Month: July 2025

Prayer, Persistence, and Peace: Sermon Preached on 27th July 2025 (Sixth Sunday After Trinity)

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

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 11. 1-13

“…everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds…” `

A painting depicting a central figure in a white robe standing on a hill with arms raised, addressing a group of people seated around him. The background features a cityscape with ancient buildings and a golden sky, suggesting a sunset or sunrise. The people, dressed in robes and headscarves, appear to be listening attentively, with some raising their hands. The scene is set on a grassy hill with a distant view of mountains and a walled city.
James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always enjoy Matthew Syed’s programme on Radio 4 called Sideways, which often gives quirky, unusual, perspectives on quirky, interesting issues. It is currently running a three-part mini-series on ‘Chasing Peace’. Exploring different approaches to peace-making and peace-building, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions about human nature, and whether we are hard-wired for war.

I listened to the dedicated peacemakers he interviewed, some of whom had taken enormous risks with their personal safety in very dangerous environments to end conflicts, and I was full of admiration. Some interviewees also said things like that to prevent war we needed to train people to be more emotionally literate, I found myself muttering, “Good luck with that!”

Over this last decade or so, many of the things we’d previously taken for granted about the direction of humanity have broken down, and the idea of progress which animated us for so long has stalled. We seem a long way, for example, from the days when people really believed that the United Nations might ultimately bring an end to war.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from these years of gathering crisis is that too many of those dreams of progress thought they could change human nature, or flew entirely in the face of it. At their worst, especially in the darkest days of the Communist world, it was precisely the possibility of building a perfect society in the future that allowed people to justify to themselves their barbaric behaviour in the present.

Indeed, if we look at the world through the lens of Faith, then we know this world can never be made perfect, and that none of us can ever be all that good for all that long, or otherwise Jesus would not have needed to die on the Cross.

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Would God Wind You Up?: Sermon Preached on 20th July 2025 (Fifth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 10. 38-42

“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.”

A dimly lit painting depicting a solemn scene at a table covered with a white cloth. A central figure, dressed in a white robe, sits and gestures with both hands, illuminated by a warm candlelight from a candelabrum. Two other figures, one standing and offering a plate and another seated, are partially visible in the soft glow. The background features an arched wall and a hanging object, possibly a lamp or decoration, adding to the intimate, historical atmosphere.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905), hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA.

I remember hanging on the living room wall at my Granny Duffy’s house was a picture of the Holy Family. It was in the style of a grainy black and white photograph, and in fact I think it may have been a posed photograph from around the turn of the 20th Century. I can remember it distinctly in my mind and I looked for it on the Internet as I was preparing this sermon, without any luck. In the photo, Jesus and Mary are helping Joseph in his carpentry workshop. They have halos over their heads and they all look very serious.

That’s what we expect Jesus to be like, don’t we? Jesus and all those old saints? Serious, and humourless, and so holy they have halos floating over their heads as they walk down the street, and not like real people at all.

But the snatches we get of the lives of Martha and Mary and Peter and Paul and all the rest of them in the Bible aren’t like those old holy pictures, but real and three dimensional. These are real human beings, with real flaws and gifts and personalities. And one thing pretty much all serious historians agree on, including the ones who are committed atheists, is that Jesus of Nazareth, was an actual flesh and blood human being who really did live in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.

And so to Martha and Mary – this isn’t Mary the mother of Christ, but another woman with the same name. Martha is perhaps a bit of a fusspot. It was she herself who invited Jesus into her home, and there’s no sense that Jesus has asked her to go to a lot of trouble for Him. We all know people who see hosting someone as a test of their skills and dedication. Would Martha really have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs just to take it easy and hang out with Him for a few hours? I doubt it! Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.

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Can We Really Do Likewise?: Sermon Preached on 13th July 2025 (Fourth Sunday After Trinity)

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A vibrant painting depicting a figure with a beard, dressed in a green robe with diamond-patterned shoulders, holding a sleeping or resting man with dark hair. The figure's large, white, wing-like arms or cloak envelop the woman, set against a background of earthy greens and browns, suggesting a protective or comforting scene.

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

Colossians 1. 1-14; Luke 10. 25-37

“Go and do likewise.”

