Month: September 2026

Hypocrisy is a Bad Thing, Actually – Sermon Preached on 27th September 2026 (Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32

“…the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…”

Small black-and-white engraving. In the centre, a bearded older man in a long cloak and soft hat stands facing right, his left arm stretched back towards a vineyard where two labourers bend over the vines with tools. On the right, two young men with mattocks over their shoulders stand before a brick wall; the nearer one looks up at the older man and points. A tree overhangs the vineyard, and the number 8 and the monogram PG appear at the top.
Georg Pencz, The Parable of the Father and His Two Sons in the Vineyard, from The Story of Christ (1534-5). In the drawings and prints collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Do you ever catch those little ‘God slot’ reflections on the radio? Things like Thought for the Day on the Radio 4 Today programme? Has any of them ever stuck in your mind?

One still sticks in mine, from decades ago, when I would hear the Radio Ulster ‘God slot’ blearily as I got ready for school. The clergyman presenting it startled me by saying that hypocrisy was a good thing. If you’re a hypocrite, at least you know what the right thing to do is, even if you don’t actually do it. There’s room for God to work with a hypocrite, ran the argument, in a way there isn’t with someone completely blind to what’s right. It was an interesting argument for grabbing the attention of a distracted audience more interested in the Weetabix and the traffic report – interesting enough that I still remember it three decades later.

The problem is that it’s hard to square with what Jesus actually taught, especially in today’s Gospel reading.

“…the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” As attention-grabbing statements go, that trumps even the argument that hypocrisy is a good thing. Any of us would be taken aback, and probably a bit outraged, to have this said to us. And Jesus says it not to a group of randomers, but to the chief priests and elders, on the sacred ground of the Temple itself.

For months our Sunday Gospel readings have been following Jesus around the Holy Land teaching and healing, starting in His home turf of Galilee with the Sermon on the Mount, then into surprising places like the territory of the Syrophoenicians (the descendants of the Canaanites), and finally on Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where He warned His followers He had to die in the Holy City.

Now Jesus’ journey is over. It is the Monday of Holy Week. The day before, He rode into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, as the Scriptures foretold a mighty prophet would, and the crowds flocked out to see Him, singing His praises and spreading palm branches before Him, also just as those prophecies foretold. The tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the common people of Jerusalem knew a prophet when they saw one.

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Real Joy for Real Champions – Sermon Preached on 20th September 2026 (Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Philippians 1.21-30; Matthew 20.1-16

“…live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ…”

Labourers, mostly women in blue smocks and dark skirts, bend over rows of vines turned vivid red and orange at harvest. One woman stands upright under a green umbrella, and a horse and cart wait further back. A low, white sun sits in a blazing yellow sky over the flat horizon and a distant farmhouse. On the right, a water-filled track or stream reflects the golden light, and on the left a row of blue-green trees closes off the field. The paint is thick, with short, energetic brushstrokes.
Vincent van Gogh, The Red Vineyard (1888). Hangs in the
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

It’s never too late to turn to God. That’s the simple reading of the story that Jesus tells His followers in this morning’s Gospel, about the labourers who start work late in the afternoon getting the same wage as those who’ve toiled from the morning. That’s certainly not an incorrect reading of it. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

The really big question it raises is whether God is fair. You’re going to tell me that of course He is – what sort of vicar would say otherwise? – and I’m going to tell you that God is something far more than merely “fair”. In a fair system we get what we deserve. However, we don’t always want to get what we deserve. We know that sometimes we let ourselves down. Perfect justice is something few of us would want to confront.

God goes beyond fairness, to generosity and abundance and forgiveness, something symbolised by paying everyone a fair day’s wage even when some have done less than a day’s work. You know some people would take advantage of you if you tried to run a company like that. You can see why the labourers who worked all day had a bit of a grumble.

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Trump doesn’t understand the messy politics of Irish reunification

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Unherd asked me for my views on Donald Trump’s United Ireland comments, and I was glad to supply them. Here’s an excerpt.

Unherd headling beside photo of Taoiseach Micheál Martin and US President Donald Trump seated together, with Irish and American flags and white floral arrangements behind them

“The United States was founded through a successful rebellion against the British Crown, and Americans have consequently long felt a degree of sympathy for those seeking a united and independent Ireland. For some, that sympathy went much further: during the Troubles, Irish Americans even helped fund the IRA’s campaign, with some going so far as to buy weapons. But across the world, people who know little about Northern Ireland or the precise nature of its communal divisions generally assume that it is natural and inevitable that the region will ultimately leave the UK and reunify with the Republic.

“It is likely that Trump’s remarks reflected that widely held instinct and have no actual diplomatic plan behind them — just another flippant comment made for laughs. But those with more intimate knowledge of what is still a place apart from both Great Britain and the rest of Ireland are only too aware that four centuries of complex and messy ethno-sectarian conflict in Ulster will not vanish quickly.

“Northern Ireland is a notoriously self-obsessed place, where political shifts are measured in decades and generations rather than months or years. It is unlikely to pay much attention to outsiders as its people work out whether its changing demographics will also alter its constitutional status — a genuinely open question.”

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Beware the Vegetarians – Sermon Preached on 13 September 2026 (Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 14.1–12; Matthew 18.21–35

“another, who is weak, eateth herbs.”

