Month: April 2026

Not Cowboys, but Sheep: Sermon Preached on 26th April 2026 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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

Acts 2.42–47; John 10.1–10

“…the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”

A man rides a dark bay horse with a black mane and tail away from the camera along a road, surrounded on all sides by a dense herd of sheep in shades of brown, black, cream and white. The rider wears a green and tan camouflage jacket and a black woolly hat, and sits in a traditional saddle. To the left, two cars — a white saloon in front and a second vehicle behind — are halted on the road, hemmed in by the flock. Scrubby grass and low earthen banks line the right side of the road. In the distance, a range of bare, arid mountains stretches across the horizon under a bright blue sky filled with large white cumulus clouds.
Driving sheep along a major road near Khochkor, Kyrgyzstan, © Gerry Lynch, 27 September 2025

What could be more American than a cowboy? The rough-hewn frontiersman, driving his cattle along the untamed frontier, encapsulates both the American Dream and American nightmares. The courageous individualist risking everything to get the job done in a place far from government support, where the added risk is an acceptable price to pay for freedom, is as American an ideal as it gets. The wresting of the land from the Native Americans to make the cowboy possible was one of America’s original sins.

What could be more Kyrgyz than a nomad? If you went to my photo talk the other week, you’ll have learned that the nomadic pastoralist with his herds of sheep, horses, or yaks is at least as powerful a symbol of national identity in Kyrgyzstan as the cowboys are in America – and the same is true across the Central Asian ’stans and Mongolia. We could also talk about the gauchos of Argentina, Kenya’s Maasai, or the Bedouin of the Arab world.

The idea of the nomadic animal herder as the incarnation of the nation seems remote and alien to us in this more settled country, even though Wiltshire was one of the last places in these islands where this way of life survived, dying out less than a hundred years ago.

But for Jews in the Ancient World, some of their greatest national heroes and holy men had been shepherds before God called them to lead flocks of people – Abraham started out as a herdsman, and Moses famously kept his father-in-law’s flock after he left Egypt the first time.

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Our Weird Faith: Sermon Preached on 19th April 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” 

A young kitchen maid, of Moorish complexion, in a white headcloth and dark olive-green smock stands behind a wooden table, her head bowed and her hands resting on a cloth on the tabletop. On the table in front of her are two large earthenware jugs, a shallow metal basin, a small dark pot, a white jug with blue decoration, a stack of plates, a mortar and pestle, and a bulb of garlic. A small white cloth lies folded on the table. Behind her on the right hangs a cloth-wrapped bundle. In the upper left corner, visible through an opening or hatch in the wall, a smaller scene shows three figures seated at a table covered with a white cloth, with one figure gesturing towards another who sits opposite. The painting is lit from the left, with warm brown and ochre tones throughout.
Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1620–2). Hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.

Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.

But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.

This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.

“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.

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Christians Help Iraq to Qualify for World Cup

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Thanks to the Church Times for publishing a short news piece from me on the hugely disproportionate number of Christians playing for Iraq’s second ever World Cup-qualifying squad—and also to its first World Cup outing, in 1986. A notably devout Christian, Ammo Baba, scored Iraq’s first ever international goal, against Morocco, in 1957, then coached … Read more

We All Need Doubt: Sermon Preached on 12th April 2026 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”

A dimly lit scene showing four men in close proximity, their faces and hands dramatically illuminated against a dark background. One man, bare-chested with his robe pulled aside to reveal a wound in his right side, guides the hand of a second man whose index finger is extended and appears to be probing the wound. The second man leans forward intently, his face close to the wound, brow furrowed in concentration. Two further men press in from behind, peering over the shoulders of the first two, their expressions conveying intense curiosity. The lighting falls sharply from the upper left, casting deep shadows and emphasising the physical, tactile nature of the moment. The figures fill the picture space almost entirely, with very little background visible.
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.

Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.

Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.

And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.

What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

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The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

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

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

A large, densely populated painting set in an English churchyard. Figures in various states of undress emerge from tombs and from between pale stone grave markers, some stretching, some clambering upright, others still dazed. The scene is crowded and unhurried rather than dramatic — people appear bemused, curious, or quietly absorbed. A woman in dark robes kneels among flowers in the foreground. A robed figure reads from a scroll near the centre. Angels and armoured figures stand among the risen dead. The church itself is visible in the background, bright white. Flowers — daisies, lilies — grow abundantly across the grass. The overall mood is strange and domestic rather than triumphant, as if resurrection were an ordinary if unexpected event occurring on a quiet English summer morning.
Stanley Spencer, A Cookham Resurrection (1924-7) – in the ownership of the Tate Modern, London, but not currently on display.

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

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Awe and Glory: A Reflection for Holy Week (Wednesday 1st April 2026)

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Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Reading—Mark 9. 2-8

A vast, open landscape photographed at dusk or just after sunset. The foreground shows a recently harvested field, its dry golden-brown stubble occupying the lower third of the image, with a grass-edged farm track running diagonally from the lower right toward the horizon. At the centre of the horizon stands a single solitary tree, silhouetted in dark brown-black against a spectacular sky. The sky is the dominant feature: deep, rich cobalt blue at the top gradually softens through lighter blue into a luminous pale glow near the horizon, which itself blazes with bands of warm amber and orange where the sun has recently set. The effect is one of vast space, stillness, and solitude — the lone tree the only vertical element in an otherwise horizontal, almost minimalist composition.
Awe in the everyday. ‘I Touched Infinity’, Potterne Hill, 27 July 2024, © Gerry Lynch.

A perfect sunset, a chord by Fauré, the giggle of a baby, the stars on a dark night – all of those can give us the most extraordinary sensation, for which we use the word awe. We become aware that we have encountered something that is more glorious than the language we have to describe it – much greater in scale and complexity, much greater in beauty and moral grandeur. We sense that we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. Wonder mixes with fear. We are lifted up out of the drudgery of our routine lives. Yet we also realise how small we are; if we are lucky, our ego deflates a bit.

Awe is more than just a feeling. It seems to remind us of facts of life that we often forget. The universe is indeed vast; each one of us is small and lives for the briefest of spans; yet we are distantly related to all life on Earth; the complex elements that make up our bodies were forged in the furnaces of long-dead stars. Everything does indeed connect.

Much of contemporary life seems as if it were designed to minimise the number of times we experience that sense of awe, and from thinking too deeply about it when it does happen. The constant buzzes and beeps, the 24-hour TV schedule, and the infinite scrolling websites aim to keep us chained to our screens so we never notice what is beyond.

To notice the truth of our lives, we need to escape their humdrum.

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