Month: June 2026

Would You Sacrifice Your Son? – Sermon Preached on 28th June 2026 (Fourth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Genesis 22. 1-18; Matthew 10. 40-42

“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest … and offer him … for a burnt offering…”

A large square oil painting dominated by expansive fields of blue, yellow, red, and green. In the lower centre-right, an elderly bearded man in red and brown robes kneels and looks upward, his right hand raised and gripping a knife. Beneath him, a younger man lies prostrate on the ground, clothed in yellow, his face turned outward toward the viewer. A large blue winged angel descends diagonally from the upper centre of the composition, one arm extended downward toward the knife. To the upper left, a green tree stands before a pale blue background, with two small crouching figures sheltering at its base. In the upper right, rendered in darker, earthier tones, a crowd of figures surrounds a crucifixion scene, with a cross visible at its centre. The background throughout is loosely worked in swirling washes of white, yellow, pink, and blue. A signature appears in the lower left corner.
Marc Chagall, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1960-6), hangs in the National Marc Chagall Gallery, Nice.

If God is merciful, why do men sacrifice their children to their gods? Today’s pairing of readings, seemingly so awkward and contradictory, is linked by the common theme of God’s mercy, and asks us how we should share God’s mercy with those around us.

The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is at once gripping and repulsive. The temptation is, as always with the more difficult Old Testament texts, to distance it from our own modern condition, because we would never do anything as crazy or barbaric as sacrificing our children for God, would we?

The conventional way to read the story of Abraham is that his faith is being put to the test, and that’s what the text itself pushes us towards. At the end of this passage, the angel of the Lord says explicitly that because of Abraham’s iron faith, God’s promise to him so long ago that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars has been confirmed.

But here’s the thing – the story was clearly strange and fearful also for people of its own time, as much as for us. Although Abraham is acting on a commandment of God, there is something furtive about his behaviour. At no point on their three-day trudge to the place of sacrifice does Abraham explain to his two young servants what is happening, and when they arrive, he leaves them behind, plainly lying to them about what he is about to do with Isaac.

He also lies directly to the boy about what is about to happen – when Isaac innocently asks where the sacrificial lamb is, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide one. But that’s not what Abraham thinks is about to happen – Abraham thinks he’s about to kill his own son, and won’t tell him the truth.

So there is a shadow of dissembling resting over this story. Abraham may have passed a test of faith set by God, but it’s as if he knows there’s something shameful about the way he’s done it. Shouldn’t Abraham have asked if God would really have demanded he embark on a course of action that he had to lie about to those closest to him? Was there a better way to be faithful? Surely, we should always ask hard questions if someone is asking us to sacrifice our children.

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The Sword and the Sparrow – Sermon Preached on 21st June 2026 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 6.1b – 11; Matthew 10.24 – 39

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus, in white robes with arm outstretched, addresses a group of twelve men gathered on a rocky hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The apostles stand or crouch in clusters, some leaning on staffs, their expressions attentive and apprehensive. A smaller group of onlookers watches from the lower left. The landscape behind is arid and hilly, with pale water visible in the middle distance under an overcast sky.
James Tissot, Ordaining of the Twelve Apostles (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Musuem.

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t have many of those cuddly quotes you see on social media with AI-generated graphics attached to them. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, says Jesus, and to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven. Fear God, for He can destroy both your body and your soul in Hell. Not the sort of stuff you see on Instagram next to a photo of some pink roses.

This is hard stuff, about division and failure and judgement. It’s also about the sovereignty of God, His rule over the universe and His power to dispose of us as He sees fit; not only His power, but His right to do so. It is stuff that we often prefer not to think about. We want to stick with the idea that God is love and can forgive all, and there’s no need for anyone to suffer or struggle – in particular, we hope that there isn’t any need for me to suffer and struggle.

