Preached at Holy Cross, Seend (Benefice Service)
Hebrews 13. 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14. 1, 7-14
“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid; what can anyone do to me?”
If you’ve ever wondered what a preacher does during the sermon, it’s to try and make sense of the passages of the Bible that are read at that particular church service, and connect them to the world we live in. So here we go.
It was lovely to have such a good congregation in this gem for our Benefice Service. (Holy Cross, Seend in evening twilight, 11 July 2025, © Gerry Lynch.)
Are you worried about the state of the world? Does the news from Ukraine and Gaza make you anxious and depressed about the state of the human race? Does the state of this country worry you? If so, you are certainly not alone!
This is hardly unique to our times too. Some of the Hebrews to whom the first of this morning’s Bible readings was addressed must have been worried. We know that because the letter tells them not to worry!
It was written when the Church was very new, perhaps 30 or 40 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, when the Christians were a tiny and often mistreated group who had much to worry about in their lives. This long letter is full of intricate and beautiful theological and philosophical thinking, but our reading came from a section towards the end, which instead supplied practical instructions about living a good Christian life—one full of love for other Christians, hospitality to strangers, care for those in prison, faithfulness in marriage, and contentment with what one has.
That sort of practical Christianity is a big part of what village Anglicanism should be about.[1] Not showy, not loud – but being a community rooted in hospitality where people care about one another and seek to do good for our neighbours in a very individualistic world.
As well as being concerned for the local community, village Anglicanism is also about being part of something bigger than ourselves. In Holy Cross, we pray using words that will be prayed by hundreds of thousands of Christians this morning in thousands of churches across England. And today millions of Christians of different traditions in dozens of languages around the world will hear the same Bible readings we just heard.
As well as encouraging us to live for others in our community and joining us with Christians around the world, worship in our parish church should do something else. It should direct us to be alert for signs of God at work in the world, especially in beauty—the beauty of human creativity, such as we see in this ancient church, and the beauty of the natural world.
We don’t offer a type of Christianity that batters you over the head and forces you to accept a party line. Instead it welcomes you as you are and seeks to form your instincts—to revere creation, to honour the holiness of ordinary life, to treasure friendship, to value what we have inherited from previous generations as well as being open to new ideas and, most of all, to pay attention to the divine mystery that sometimes slips into the world unannounced.
That’s all this Christianity stuff is about, isn’t it? Just doing good and being aware of God, isn’t it? Hmmmm. Let’s come back to that, because there is a little more to it.
Our Gospel reading is about a conversation that Jesus had with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a powerful Jewish group at the time Jesus lived, and they’re basically the main bad guys in the stories of Jesus’ life. They are obsessed with keeping all sorts of religious rules about what you can eat, what days you can work on, and things like that – but often completely neglect God’s more important commands about treating others well and being humble before God. The Pharisees are terrible hypocrites – they preach a lot but never seem to practice.
Now, secretly, we all love religious leaders who are hypocrites. Because if even the religious bigwigs don’t really believe what they say, then we can ignore them and do whatever we feel like!
Of course hypocritical religious leaders are a curse. I come from Northern Ireland. I could write a book on them. But the problem for us today is that we live at a time when we’ve knocked all our leaders off their pedestals—not just religious leaders, but political and cultural leaders and many others. We’re leaderless, partly through our own choice, yet we wonder why our country and civilisation seem becalmed, completely lacking direction.
Our first reading, from Hebrews, tells people to emulate their leaders. There are examples of good leadership in our times too, but perfect leadership does not and cannot exist.
So maybe we ought to learn to forgive our leaders sometimes, even when they can be hypocritical? For the truth is that we’re all hypocrites, at least some of the time – and we all let ourselves down in other ways sometimes too. That’s the problem with the idea that you can just do good and that’s enough. Every one of us does the wrong thing sometimes. That’s where the Church comes in, because it is the channel through which God offers us the forgiveness of our sins. That’s why one of the first things we did here this morning was to say a prayer where we confessed our sins and then Caroline pronounced God’s absolution on them.
God is always ready to forgive. He loves you because He made you, not because you are perfect, any more than you love your children for being perfect. And, as Jesus told the Pharisees in this morning’s Gospel reading, He will repay you for the good that you do in this world at the Resurrection.
So, when this world overwhelms you with its worries, remember that you are called by God towards something more and better than even this beautiful world, not because you are good enough, but because God loves you, and is always ready to forgive you. Seek to do good, share forgiveness with others, and don’t neglect the divine mystery that sometimes slips into the world unannounced.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: The Semington Brook at Marston, 11 July 2025, © Gerry Lynch.
[1] I got these ideas from Mark Clavier’s recent blog on the The Wind in the Willows, but decided a service aimed at returners and newcomers wasn’t the place to get into all the detail on that.
