Christianity

Jesus is Coming Back: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th November 2022 (The First Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – Romans 13: 11–14; Matthew 24: 36–44

“…the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

I want to start this morning with a question: Do you believe that Jesus is going to, you know, actually return and be your judge?

I know we say in the Creed every Sunday, that “I believe that He will come in glory to judge both the living and the dead”, but if you’re like me, you’ll be more than a little uncomfortable with the topic.

The famous late 15th Century doom painting at St Thomas’, Salisbury. © Gerry Lynch, 31 July 2016

Part of the reason for that is because there are Christians who spend entirely too much time not only thinking about the Second Coming, but also shouting about it. These people always seem to be bad, sad, or mad – or all three at the same time – full of angry judgementalism towards others while howling at the moon themselves. We rightly don’t want to be like them.

So well tell ourselves that Christianity isn’t like that, or at least our Christianity isn’t like that. We remind ourselves that the Bible also says in three plain words that “God is love” – in fact, had our epistle reading from Romans started one verse earlier, we would have heard St Paul state clearly that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” We tell ourselves that means something like “God is all-forgiving and all-accepting”. That allows us to leave the preaching about Jesus coming back to the headbangers and fundamentalists and get on with trying to be more like this all-forgiving, all-accepting God.

Yet avoiding guilt by association is only one reason why we don’t like talking about the Second Coming. Another part of it is, of course, that if all this stuff that Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel is true, then we’re going to be subject to judgement at His hands when He returns, and we’re worried about that. Now, the uncomfortable reality is that especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which is going to supply most of our Sunday Gospel readings from now until next November, Jesus talks about judgement a lot. In fact, He talks about carrying out the Last Judgement Himself, in the same section where he says the nice stuff about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Does that scare you?

Well, let’s unpack it a bit.

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Worthless Slaves?: Sermon Preached in Christ Church, Worton, Sunday 2nd October 2022 (Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – 2 Timothy 1: 1–14; Luke 17: 5–10

“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t know about you, but I could have done without a Gospel reading like that. We are told to be like the poor slaves toiling in the fields all day, then as soon as they come home ordered to prepare their master’s dinner before they get the chance to eat and drink themselves. It’s not exactly the most encouraging text in the current circumstances.

Christ Church Worton, 2 October 2022.

I am tired after the last two and a half years of Corona-Christianity, of the endless chopping and changing of regulations and routines, of the closures and the re-openings, of putting huge effort into learning new skills that became obsolescent a few months later. It was blooming hard work, made more exhausting by being constantly told that the pandemic had forced the Church to confront that it has no money and that we need to get used to a leaner Church more dependent on volunteers. This comes on top of decades of the lay people in the villages, the Poor Bloody Infantry of the Church of England, being amalgamated into ever bigger benefices with ever fewer clergy even as the demand for share goes up. Of course, every clever reorganisation presents itself as the solution to the current problems, but ends up being superseded by the next clever scheme a few years down the line.

There is money in the system, but it’s never for churches or benefices like this; only ever for churches in student towns and big cities promoting a style of worship that is a million miles away from village Anglicanism. Strangely, those churches often seem to promote a sort of theology of success that is also a million miles from the Gospel Jesus is proclaiming this morning, where the reward for hard work is yet more hard work. It is enough to make you lose faith.

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Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair

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A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.

I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.

I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.

Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.

But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.

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A Queen and A Poor Sinner: Sermon Preached in St Peter’s, Poulshot, Sunday 11th September 2022 (The Period of Mourning for the Death of Queen Elizabeth II)

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“every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life”

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:4; John 6:35–40

As I prepared to preach a sermon as we mourn a long-lived monarch of deep Christian faith, the story of another royal death 106 years ago pushed its way into my mind. It is about the funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph von Habsburg, who was as deeply faithful a Christian as Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; he also sat on his throne for almost as long as she did on hers.

Franz-Joseph reigned for 68 years after assuming the throne as a result of the great Europe-wide popular uprisings of 1848, and died in the middle of the First World War. On one level his life story seems impossibly remote – even his surname invokes the medieval world; yet it was recent enough to encompass democratic elections, trade unions, worldwide telecommunications, and the sort of horrific artillery barrages we have seen recapitulated on the flats fields of Ukraine this year. Indeed, it was recent enough that it is possible to watch a few minutes of film footage from his funeral procession through the streets of Vienna on YouTube.

The procession was appropriately full of pomp and circumstance. Beautifully attired dignitaries and a detachment of elegant hussars on white steeds escorted a casket draped in the black and gold of the Habsburg family which had ruled vast territories for six hundred years.

Emperor Franz Joseph’s funeral procession through Vienna in 1916

When the procession arrived at the Imperial Crypt, a great iron door barred the way to the family mausoleum. On the other side stood the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna waiting.

