May 2025 - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

The Feast of Waiting Patiently: (Ascension Thursday, 29th May 2025)

30 May 202529 May 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 1. 1-11; Luke 24. 44-53

“While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”

A surreal painting depicts a nude human figure floating inside a transparent sphere, with arms and legs outstretched. The figure hovers above a glowing, honeycomb-like surface radiating yellow light. In the background, a dramatic, fiery red and black sky contrasts with a serene blue and white scene at the top, where a partially visible figure in white appears to be looking down. The overall composition evokes a sense of cosmic or spiritual transcendence. — The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali (1958). In a private collection.

Poor old Jesus. Even after all that the apostles had seen and experienced, even after all that happened and didn’t happen in Jerusalem, even after the encounters when He appeared to them on the lake and stood among them even though the doors were locked, the apostles really didn’t know what He was about.

“Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom” they ask Him. They’re still expecting that at some point, probably very soon, Jesus is going to seize power and put them, of course into top jobs. They still want Jesus’ to give them a kingdom that is of this world. Instead Jesus’ kingdom is something that can only be shared in in its fullness in a state that is higher than the one in which we live, when we are in the nearer presence of the Father. It is a state to which it seems that even Christ Himself must ascend to participate in fully, and to do so must withdraw from them. This kingdom is much greater than any state we or the apostles could imagine for ourselves on this Earth. For most of us, in this life, we can only detect little flashes of this kingdom for brief and wondrous moments.

Christ, truly God as well as truly human, knows what this kingdom really is, and how much greater it is than the kingdoms of the world. So, you can almost hear the exasperation when He answers the apostles’ question, “It is not for you to know.” Authority over everything belongs to the Father. The apostles wish to seize that authority, to rule over the Earth, and they think they’ll be much better than the world’s existing rulers and not corrupt or cruel or incompetent. No, not them! God knows what is actually best for them, however. The job of the apostles at this point is something very different—to wait for the Holy Spirit; to wait for God who is love to flow and blow and make His move.

Life often seems to be a waiting game – waiting for the train, waiting for exam results, or medical results, waiting for the money to clear into your account or, worst of all, for the contracts to be exchanged. The worst waiting comes when you don’t exactly know what you’re waiting for, when it feels like you’re going nowhere and being left behind. We can see why the apostles are getting a little impatient to find out what they’re supposed to do next.

Happy to See Me Dead?: (Sixth Sunday of Easter: 25th May 2025)

30 May 202525 May 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 16. 9-15; John 14. 23-29

“I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Will you be happy when I die?

A terracotta bust of a figure with one arm raised, hand resting on the head, and long black hair flowing down the back. The sculpture has a weathered, earthy texture and is set against a black background. — Mourner, suspected to represent Isis mourning Osiris. 18th dynasty, 1550–1295 BC. Now in the Louvre, Paris.

Often when I take a funeral, people tell me they want it to be a celebration. But I always reply that I hope that people won’t be too happy at my funeral.

The summer I finished university, twenty-five years ago, I went on a post-graduation trip to Turkey and Georgia – Georgia the country in the Caucasus, not the American state. One of my abiding memories of that trip is being invited to a wake, which in Georgia involves a full day of banqueting—and drinking. As the coffin was carried off from the house, Chopin’s Funeral March was played on old record player as a black and white portrait photograph of the deceased in younger days, resplendent in his Red Army dress uniform, was processed in front of the coffin. Most incredibly, professional mourners, all of them older women dressed in black, wailed at the top of their voices and pulled clumps of hair from their heads.

I don’t think I want people to go that far at my funeral, but I hope they’ll be at least a little bit sad that I’m gone.

According to this morning’s Gospel reading, that might make me a bad Christian. The reading comes from a speech Jesus made to his closest followers on the night before He died, and He uses a strange phrase “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father”.

Lizards for Lunch! (Fifth Sunday of Easter: 18th May 2025)

13 June 202518 May 2025 by Gerry Lynch

A large iguana with a speckled grey and green body and prominent dorsal spines rests on a rock in a natural setting. The background features green foliage, a cactus with spines, and a blurred blue sky, suggesting a tropical or desert environment.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Acts 11. 1-18; John 13. 31-35

“But I said, ‘Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.’”

Do you like eating lizards? Will you go home from church and enjoy tucking into an iguana steak for your Sunday lunch? Or will you perhaps, to accompany a salad in this warm weather, rustle up a quick chameleon quiche?

A small lizard with a brown and green body, featuring an orange throat patch, is perched on a white stone surface in sunlight. The lizard casts a shadow, and the background is blurred, showing earthy tones of soil or rocks. — Your Lunch? © Gerry Lynch, 30 November 2006, Curaçao.

I’m guessing that most of you aren’t actually that into lizard meat. Therefore if I told you that not eating lizards was an essential criterion of getting into heaven, you wouldn’t exactly lose sleep about it.

That’s one of the problems with rules. It’s easy to keep rules that we would never in any circumstances want to break. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about rules we have no intentions of breaking being enforced on others, especially people we don’t like—even as we try to wriggle out of the rules we don’t enjoy following ourselves.