A vibrant painting featuring two figures riding a horse along a path. One figure, dressed in a yellow robe and blue pants, carries another figure on their back, who wears a red headscarf. The background includes swirling, textured landscapes with trees, a river, and a figure standing near a wooden cart, rendered in the distinctive brushstroke style of Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, near Arnhem.

Does the name Olive Cooke mean anything to you? Ten years ago, Olive, who was ninety-two years old, was found dead in the Avon Gorge in Bristol. This generous lady, still tireless in charity work into her nineties, had given so much money to charity that she was constantly plagued by begging letters, receiving up to 3,000 a year. Some of the charities she gave money to passed her details on to other charities, and she eventually became so distressed by the tragic stories they sent her, and her inability to do more to help than the huge amount she was already doing, that she took her own life.

The Good Samaritan is one of the most famous of Jesus’ parables and it still resonates with people even in our post-Christian culture. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, it allows us to thumb our nose at hypocrites. We all hate hypocrites. In particular, it allows non-religious people to thumb their nose at Christians for being hypocrites, with Jesus’ approval (or so it seems). That allows them to keep doing what they want to do, which is to ignore what Jesus actually taught. But the second reason this parable resonates is because, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold, we all know that we do pass by on the other side, far too often. It’s true that we all hate hypocrites; but we also all are hypocrites, at least in some situations.

But hold on, we don’t want to end up like Olive Cooke, driven to despair by our inability to fix everybody’s problems. So let’s ask ourselves if Jesus was doing something more with this story than just telling people off for not always practising what they preach.

For there are different ways of exploring this parable, all of them tell us something interesting. One is to note is that the Samaritans were the traditional enemy of the Jews in Palestine. The Samaritans agree with the Jews about many religious matters, but also disagree with them about some very important things[1]—so they’re the classic example of the enemy similar and familiar enough to be truly hated. Therefore, I’ve often heard sermons on the Good Samaritan that read it as a warning against prejudice generally and religious bigotry in particular. That isn’t wrong. It’s an important part of the message of the parable, but I want us to explore it from a different angle today.

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Things Don’t Always Get Better: Sermon Preached on 6th July 2025 (Third Sunday After Trinity)

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A large crowd of people is gathered on and around a graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall, with the Brandenburg Gate visible in the background. Many individuals are sitting or standing on the wall, some holding a German flag. The scene is lively, with people of various ages and styles, and the sky is clear, suggesting a celebratory or historic moment.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and St Mary’s, Potterne

Galatians 6. 7-16; Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20

“…do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”

We’re all shaped forever by the world of our young adulthood. Some eras leave a particularly profound mark. Those who were young adults during the Second World War were defined by the words “Never Again”. They were the generation who built international institutions to try to build peace between nations, and social safety nets within them to try to prevent the sort of embittering poverty that did so much to pave the road to war in the 1930s.

Two men in suits are shaking hands and embracing on a tarmac in front of an airplane. The man on the left has dark hair and a red tie, while the man on the right has gray hair and a blue tie. In the background, there is a staircase with "Belfast Int" written on it, and a few other individuals are visible. The scene appears to be a formal or diplomatic greeting.
The years when things could only get better? Clinton and Blair in Belfast, 1998.

That generation has mostly passed to its reward. Many of you here, however, were formed by the Swinging Sixties, when the world changed dramatically in just a few years, with a huge expansion of individual freedom and self-expression, and huge changes in the status of women.

Both of these were times when the Church urgently engaged with the task of making the world a better place. After the war it sought, in the name of the Prince of Peace, to help create the means for a permanently peaceful world. In the Sixties, the Church set itself the mission of updating itself, fearing the rapidly changing world might leave it obsolete.

The era that formed me was the 1990s Golden Age that followed the end of the Cold War. It was encapsulated in the title of the song that accompanied Tony Blair’s triumphal march into Downing Street twenty-eight years ago – D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better. By this time, the Church had become very much weaker. Although the Church itself still expected to play a part in helping things get better, few others expected it to. Mine was the generation that devoured the works of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, especially after our youthful Golden Age was brought to an end when two aeroplanes shattered a bright September morning in New York

The optimistic world of my youth is now a long time ago—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of President Mandela; the Play Station and the arrival of the Internet. For those of you who are young adults today, the world that shaped my outlook is something you read about in history books.