The officer leading the casket stood at the door, knocked, and cried “Open!”

“Who goes there?” responded the Cardinal from behind the iron doors.

The officer replied: “We bear the remains of his Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Franz Joseph the First, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Defender of the faith…” continuing with all the Emperor’s thirty-seven titles.

“We know him not!”, the Cardinal replied abruptly.

The officer once more knocked the vast iron door, and again the Cardinal replied – “Who goes there?”

The officer this time used a shorter title for the deceased Emperor.

The Cardinal replied again, “We know him not!”

The officer then knocked for the third time. The Cardinal replied for the third time, “Who goes there?”

This time the officer’s answer was different: “We bear the body of Franz Joseph, our brother, a sinner – like us all.”

“This man we recognise”, replied the Cardinal finally, and the huge iron doors swung open to admit the body of an Emperor.

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Faith, Gays, and Sandi Toksvig: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 7th August 2022 (The Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Hebrews 11: 1–3, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen”

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” – so writes the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Faith and hope are intimately connected – they are the twin foundations for imagining a future that is better than the present.

Smartly dressed man singing and banging a hand drum in Africa
You gotta have faith! Confirmation Day in Sharpeville © Gerry Lynch, 15 September 2019

We live in a society where faith is routinely derided as an unscientific delusion without evidence. Yet doing anything transformative requires us to dream dreams that go well beyond what the evidence will sustain; without faith we can only ever be anchored in a permanent present, unable to take risks because we’re afraid of going into uncharted territory, where there isn’t yet any evidence and we must rely on insight and inspiration.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why our culture seems to be so stagnant, trapped in an endless cycle of movie repeats and music that sounds like it could have been made thirty years ago. Our artists and musicians and writers and journalists are overwhelmed with data about what sells or what generates the clicks. Why take risks when you know what works? Even when the creatives themselves want to try something new out, the executives and editors have all the same data and seem to opt for profits over vision every time.

It seems that the more we know about the present, the less we are able to imagine an alternative to it. Drowning in numbers, we lack the sort of visions that can renew us into the future.

In practice, humanism has displaced Christianity as the official religion of this country. Of course, the Church of England still provides Christian liturgies for all the formal state occasions; but listen to the language of politicians of all parties, or our leading cultural figures, and it is almost always couched in the terms of humanism.

One of our cultural leading lights, Sandi Toksvig, gave the Archbishop of Canterbury a public ticking off this week about the Lambeth Conference. She was herself a humanist, she said, but she was sure that “the sort of message” Jesus wanted to send people was for them to “just be a good person”.

Just be a good person. That’s a charming sentiment – coming from a nursery school teacher, perhaps, or an eight year-old. It is genuinely startling to hear an intelligent person come to mature years and not observe that even good people sometimes do bad things – even when it is obvious what is good and what is not, which is not always the case.

I think that is another part of our present malaise – we tell ourselves that we’re good people, and indeed the official narrative seems to be that people are basically good unless they’ve been subject to some sort of horrific early childhood emotional trauma, or something like that. But we all know that we aren’t always good, indeed that we often hurt the ones we love the most, while that the people whom we love the most are often those who wound us most.

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Flourishing in Tension: Sermon Preached at St George’s, Belfast, Sunday 8th May 2022 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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Readings – Revelation 7: 9–17; John 10: 22–30 

“…you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep…” 

I wonder if I say the name William Stringfellow, does that mean anything to any of you? I don’t mean the man with the dodgy nightclub, but the American Anglican theologian of the 1960s to ‘80s. Stringfellow refused ordination despite having a doctorate in theology, preferring to live in a slum tenement in Harlem while working as a lawyer offering his services for free to the poor of New York. 

Fancy a little light reading? (It is a surprisingly easy read…)

A garrulous, bibulous, chain-smoker, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture and theology, Stringfellow was heavily involved in activism against the Vietnam War. He was known in particular for allowing the famous Jesuit war resister Daniel Berrigan to hide in his house. This saw him visited by an FBI agent, who made the mistake of asking Stringfellow about the Bible. Questioning the legitimacy of Christian civil disobedience, he asked, “Doesn’t the Bible say you must obey the emperor?”  

Stringfellow reports his own reply as follows:  

I could not concede the simplistic premise about the Bible which his question assumed, and I rebuked him about this, taking perhaps forty-five minutes to do so. During the discourse, he wilted visibly, and, when I paused momentarily, he abruptly excused himself and departed. This was some disappointment to me, for I had only just begun to respond to the multifarious implications of the issue he had raised. 

I introduce you to Stringfellow because not only did he always refuse to allow Scripture to be used to simplistically reinforce our pre-existing notions, but he had a particular demand that we read Scripture in tension. When confronted by passages of Scripture that seem to contradict or clash with one another, he argued that we should not seek to impose a false consistency on them, for we would inevitably do so in ways that simply suited our own ends. He argued instead for seeking to hear what God is saying to us in the dissonance between passages of Scripture – he argued that Scriptural Truth is often complex and can only be unveiled by being prepared to remain with the texts in tension. 

