Month: December 2024

True Light and Deep Darkness: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2024 (Midnight Mass)

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The image captures a breathtaking night sky filled with countless stars, with the Milky Way galaxy prominently visible, stretching diagonally from the top right to the bottom left. The sky is a deep, rich blue, contrasting with the bright, sparkling stars. A faint, white streak of a shooting star or meteor is visible near the top right, adding a dynamic element to the scene. In the foreground, on the left side, stands a large, rugged boulder. This boulder has a rough texture, with visible cracks and crevices, and appears to be part of a natural landscape. The ground around the boulder is covered in grass, which appears slightly illuminated, possibly by moonlight or a distant light source. In the background, there are a few trees, their dark silhouettes adding depth and framing the scene. The trees are spaced out, suggesting an open field or meadow. The overall composition of the image evokes a sense of tranquility and the vastness of the universe, with the ancient rock contrasting against the eternal expanse of the cosmos.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“…the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”         

The image captures a breathtaking night sky filled with countless stars, with the Milky Way galaxy prominently visible, stretching diagonally from the top right to the bottom left. The sky is a deep, rich blue, contrasting with the bright, sparkling stars. A faint, white streak of a shooting star or meteor is visible near the top right, adding a dynamic element to the scene. In the foreground, on the left side, stands a large, rugged boulder. This boulder has a rough texture, with visible cracks and crevices, and appears to be part of a natural landscape. The ground around the boulder is covered in grass, which appears slightly illuminated, possibly by moonlight or a distant light source. In the background, there are a few trees, their dark silhouettes adding depth and framing the scene. The trees are spaced out, suggesting an open field or meadow. The overall composition of the image evokes a sense of tranquility and the vastness of the universe, with the ancient rock contrasting against the eternal expanse of the cosmos.
The dark skies of Wiltshire,13 August 2024 © Gerry Lynch

It’s a pity that it’s so cloudy tonight, because the night sky is magnificent at present, especially around midnight. The winter stars, held together by Orion and Sirius are all rising in the south-east about this time of night, with the brilliant white of Jupiter and jaunty red of Mars making a cameo appearance for this winter only.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Devizes four years ago was how dark the skies are in this part of Wiltshire, especially as one looks south towards Salisbury Plain, where there is very little artificial light to ruin the view.

A sad reality of the present is that only a small minority of people in the world now ever see the night stars in all their glory. Most people now live in cities, where thousands of streetlights waste much of their energy by leaking upwards, doing no good to anyone below but ruining the night sky.

The human race now has so much power that the light we waste is enough to obliterate the glories of nature.

The light that really dominates our lives in the 21st Century, however, is that of flickering screens, the sickly blue glow that comes from our phones, tablets, and televisions, which impacts our system so profoundly that it even disturbs our sleep. Beyond that, these screens make us agitated about things that we can do little about and could probably quite easily ignore. The programmes on our TVs and apps on our phones are also intentionally designed to seize our attention, to distract us from anything that might encourage us to tune away from the channel, or close the app.

By possessing our attention these screens crowd out the space we might have to think, or just to allow our minds to slow down. I am as guilty of being distracted by all this as anyone; I am constantly flipping between tabs as I try to write my sermons.

None of this technology ever seems to make us better. We live in a society surrounded by all sorts of light we have generated ourselves. But our souls are as dark as they ever have been. In fact all this artificial light just seems to make that spiritual darkness more visible. We parade our anger and intolerance on social media apps and radio phone in shows.

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Duty: Sermon Preached on 22nd December 2024 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Hebrews 10. 5-10; Luke 1. 39-45

“See, God, I have come to do your will…”

The painting depicts an intimate scene of two women in a dimly lit room. The woman on the right, dressed in a blue garment with a white scarf, stands with her hands raised in a gesture that could suggest surprise or conversation. She faces another woman on the left, who is partially obscured by shadow and an archway, wearing a dark cloak and holding something in her hand. The table between them is set with a bowl of oranges, bread, and a small cup, suggesting a domestic setting. The interplay of light and shadow creates a warm, almost ethereal atmosphere, highlighting the emotional connection between the figures. The overall mood is one of quiet interaction, perhaps of sharing or contemplation.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Visitation (1910), hangs in the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.

