Month: February 2024

Losing Your Life: Sermon Preached on 25th February 2024 (Second Sunday in Lent)

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Galilee countryside viewed from Mount Tabor - gnarled hills with many water-cut ridges and some deep, but lush, valleys.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 4. 13-21; Mark 8. 31-38

“Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Do you want to have a happy, successful, prosperous life? I certainly do. I don’t want to suffer, or be picked on, still less persecuted, and I certainly don’t want to lose my life—at least not until I’ve had my fair share of the good times.

Ilya Repin's brightly coloured "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" of 1860, with Jesus in gold next to a disfigured, red and black Devil, in front of a dark blue background.
Get Thee Behind Me Satan, by Ilya Repin, ca. 1860. Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Rostov-on-Don.

Poor Peter always gets a hard time for provoking Jesus into saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” But he’s only reacting like any of us would do if were told by our best pal that we would have to suffer on their behalf. In fact, if we saw someone we knew being spoken to by their best friend in the way Jesus spoke to Peter, we’d probably tell them to get a new best friend—even more if we heard them being told something as weird as “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake…will save it.”

Christianity, my brothers and sisters, is a very, very, weird religion. We often miss that weirdness, because Christianity was the framework through which nearly everyone in this country viewed the world for more than fifty generations—an unimaginable stretch of time. Perhaps Christianity was preached more than it was practiced, but it guided people in how they should behave even if they didn’t always live up to it. Now that it is in retreat, the strangeness of Christianity is starting to become visible again.

We forget how much Christianity, as it rose, upended what had been the established norms of right and wrong, and in a good way. The Wiltshire-based historian of the ancient world, Tom Holland, came back to the Faith after having abandoned it as a young man once he understood how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire, which were all about power and authority, often exerted with great cruelty. At the heart of the Christian story is Jesus Christ being executed in a particularly cruel way, despite having broken no laws, for reasons for political convenience. The Romans never missed an opportunity to remind the public of just how bloody and brutal they could be if they felt it necessary. This was a society that glorified cruelty as something that successful and honourable men did, not only out of necessity, but also for pleasure. Might is right and the devil take the hindmost—this was this value system that Christianity upended

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Choose Your Story: Sermon Preached on 18th February 2024 (First Sunday in Lent)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

1 Peter 3. 18-22; Mark 1. 9-15

 “repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

We see all sorts of patterns in the universe that repeat on vastly different scales. Most famously the swirl of water down the bathplug has the same pattern as that of the clouds in a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic to batter us – like last night’s – and that of the impossibly slow swirl of stars in the arms of a distant spiral galaxy.

Snowdrops, in focus, in front of a church, which is quite out of focus, with raindrops also visible on the lens. The sky is grey. There is a St George's flag flying from the church tower.
Snowdrops and raindrops six Februarys ago at Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. © Gerry Lynch

The evidence of order in the universe is everywhere. At this time of year, we are particularly aware of the natural world following the pattern of the seasons. The flowers have arrived early in this exceptionally mild winter – we have not only the snowdrops but the violets and daffodils and even some of the blossoms. In very different climates, something similar happens. I have been on the South African/Namibian border in August, when the spring rain comes and briefly turns that parched landscape into a riot of multi-coloured daisies. There as here, what we see is new life following death.

In today’s readings, we see this pattern of new life following death, as part of an ordered universe. Jesus, God made human, does not start His earthly ministry until he has been baptised by John the Baptist. John was a great man but still a human being, so this Gospel reading is saying something very powerful—God puts Himself under human authority here, and respects John’s own distinct calling.

Baptism is rich in symbolism—a symbolic drowning before a rising to new life, a drowning of hate and selfishness and contempt and all the sins that keep us from loving God and our neighbours as we should. Our Epistle reading, from St Peter, looks back to the story of Noah’s Ark as a something that pointed towardsbaptism—the flood marks the close on an old and wicked order, a terrible but necessary death so that new life could begin.

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Is Lent What You Do?: Sermon Preached on 14th February 2024 (Ash Wednesday)

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A cartoon version of an ash cross such as is put on people's heads on Ash Wednesday.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10; John 8. 1-11

When I was at university, a big Catholic charity in Ireland had a major Lent advertising campaign to raise funds for its work in developing countries. The campaign slogan was very clever: not only does it stick in my head a quarter of a century later, but I remember how, back at the time, it struck a chord with one of my associates in student politics. This friend was and still is what you might call a sympathetic atheist—supportive of the Church as a channel for good works, especially looking after the poor; sometimes entranced by the beauty of Church music and architecture; but fundamentally convinced that there was and could be no such being as God. But the slogan stuck in his head—one evening, in the pub, when I refused a pint because I had given up drink for Lent, recited this charity’s slogan to me. It was: “Lent is what you do.”

