Today’s Gospel begins, “Immediately, he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while immediately he dismissed the crowds.” Then Jesus goes up the mountain and spends all night there, then early in the morning, presumably refreshed, He walks out into the lake to meet the disciples – walking on the water – as their boat has drifted away from the shore overnight. When the disciples see Jesus, given that they, not unreasonably, don’t believe people can walk on water, they think He’s a ghost. And Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

So, Peter puts Jesus to the test. Peter demands that Jesus gives him the power to do what humans aren’t designed to do, all because he doesn’t really trust Jesus. And that is what this is what this story is all about.

I often hear it presented as if Peter’s problem was that he didn’t have enough faith, and if he did, he would have been water-skiing on his bare feet. Sometimes, the preacher then uses it in quite a manipulative way to harangue the congregation for not having enough faith themselves, saying that if they did, they would work miracles too. But if humans were meant to walk on water, God would have given us flippers.

Wresting With Fragments: Sermon Preached on 6th August 2023 (9th Sunday After Trinity)

7 August 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Genesis 32.22-31; Matthew 14.13-21

“And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”

The vision of God whom Jacob encounters by the ford at Jabbok is different from the one depicted in some other Old Testament writings, where it is impossible to see the face of God and live; here, Jacob smells God’s breath and lays hands on His sweaty body.

An image of Margot Robbie playing Barbie is crudely superimposed on Gustav Doré's 1854 painting, Jacob Wrestles with the Angel. — Barbie meets Wrestling Jacob, courtesy of Gustav Doré’s 1854 painting.

Wrestling with God is an experience familiar to most of us. One thing that jumps out at us from this story is that God doesn’t mind having a good wrestle with Jacob – in fact, it is God who seeks Jacob out and begins the bout with him. God is not some sort of divine Kim Jong-Un; we aren’t called to live in terror of some cosmic tyrant who will punish us in fury if we ask difficult questions. Instead we are called to be God’s friends – deeply beloved friends. And friends are allowed to wrestle with one another, to challenge one another with their different perspectives. Like Jacob, we are called to smell God’s breath and lay hands on His body, to wrestle with Him being honest about what we think and feel, about Him and the world.

God doesn’t demand that Jacob submit and acknowledge defeat. God has no need to end this bout by dominating Jacob to prove His superiority. Nor does Jacob run away, as presumably he could have done—but instead remains engaged in an exhausting contest right through the night. What God asks of us is not fearful obedience; nor even a childlike dependency; but instead the sort of deep and loving friendship that can cope with a healthy degree of struggle. Our strongest human friendships are ones that can survive wrestling with one another, indeed our deepest friendships are often those that actively thrive on difference and debate. God should be our most deeply loved friend of all, with whom we can wrestle as we change and grow throughout our lives.

All of our lives contain enough experiences of day-to-day suffering, whether our own or that of others we encounter, to make any sane person wrestle with the gap between a world created by a God of love and goodness, and the suffering and pain that we all suffer and witness afflicting our loved ones. As St Theresa of Avila once prayed, “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” That’s before we start thinking about the state of the world, or the unresolvable tragedy of the human condition.