I never expect a bumper congregation on the Sunday before Christmas [it was a pleasant surprise to have an above-average congregation at both services I took!]. I always presume it will be composed largely of people who see going to church every Sunday as their duty. That’s OK, because I see going to church every Sunday as my duty too, and I did so long before I was ordained.

Duty is a very unfashionable idea, but it’s hard to see how any society can function without it. In a culture where people have a strong sense of duty, we are more likely to know how things will work and that they’ll work at all. We will be clearer on our own responsibilities and clearer about where to expect the assistance of others. Societies where people have a strong sense of duty tend to have higher levels of trust and stronger social bonds—and they have all the benefits that flow from these things.

In times of crisis, we all depend on people doing their duty even at great personal risk. We will all remember the situation we faced in March 2020, when we depended on doctors and nurses doing their duty even though we knew little about Covid and we also knew there was a great shortage of personal protective equipment. At the other end of Europe, Ukraine’s survival as a nation depends on people doing their duty, in terrible danger and in horrible mid-winter weather, in the trenches that run the length of 700-mile front line.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have considered it their duty to gather to worship together on the first day of the week, Sunday, because it was the day of Christ’s Resurrection. They often did so in the face of challenges much greater than needing an extra morning to finish the Christmas shopping. Even now, this very Sunday, in places like North Korea and Iran, Christians will gather to worship Jesus Christ at the risk of their liberty.

If we, with all our freedoms, attend church every Sunday and follow the Church’s year—even on the odd Sundays when attendance tends to be low—we don’t just fulfil a duty that’s relatively easy for most of us, but we follow church’s year in its fullness, giving us a richer picture of our Faith.

What makes the Fourth Sunday in Advent interesting is that there is perhaps no other point in the year when the Church’s rhythm is so out of kilter with that of wider society. Most people assume that Christmas really started ages ago—how many weeks ago did you have your first mince pie?—with a lot of people finishing work last Friday, even the Christmas party season is starting to wind down. There is only the final blow-out on Wednesday to look forward to and that’s Christmas for another year.

But in Church, Christmas hasn’t even started yet. We are still in the season of Advent, the great season of waiting; in Advent the Church’s worship takes place in the key that forms so much of our lives—waiting with longing for God to break into a troubled world and our often troubled lives. We wait still for God to make His presence felt in all its fullness even as the rest of the world assumes the party has long started, because we know that God is often at work precisely in the opposite direction to where people are looking, in ways that will surprise everyone when they eventually come to light, through people the world considers of little account.

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You Brood of Vipers!: Sermon Preached on 15th December 2024 (Third Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 4. 4-7; Luke 3. 7-18

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

A scantily dressed man with a translucent shine around his head raises his right hand in the air as a group of women, men, and children gather round him with grim, sometimes excited, expressions of their faces.
Saint John the Baptist Preaching by Luca Giordano (1695). Hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Are you a viper? Have you, in the course of this year, exhibited any snake-like characteristics? You don’t have to answer that question out loud. But if the answer is yes, then you’re in the right place: because you need to repent, and church should be a place of repentance.

There is some contrast, isn’t there, between our two readings this morning. The crowds flock out through the Jerusalem Desert to be baptised by St John the Baptist, and he does the exact opposite of what a good PR man would tell someone to do today if they found themselves an accidental celebrity. The smart thing to do if you want to maximise your return on your fifteen minutes of fame is to make your biggest fans feel valued and loved in return for their loyalty—not to call them a den of snakes, and warn them that, “Even now, the axe is lying at the root of the trees”.

St Paul, in contrast, tells those reading his letter in the far off city of Philippi, “Do not worry about anything” for, “The Lord is near.” Rejoice therefore, he tells them, be full of peace and open gentleness.

Let me tease out this contrast between our two letters by repeating the question I started with: are you a viper?

If so, it’s time to repent.

