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

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.”

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.

These guys were being sent out to face opposition and some real danger. Herod ran the country, backed by the Romans, and neither lost sleep over killing; and not all the Jewish people reacted warmly to Jesus’ teaching either. So Jesus was preparing the apostles to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near, but reminding them that not everyone would be happy to hear this. The division between those who welcome Jesus’ teaching and those who reject it will divide people, with the fault-line even running through the middle of families. He’s preparing them that some people will try to shut them up, in some cases forcibly, and He’s telling them not to fear physical attacks from people who can hurt them or even kill them, but instead to worry about the fate of their immortal souls.

Now, is this advice Jesus gave to the apostles remotely relevant to us in Seend Church this morning? Well, yes, it is. We still meet in the name of the apostles. In a moment, when we profess the Creed together, we will say we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We share the same commission that Jesus gave them – to go and preach the good news to all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

But the dangers facing us are different. In this country, at least, we’re unlikely to face any physical danger for our faith; far from persecuting us, most people who dislike the Church are happy just to sneer at us, convinced we’re disappearing into the dustbin of history anyway.

The dangers facing Christians like us are more insidious. Like that we forget that we should have a reasonable fear for the destiny of our souls – as the saying goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.” Like that because God’s Grace is limitless, we regard God’s Grace as cheap. Like that because we have a quiet life, we’ll turn a blind eye to anything, in ourselves and in the society around us, to keep it. But it is those who lose their lives for His sake, Christ reminds the apostles, who will save them.

There are two things Jesus says here that are intentionally next to one another and that it’s easy to miss. There is only one person whose opinion of you should really cause you worry, and that’s God. He has the power to destroy you entirely, including your soul, and only He has the power to do that. At the same time, God knows every hair on your head; God considers you immeasurably valuable. The God who will judge you is the God who knew you before you were formed in the womb. He knows the backstory behind all your worst moments. The God who will judge you is the God who loves you, who loves what we find impossible to love, who loves each and every one of us so much that He came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, to suffer and to die to save us.

Don’t fear division either. It is a natural part of human behaviour. Without conflict, bad ideas and bad people are never challenged. A situation that seems peaceful on the surface is often one where many problems are being buried for the sake of a quiet life. The sword that Christ brings is not one that kills, but one that divides wrong from right and truth from lies.

Let me mention one last besetting danger of our times, because it links us neatly back to our first reading. That is that we conclude that because God is always ready to forgive, sin doesn’t matter – in fact, sin might even be a good thing because it allows God to extend His Grace even further.

Clearly people were teaching precisely that in the first decades of the Church, because in that first reading, Paul warns the Christians at Rome against taking that sort of view. Instead, in their baptism, they should have died to sin. The water used in baptism has multiple symbolic meanings, but one of them is that baptism is a symbolic drowning, a dying to the old self. Paul specifically says that, in baptism, we have died along with Christ, so we can be reborn with Him at our Resurrection.

Now, there’s no magic trick at baptism that means you aren’t going to sin again – rather, you should be dead to the idea that sin can ever profit you or the world. While you are reborn in baptism, you are still a long way from maturity. We are reborn as spiritual infants and the road to living a life like Christ’s is a long and rocky one and few of us get all that far along it before we have to meet God as our judge. We walk that road not because we ever expect to earn God’s favour by passing some sort of test, but because we trust that by following Christ, the life we live on this Earth will be better and richer than we could ever imagine by striking out on our own.

So keep your eyes on Christ as you walk that road of patterning your life on His, and share that risen life with others, and then you need have no fear, for God’s judgement in the end will kill only that within you that keeps you from Him, so that in your Resurrection you will finally become what the God who knows every hair on your head made you for.

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 for evermore. Amen.