Your lives have instead been formed by a lengthy economic and cultural stagnation, by plague, and by failing institutions. Nobody believes anymore that things can only get better. The Church invested so much into trying to make the world a better place, but it may be getting worse anyway and, if it is, there’s probably little we can do about it. Like every generation before us, we are carried on great historical trends that are beyond the human capacity to identify fully, let alone control. It was always a bit naïve to think that these cycles of history would cease. Empires always rise and fall. Golden ages always turn to decadence. After any period of unity comes division. Thus it has ever been.

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What To Do When We Feel Powerless

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A close-up view of a green circuit board with intricate white pathways and numerous small holes, used in electronic devices.

This article appeared in the July 2025 edition of village magazines in Potterne, Worton and Marston, Seend and Bulkington, and Poulshot

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling powerless in the face of a world where power and the will to abuse it seem to be spiralling out of control. I feel powerless in the face of the grim events in Ukraine and the Middle East, where human ingenuity is put to building ever more ingenious ways for people to kill other people.

A close-up view of a green circuit board with intricate white pathways and numerous small holes, used in electronic devices.
Image credit – Pixabay.

I often worry that the fruits of our intellect are outstripping our wisdom to use them well. Why is it that every couple of months, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research pops up in the news to tell us it could wipe out the human race? Most recently, it was Professor Yoshua Bengio from Canada, whose research is cited more often than any other computer scientist in the world, who left Faisal Islam visibly shocked when he told him bluntly on Newsnight that “the worst case scenario” from AI “is human extinction”.

I feel powerless in the face of not only of Artificial Intelligence galloping ahead but also Genetic Modification. I worry about why we feel driven to develop these very powerful technologies quickly, even when we know things as seemingly innocuous as social media and video streaming are driving some people crazy, partly thanks to smartphones that follow us everywhere, constantly buzzing and demanding attention.

Despite these problems, technology is often presented to us uncritically as good of itself. We live at a time when people seek truth in spreadsheets rather than sonnets. Yet human beings are more than rational creatures. We are made not for power, which often brings out the worst in us, but for beauty, truth, goodness, and love.

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The Chickenhawk and the Oddball: Sermon Preached on Sunday 29th June 2025 (Feast of SS Peter and Paul)

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Preached in the Green Gardens, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 12.1-11; Matthew 16.13-19

The image depicts a detailed black-and-white relief sculpture featuring two male figures dressed in flowing robes, each with a halo around their head, indicating their saintly status. The figure on the left holds a large key with intricate designs, while the figure on the right holds a book in one hand and a sword in the other. Above them, a winged angel with a halo holds a crown, symbolizing divine authority or martyrdom. The background includes a textured wall and a tiled floor, adding depth to the composition.
The chickenhawk and the oddball.

Peter and Paul! We know these two names go together, but we tend to forget they were real people. Our image of them is, when we think about them at all, is like the image on the front of your order of service— two-dimensional men from a vanished era with stern faces and beards that would put a Hoxton hipster to shame. If we’re a bit less religious we tend to dismiss them as irrelevant, and if we’re a bit more religious we can turn them into plasterboard saints, beyond critique and therefore not really human at all.

But the Peter and Paul the Bible writes of are very real people, with strong personalities, and some real faults. Both of them could be quite hot headed for starters! Beyond that, they were very different.

Paul could be difficult to deal with. He seems to have been quite socially awkward and a little bit obsessive—maybe, to use the modern phrase, quite far out on the spectrum. Even his best friends found Paul hard to take sometimes. Yet this awkward, annoying, obsessive nature was possibly also why Paul had so much determination, stickability, and raw courage.

Peter was very different. He was a natural leader of men, and a man’s man . It’s easy to imagine the young Peter sitting in a tavern in a port on the Sea of Galilee holding court, surrounded by his hired men. He was no sophisticated thinker, but Peter could be as sharp as a tack—this morning’s Gospel reading shows him being the first person to work out that Jesus was more than just a wandering teacher and healer. But although he liked to talk big and lead from the front, when the chips were down he wasn’t always so good at following through—at least not at first, but we’ll come back to that.

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