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Requiem for a Dream

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Also posted at Slugger O’Toole

European flag carpet, Gift from the Republic of Azerbaijan. World Forum for Democracy 2016, Strasbourg, France. © Northern Ireland Foundation

Today, the Netherlands reinstituted border checks with Germany and Belgium. The new policy, which will initially run for six months, aims “to combat migration and human-trafficking”. According to the EU, fourteen of the twenty-nine members of the Schengen passport-free travel area currently have some form of “temporary” border control; of these all but Malta’s relating to a major international conference feel at least semi-permanent, with Russian sabotage efforts and “risk of violent actions against Israeli citizens” cited by some countries along with irregular migration and organised crime.

This hits me particularly hard because of the ten summers in a row between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s I travelled by buses and ferries from Northern Ireland to Germany – in the early years to West Germany – via Belgium and the Netherlands to spend the summer with a German family. I remember the infrastructure on the Dutch-German border being dismantled in the early 1990s; most traffic was waved through before that, although a differently coloured passport could occasionally attract attention from a bored border guard. But on the Antwerp to Eindhoven motorway, even in the 1980s, I can only ever remember a few trucks being parked up in service areas waiting for a customs inspection. Otherwise there was nobody around to check passports and not even a little booth to house them. I had to Google when was the last time private citizens last faced checks on the Dutch-Belgian border; it turns out to be 1947!

Those of us who have believed in the vision of a united Europe and saw it start to blossom in our lifetimes are watching our dream dying. There are plenty of shrilly self-deluding voices screaming that it has been betrayed by populists and jingoists and paid shills for Putin. The harsh reality, however, is that it is dying because it hasn’t survived contact with reality; and more specifically, it hasn’t survived contact with Europe’s reality of the 2020s being very different from what anyone imagined in 1992, let alone 1947.

We could summarise the history of the European Union over the last 35 years in a rock lyric: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the Moon.”

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The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)

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A brightly coloured, abstract, plan-like painting of some houses with their many interior rooms visible and onion dome roofs.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13; Luke 21. 25-36

“…when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”

Happy New Year!

I haven’t got the calendar wrong by a month. The Church’s year starts now, on Advent Sunday. From now until Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday, we will journey through the great themes of the Christian story. Advent is a season of waiting, and so we start our journey in the waiting room. Advent is a season of humanity waiting through trials and exiles; of the disappointment of trying and failing that is so much a part of all our lives. It is a time which remembers how much of our lives are taken up with waiting, and also how much of the lives of nations and civilisations take place in periods when people see no obvious hope of things getting better on their own, and so wait for God to break into world.

A tempera on wood painting, originally an altar piece, of Christ teaching his apostles in the last days of His earthly life.
Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles, Duccio (1308-11) from Duccio’s Maestà; in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena.

God will indeed break into the world at Christmas, as a tiny baby. Then we will journey with that little baby as He becomes a man, go into the wilderness with Him during Lent, walk through death to resurrection and eternal life with Him during Holy Week, and then to the birth of the Church at Pentecost. After that comes the long season of Ordinary Time, the celebration of Christian life in the everyday, which starts as the summer begins and ends… well it ended yesterday. Today, the cycle repeats, Advent starts again, and we wait with longing for God to break into the world.

A new year for the Church also means a change to our Bible readings on Sundays. Our Sunday readings take us through a different Gospel on each year of a three year cycle – Matthew one year, Mark the next, and then Luke. Readings from John are scattered through all three of the years, especially around major festivals. This year, through to November 2025, most of our readings will come from Luke’s Gospel. There is much to be said about Luke’s unique understanding of Jesus’ life, but for the moment, let me just draw one point out: Luke is a Gospel of journeys

Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a lot of the same material, sometimes being word-for-word the same, but tell the same story from slightly different angles—John is really quite different. That’s why together Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, which sounds like a very difficult term, but synoptic just means seeing with the same eye. All three of them have Jesus’ ministry starting in Galilee, followed by a journey to Jerusalem, which leads to the final crisis of Holy Week. In Matthew and Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is a short interlude relatively late in the story. One thing that makes Luke distinct, however, it that this journey takes up almost half the length of the entire Gospel. That’s one of a number of ways that Luke presents Jesus’ life and our own as a grand journey: in Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, the whole world is on the move as a result of a great census called by the Roman Emperor; and the first witnesses to the Resurrection are two men on a journey to Emmaus.

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