Of course we need rules. How many of us, if we’re being honest, would pay our taxes on full and on time every year if we didn’t know that HMRC would fine us otherwise? How many more deaths were there on the road when drink driving laws were laxer and less rigidly enforced?

But no set of rules can match the complexity of real life. After every major sporting event, we see fans of one team complaining about bad refereeing decisions that everyone else thinks were fair. I believe Man City fans were upset at the referee after they lost the FA Cup Final yesterday. A football match is a lot simpler than life. Every set of rules can be interpreted in different ways. They all also contain plenty of loopholes. We are all inclined to interpret the rules to suit ourselves, and see what we want to see. In that light, it should be no surprise that we all know people who are very firm about sticking to the rules and making sure other people do too, but are also unkind and selfish, perhaps even cruel.

OK, Sheeple! (Fourth Sunday of Easter: 11th May 2025)

31 May 202511 May 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Acts 9. 36-43; John 10. 22-30

“My sheep hear my voice.”

“OK, sheeple!” I don’t know how many of you have heard of the term “sheeple”. If you spend too much time on the internet, you might have! It is used in conspiracy theory circles – the sort of people who think the moon landings were faked and that Covid was invented so Bill Gates could implant us all with microchips under the cover of vaccines. In the conspiracy theorist part of society, the rest of the population is ridiculed as “sheeple” whose acceptance of received wisdom about the world is read as a sign of conformity and lack of independent thinking.

A painting depicts a flock of sheep and lambs grazing on a grassy hill near a stormy coastline. The sky is cloudy, and waves crash against the shore. In the background, a shepherd in a blue cloak stands near a cliff, with distant hills visible. The scene is lush with green grass and scattered bushes. — Coastal Flock by August Friedrich Schenk (1865)

While we shouldn’t lose too much sleep about what conspiracy theorists call us, calling someone a sheep isn’t normally meant a compliment. A sheep blindly follows their leader, is afraid to take a stand, lacks critical thinking, and probably isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

Everything in our culture encourages to think of ourselves as being the opposite of sheep. We’re encouraged to think of ourselves as independent minded free spirits, who become the people we dream ourselves to be through the power of self-will. We don’t want to be sheep, and we don’t even particularly want to be shepherds. We romanticise the Lone Ranger sort of figure, the iconoclastic anti-hero who loves to do it all “my way” and refuses to let convention prevent them doing good or having a good time. The strange thing is that most people who think of themselves as self-willed free thinkers are desperately conformist, but that’s another story for another time.

In that view of the world, of course, there’s nothing positive to be said about being one of the sheep. But let’s be fair to our fluffy friends, they have their positive side, and not just as a delicious Sunday lunch. Sheep are part of a community, and while our individualism has brought us many blessings, its dark side has been that the bonds of our communities have become much weaker. Staying part of a coherent community doesn’t require dull conformism, but does need sensitivity to the needs of others, adaptability, and mutual trust.

We’re Suspicious of a St Peter—(Third Sunday of Easter: 4th May 2025)

17 May 20254 May 2025 by Gerry Lynch

A view across the Sea of Galilee from Magdala/Migdal towards the Golan Heights in afternoon sun.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 9. 1-7; John 21. 1-19

“Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’”

Angelos Akotantos, Icon of The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul (mid-15th Century). In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

We all love a St Paul—but the St Peters of this world are often treated with profound suspicion. Why? Well, we all love finding out we’re right, and what could be better proof of that than someone who had been one of our bitterest enemies coming over to our side. It’s harder to embrace those who were always in agreement with us, but failed to put their principles into action for one reason to another. We all love a new friend; it can be harder to forgive an old friend who has let us down. The former is like St Paul, someone who once held wrong ideas, which have now changed for the better. The person who has let the side down, like St Peter, on the other hand, is always suspected of weakness of character. They may have failed in circumstances anyone could understand, you might like them a lot, but when the going gets tough, can you really trust them? And here’s the oddest thing—after incidents where we’ve let others down, we are often ourselves our harshest critics, and we can be the very ones who trust ourselves least.

I mention that last point for this reason—although it isn’t mentioned directly in today’s Gospel reading, I hope you remember how many times Peter denied Jesus on the night of His arrest? Three times! So, in this reading while Peter may be hurt at Jesus’ asking Him three times if he really loves Him, this balances out Peter’s three denials, which had taken place just a few weeks before. And each time Peter affirms that he loves Christ, Christ shows He trusts Peter again, by trusting him with the most important job of all: to tend and to feed the lambs and the sheep of Jesus’ flock. The story of the risen Christ appearing to the disciples on the Sea of Galilee is reported only in St John’s Gospel, the Gospel where Jesus declares Himself to be the Good Shepherd. So Jesus telling Peter that he is to feed the lambs and the sheep has profound symbolic significance here—not only is Jesus’ forgiving Peter but commissioning him to a role in Christ’s own mould.

Don’t think you’re not pious enough or have made too many mistakes or are too washed up to serve God. Peter was good enough for God, even after His spectacular, public, failure. You are good enough for God and He is undoubtedly calling you to do things for Him in the next part of your life. The question is to discern what it is.