Month: May 2024

Love is Our Nature: Sermon Preached on 26th May 2024 (Trinity Sunday)

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A renaissance-style triptych; the central panel represents the Holy Trinity with the Father holding both hands of Christ being crucified, while the Holy Spirit flies out, i.e. proceeds, from them. The side panels show Judas betraying Christ, and John the Baptist in his loincloth of camel hair.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8. 12-17; John 3. 1-17

“When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

When we cry to God the Father, it is the Holy Spirit calling within us, rhyming with our own human spirit, and bearing witness to the fact that as children of God, we are His joint heirs along with Christ. That’s an attempt to paraphrase in more understandable language what St Paul wrote in today’s epistle reading from the Letter to the Romans. We are heirs of God, His legitimate inheritors, jointly with Jesus Christ, and the fact that we instinctively cry to God as our heavenly Father reveals that the Holy Spirit is at work within us.

A modern recreation of a medieval sculpture of the eponymous Holy Trinity, on the south column of the chancel arch at Holy Trinity Micklegate, York.
A modern recreation of a medieval sculpture of the Holy Trinity, at Holy Trinity Micklegate, York. © Gerry Lynch, 1 April 2017.

We often hear the phrase that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. This is not just a fundamental teaching of Christianity, but one that we inherited directly from the Jewish faith where this statement is made in the Genesis creation story during the ‘sixth day’. While Christianity has more in common with Judaism than it does with any other religion, we part company very dramatically in our belief in the Holy Trinity, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So when we say we are made in the image and likeness of God, we don’t mean that we are made in the image and likeness of the Father alone—although certainly in His image. But we’re also made in the image and likeness of the Son, Jesus Christ. That seems to follow logically, as Jesus is God made human. There’s something much more mysterious, however, about the nature of Jesus. Jesus is not just the babe of Bethlehem or the preacher of Galilee, but also the eternal Word who was with God before time began. We human beings are like God, Father and Son, perhaps most obviously in that we are begetters of life, as the Father begat the Son, and were also ourselves begotten by our earthly fathers and mothers.

We are also made in the image and likeness of the Holy Spirit. There are two ideas from the sermon I preached on the Holy Spirit last week for Pentecost that I want to repeat on Trinity Sunday. The first is this: the Holy Spirit is many things, many of them beyond human comprehension, but one certain thing is that the Holy Spirit is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that the Father and the Son each have for the other, love as a person in its own right, flowing not only among the Father and Son but outwards into the Church and the whole universe. The second is this: the Holy Spirit is in many ways alien and difficult to understand; it is unbiddable—as St John records Jesus saying in today’s Gospel, when we are born of the Spirit, the wind blows where it wills and we have not the foggiest idea where it comes from or where it goes. We are made in the image of this Holy Spirit as much as the Father and the Son, and therefore made in the image of love, of this wild, unbiddable, uncontrollable, freely moving being. Love and freedom are at the very heart of what it means to be human, and the points at which our human nature most obviously touches the nature of God.

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Love, Truth and Fire: Sermon Preached on 19th May 2024 (Pentecost)

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An architect's design for the side interior wall of a church, containing many apses, statues, and a gallery.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

Pentecost is the Feast of the Holy Spirit. So, let me talk a little this morning about the nature of the Holy Spirit, because it is one of the truly distinctive things about Christianity. We share our faith in a loving, fatherly creator with Muslims and Jews, and indeed many traditional religions around the world. This seems to be something that human beings grasp quite instinctively.

Greek icon style painting of six saints, five of them with beards, and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Descent of the Holy Spirit (fragment) by Duccio, 1308-11.

The idea of the Son, Jesus Christ, God made human, has some very profound and perhaps intellectually difficult implications, but is something human and therefore not beyond us.

In contrast, there is something fundamentally otherworldly and inhuman about the Holy Spirit. Because there is no obvious human comparator for what the Holy Spirit is, we must attempt to shed some light on its nature by analogy. Here’s the odd thing—we need to remember that this very otherworldly, very inhuman, being is God, and as we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the Holy Spirit in all its strangeness and unbiddability is also something that we are made in the image and likeness of. Deep within us, often beyond the horizon of our senses, is part of our nature that is as uncontrollable and difficult to comprehend as the Holy Spirit.

So with all that in mind, let’s explore some of the things we do know about the Holy Spirit.

Firstly, the Holy Spirit is love, and therefore God is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows mutually between the Father and the Son, Love as a person in its own right. Love, therefore has a character, and a will, all of its own.

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Fame and Truth: Sermon Preached on 12th May 2024 (The Sunday After Ascension)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“…and the lot fell on Matthias.”

The singer Bambie Thug, in heavy makeup, looks at the camera at Eurovision 2024.
Seeking El Dorado? Eurovision 2024, © Arkland, Used under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On the morning after the Eurovision Song Contest, it seems appropriate to reflect that fame and celebrity seems to be the El Dorado of the present age. It isn’t new, of course – even in the 19th Century, artists with a worldwide reputation like the singer Nellie Melba or the pianist-conductor Franz Liszt could often arrive in a new city to crowds of screaming fans, much as the Beatles and the Stones would a century later. The ancient Romans and Persians also had their celebrities. But this ancient human trait seems to have intensified since the turn of this century. Reality TV and talent shows began to crowd out more interesting forms of programme-making, while the Internet facilitated new forms of celebrity entrepreneur, willing to say, do, or sell anything to harvest attention from their own little world of fans.

People can make a good living from this. You’ve probably never heard of Charli d’Amelio. Charli is a social media influencer, someone who’s famous on social media because she’s famous on social media, and therefore attractive to people wanting to advertise and promote brands. Charli has 44 million followers on Instagram and a whopping 154 million followers on TikTok. Her most recent TikTok video, posted on Wednesday, shows Charli and a friend dancing to music while washing their hair with Garnier shampoo.

Compare this with the situation in our epistle reading. The 120 people Peter speaks to seem to comprise all the remaining Christians in the entire world. Even I have more social media followers than this. About twice that number came to church on Easter morning in our little country benefice.

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