Oil painting of a king and his servant seated at a table, the king pointing accusingly while the anxious servant sits with hands clasped; two clerks between them count coins and write in a ledger, illustrating the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.
Jan van Hemessen, The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (c. 1556). Hangs in the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA.

When St Paul writes that the weak eat only vegetables, he isn’t acting like the ancient equivalent of a social media influencer from the manosphere, recommending that his followers stick to a fat-rich diet of red meat and bone broth. He’s actually referring to a controversy that divided the ancient Church in exactly the same way that gay marriage or women bishops divide the Church of our own time.

For St Paul, the question at hand was what Christians should and shouldn’t eat. In the pagan cults of the Roman Empire sacrificing animals to various gods at their temples was a big thing, especially on their holy days. Of course, a lot of the meat was consumed at big parties at the various temples, but some of it was given away, perhaps to the poor or just to buy goodwill, and some of it was sold on the open market. So, if you were tucking into a nice ham sandwich in a big Roman city, there was a fair chance the ham had been sacrificed to a pagan god.

So, some people in the early Church avoided eating meat, because they were worried it might have been sacrificed to pagan gods. For St Paul, that kind of scruple was a sign of having a weak faith. After all, pagan idols weren’t actually gods – they were just dumb statues, or figments of people’s imaginations, after all, so if you really had a strong faith that Jesus Christ was Lord, then why would you worry about a bit of chicken that had been sacrificed to Jupiter or whoever?

This had big social implications, because just as now, a lot of Roman socialising and commercial life was done over a meal. Business deals were struck at the dinner table. Men of social standing invited others to dine and accepted invitations. The Christians who refused to eat meat that might possibly have been sacrificed to pagan gods were cutting themselves off from respectable society and job opportunities.

So, the Christians who abstained from meat sacrificed to idols thought that the people who ate it were barely Christian at all, unwilling to make the slightest sacrifice for God, completely captured by the pagan society round them. The people who ate meat thought the abstainers had totally missed the implications of Jesus Christ dying for us, which freed us from the idea that breaking arbitrary laws about diet and washing could put us on the wrong side of God.

This might seem obscure, but it was a topic that divided the Church along the lines of whether Jesus was calling Christians to be a group of particularly holy people quite separate from the mass of people; or whether Jesus was calling Christians to be an integral part of society to better lead others to Him – very like, for example, a lot of Christian arguments about whether or not the Church should embrace same-sex marriage.

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Sarah Mullally is outshining Justin Welby on assisted dying

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Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury, in purple episcopal shirt, clerical collar and pectoral cross, before a stained glass window.

Thanks to UnHerd for carrying my piece on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the assisted dying debate…

Earlier this week, Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally wrote an opinion piece in the Telegraph urging MPs to vote against the reintroduced Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill when it comes before the Commons on Friday. The article restates her opposition to assisted dying, expressed in a speech in the House of Lords last year and again when the previous bill ran out of time in the upper house in April.

Mullally’s predecessor, Justin Welby, also objected to assisted dying legalisation during the passage of the previous bill, but by the time the key Second Reading vote took place in November 2024, he had announced his resignation over safeguarding failures. The argument the bishops most wanted to make — that the state cannot be trusted to protect the vulnerable from coercion — was being made by an institution that had just demonstrated it could not protect the vulnerable in its own care.

That is the deficit Mullally is placed to repair. The Archbishop objects to assisted dying because the pressure to opt for the measure against one’s own wishes will fall most heavily on those who are most vulnerable: the poor, disabled people, and ethnic minorities. Although these arguments dovetail with Church of England perspectives on assisted dying, they are clinical rather than religious objections that echo those made by, among others, secular disability campaigners.

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Love Is Simple… And Hard  – Sermon Preached on 6 September 2026 (Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 13.8–14; Matthew 18.15–20

“if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Stanley Spencer, Separating Fighting Swans (ca. 1932-3)
Stanley Spencer, Separating Fighting Swans (ca. 1932-3) in the keeping of Leeds Museums and Galleries.

“…the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So writes St Paul in this morning’s epistle. Isn’t that lovely? Christianity is all about love and nothing more. I could stop preaching now, you could all go home deciding to be even more loving than you already are, because that’s what Christianity is about, and we could all live happily ever after.

But, wait, maybe it isn’t that simple. Jesus says, “if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Cut them off! Treat them like one of those thugs who abuse their position with the government to extort money from law-abiding people! That’s what Jesus says.

So, clearly, it isn’t just as simple as saying love one another and that’s it. How do we resolve St Paul’s commitment to love as the absolute standard of the law with Christ seeming to put hard limits on forgiveness when reasoned persuasion has failed?

One thing to bear in mind is that our Gospel reading is set towards the end of Jesus’ time of preaching and teaching in Galilee. He is about to make His final journey towards Jerusalem. He is starting to teach His followers things that will matter when He is no longer with them. Their lives have already been transformed by His work of preaching and healing, and they will later be transformed further by His Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

But they’re still people, with the normal run of human failings. People don’t always see eye to eye. They don’t always agree on what the most loving way to behave is. And then they all get tempted by greed, and laziness, and need for status, and taking others for granted; and they still have the frustrating moments of failing to live up to their principles that we’re all familiar with.

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