But we’ve had a week of headlines that ought to remind us that a world where there is no judgement is a world where there is no justice – from the monstrous abuse and murder of a baby by the people who adopted him, to warmongers perpetuating the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine at horrendous cost in human life. And if justice requires that God will judge the world, that means justice requires that God will judge each of us as individuals. So let’s turn back to the Gospel reading fully aware that we live in a world where all of us sometimes choose intentionally to do wrong things, and some people sometimes choose to do truly monstrous things.

Our Gospel reading is part of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve Apostles the first time He sent them out on their own to preach and heal in His name.

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Faith over Fame – Sermon Preached on 14th June 2026 (Third Sunday of Trinity)

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

Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

A woman reclines while having her makeup applied by two unseen stylists. One stylist applies lip colour with a brush, while another works on her hair. She has dark, glossy hair swept back, heavy eye makeup with dark liner and mascara, and full, glossy lips. She is wearing a black top with a sequinned neckline. The image is shot at a slight angle, with a blurred red object in the foreground.
Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.

Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.

How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.

If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.

So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.

In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.

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Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

A detail from Veronese's The Feast in the House of Levi. At the centre of a long banquet table draped in white, Christ sits in a rose-pink robe with a faint halo, his long hair falling to his shoulders, reaching toward a dish. He is surrounded by guests in richly coloured Renaissance dress: bearded older men in red, blue and orange, a young red-haired man leaning in at his right, and a servant in yellow raising a glass behind. Two large spaniels sit on the chequered marble floor in the foreground, with pale classical architecture and open sky behind.
An excerpt from Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573), hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

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Unclean Lips – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

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Preached at All Saints’, All Cannings (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Isaiah 6.1–8; John 16.5–15

“Woe is me! … because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!”

Starting in 1972, the animal psychologist Francine Patterson began to teach an infant gorilla named Koko a modified form of American Sign Language. Patterson claimed Koko could sign a thousand words and understand twice that number in English. I remember seeing Koko speaking on children’s programmes when I was a kid, where we were told that this was absolutely the case (and some people still claim that is so).

Other researchers, however, found that while Koko could indeed use signs to request food, play, or affection, her handlers were, to a large extent, seeing what they wanted to see and ignoring the many times that Koko signed arrant nonsense in search of a reward. Koko could only use signs in a simple, isolated way, with no evidence of the complex, rule-based sentences that even young human children use.

Koko’s life was not in vain, however. She transformed public attitudes to gorillas, previously seen only as dangerous and brutish, just as their habitats were coming under terrible pressure and needed protection. She died eight years ago at the ripe old age – for a gorilla – of forty-six.

Those with longer memories recalled a horse in early 20th Century Germany nicknamed Clever Hans, whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that he could not only spell words by pointing his hoof at a blackboard, but could also tell the time and even do arithmetic well enough to work with fractions. Unfortunately, when von Osten died, nobody else could get Hans to multiply fractions, and the poor creature had a miserable end, drafted into the First World War as a warhorse, where he was either killed in action or, perhaps, consumed by hungry soldiers.

A black-and-white photograph, apparently from the early twentieth century, showing two men and a horse standing in a cobbled courtyard in front of a brick wall. On the left, a young man in a cap holds the horse's bridle. In the centre, an elderly bearded man in a long coat and apron stands beside the horse, which is dark-coated and tall. To their left, a large blackboard mounted on a stand is covered in rows of handwritten numbers and arithmetic problems, including fractions and multiplication sums. Several small round objects, possibly balls or stones, are scattered on the ground at the base of the blackboard. A second, smaller board with abacus-like apparatus is visible in the background.
Clever Hans’ owner claimed he could spell, tell the time, and even work with fractions.

Words are the fundamental thing that separates us from animals. Even animals who have an impressive range of calls use closed systems of communication – we see no open-ended creativity among them, or combining of existing elements to make new concepts. Humans can use the power of language to touch the hem of God Himself. We can use our God-given power over language to speak truth, or we can use it to facilitate deceit. This is not always a case of maliciously and wilfully telling lies. As the stories of Koko and Clever Hans show, people often hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

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