A cartoon version of an ash cross such as is put on people's heads on Ash Wednesday.

Of course, it was nice that my friend missed drinking beer with me, but I wasn’t convinced by the idea that: “Lent is what you do.” My instinct was that Lent was indeed mainly about giving things up and that this was a good thing. Over the years since, my instincts then on this score have hardened into a firm conviction.

Of course, I understand the logic behind “Lent is what you do”, and why many of you will be surprised that I don’t like it. With the idea that Lent is about giving things up so firmly rooted in people’s heads, the slogan presents the exact opposite message. Not only was this memorable for the charity, but it also presents an image of Christianity that is positive and wants to get things done for people, rather than always saying no and wanting to forbid things.

So why do I think Lent should be primarily about giving things up? Well, while good works are indeed good, we lose much of the richness of the Christian faith if we reduce it to a religion of good works.

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The Transfiguration of Technology: Sermon Preached on 11th February 2024 (Sunday Before Lent)

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Carol Beer from Little Britain, and her computer which always says no.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and Holy Cross, Seend

2 Corinthians 4. 3-6; Mark 9. 2-9

“He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Carol Beer from Little Britain, and her computer which always says no.
Computer says… yes…?

We seem to be hardwired to giving more credibility to information that comes from a screen than things we hear in-person from other people, or even things we see directly with our own eyes. Last month, after falling for a so-called Deep Fake, an employee of a large multinational firm in Hong Kong transferred twenty million pounds to fraudsters. Police in the territory think that the criminals faked an entire video conference, with perhaps fifteen computer-simulated participants, using Artificial Intelligence to add made-up dialogue to real recordings. Because the people in the video conference looked and sounded just like people the victim knew from the real world, she fell for it. Would she have fallen for a similar con attempted in the flesh by a troupe of actors?

And so to our first reading, from St Paul, writing another of his letters to those perpetually troublesome Corinthians. “The god of this world”, he warns them, “has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel.” The “god of this world” is, fairly obviously, a reference to the Devil. But the quote sets off all sorts of reflections about what the actual god or gods of today’s society are. We seem particularly prone to worshipping our own supposed cleverness, and the products of it. Above all, technology seems to be the Zeus or Jupiter of our 21st Century gods, the solver of problems and the bringer of enlightenment. That’s why we are at risk of falling for scams delivered via a screen, in a way we never would for a real-life cold caller at the door.

I’m hardly opposed to technology. I make quite heavy use of social media and the Internet and all sorts of gizmos and software for my photography. Technology is a morally neutral thing, neither good nor evil – at the end of the day, a computer is just a fancy tool. Difficulties start when we forget that humans are supposed to use tools and not the other way around. Technology often seems to be our master rather than our tool.

The Church seems besotted with technology as a sort of magic bullet to appeal to young people and reverse Church decline. In particular, during the pandemic, we tried to convince ourselves that Zoom services were the future of the Church rather than an emergency response to an unprecedented situation. By the end of all those lockdowns, however, I think we all knew that being on a videoconference call with people was emphatically not the same as being in a room or a Church with them. Electronic presence is not the same as physical presence; and, as already noted, experiencing things through a screen can make it harder, not easier, to discern the truth.

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Christianity is Strange: Sermon Preached on 4th February 2024 (Second Sunday Before Lent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Colossians 1. 15-20; John 1. 1-14

“through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things … by making peace through the blood of his cross”

The cover of Tom Holland's book on the history Christianity and the Western mindset, 'Dominion'.
Confessions of a sort-of convert—Tom Holland’s ‘Dominion’ details how Christianity changed the mindset of Westerners from Graeco-Roman conceptions of power and violence.

I don’t know if you have yet heard me say in a sermon that Christianity is a very weird religion. If you haven’t, don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of chances over the years to come. In this country, a Christian understanding of the world was simply the default position of almost everyone for well over a thousand years, and that has obscured the sheer strangeness of our faith to us. The retreat from Christian faith over the last two generations has started to make that strangeness apparent again. Interestingly, I think because we want to be as open to newcomers and explorers as we can, we have tried to underplay or hide that strangeness, for fear of scaring them off. But actually, I think it’s precisely the weirdness that makes Christianity a worthwhile alternative to a secular order – in business and politics and entertainment and so much else – that seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Christianity has always been strange. The Wiltshire-based historian, Tom Holland, came back to the Faith after having abandoned it once he realised how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire, which were all about power and authority, often exerted with great cruelty. This was the world in which this morning’s Bible readings were written.

At the centre of this strangeness is the person of Jesus Christ. Who was Jesus Christ and why did He matter so much?  Our readings both show 1st Century Christians trying to grapple with these questions.

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