Indeed, I would argue that spiritual growth often comes from allowing ourselves to sit in the tension, allowing the weaknesses and fallacies in our thinking and our attitudes to be stretched out; to allow our spiritual muscle to be built up. 

This morning we have two passages of Scripture which are to some extent in tension. A Gospel that sets firm boundaries about who are God’s people; and an Epistle reading that presents a vision of heaven that is packed with people of every possible kind. 

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Admit It, You Think Judas is Right: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd April 2022 (Fifth Sunday of Lent)

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Readings – Isaiah 43: 16–21; John 12: 1–8

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 

Admit it, a large part of you agrees with Judas when he asks Jesus this question… keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it!

A view of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery from the bell tower of St Sophia’s in Kyiv, 13 August 2017.
St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, 13 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch

If you have seen television news reports from Kyiv, you will doubtless have seen the magnificent St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. A huge trapezium of sky-blue with white vertical stripes, all capped by seven golden domes, and next to it an even bigger clock-tower in similar colours with a truly huge golden dome on top. It was originally built towards the end of the 11th Century, a few decades before our own St John’s, and like our St John’s it was developed in fits and starts over many centuries. It was hugely expanded in the ornate Ukrainian Baroque style which make Kyiv’s churches and monasteries a delight during the 18th Century, the period when many of our beautifully carved wall memorials in St John’s were erected.

What I’ll tell you next is hard to believe, although we have learned in recent weeks the depth of hatred Stalin held for Ukrainian culture and identity, but those wonderful 18th Century baroque extensions were used as an excuse for the Soviet authorities to declare the monastery historically “inauthentic” in 1934, and it was demolished, replaced by a modern office block housing the administrative headquarters of Soviet Ukraine. What we see today has been entirely rebuilt over the last thirty years, as faithfully as possible to what was there before.

On one level, buildings are just stones: but they are also things that can move people to tears through their beauty, and be the repositories of the soul of a nation, or a family, or a faith. Stalin, among others, understood how much buildings mattered – St Michael’s was one of thousands of churches destroyed across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as the state tried to destroy Christianity. But he also understood the power of beautiful buildings to lift up and renew. Much of the centre of Kyiv was destroyed during the Second World War, and it was the site of one of the first rebuilding efforts in the immediate post-War years, especially around the famous Maidan, a handsome cityscape of optimistic wedding-cake towers and neo-classical pillars. The aim was to incarnate in stone the beauty of Communist ideals of progress and enlightenment, and inspire the people of Ukraine to play their part in rebuilding the USSR after the depredations of Hitler.

Domes of St Michael's in Kyiv
Domes of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, 10 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch.

Let us turn the clock back even further, before the construction of St Michael’s in Kyiv and St John’s in Devizes, before even the times when Christ walked the earth, to the time when the Scythians were the people who dominated the great Eurasian plain, from Ukraine in the west as far as Mongolia in the east. A few years ago there was an exhibition of their art at the British Museum. The Scythians had no writing, but worked gold with exquisite skill, the equal of the Greeks and Persians of the same period. Complex depictions of Tree of Life, sometimes a foot high, reveal a people with a keen sense of spirituality and the wonder of creation. The instinct for beauty seems to be hard-wired into us.

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Reading the Signs of the Times

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This article first appeared in the September 2021 edition of Franciscan magazine.

“In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son.” So begins the Letter to the Hebrews. These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.

The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways. Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ. Personal presence matters; the Word was made flesh because we are creatures of flesh and blood.

What might the digitisation of human relationships, accelerated by necessity due to the terrible pandemic we are enduring, mean for the Church? Let us first explore its wider societal impact to shed some light on that.

It is now a generation since communication started migrating into digital spaces, mediated by screens. I notice this shift most profoundly in pubs; people on their own are much less likely to strike up conversations with strangers or the barman than they were when I first discovered their amber-tinted pleasures in the mid-1990s. Instead, singles constantly flick through their phones to pass the time. A more specific example: gay bars have closed at an astonishing clip, rendered commercially unviable after losing the section of their custom primarily interested in casual sex to dating apps which leave many of their users experiencing incessant digital rejection. Gone with the bars is the broader sense of community they provided, including for those who had no interest in hooking up. A good pub, gay or otherwise, allowed people to meet in a way that transcended class, politics, race, and educational levels, at least to the extent their locality or workplace environs did.

On social media, in contrast, people often slip into clusters of the like-minded, forming small and cohesive online communities trapped in their own groupthink, increasingly incapable of assimilating any alternative viewpoint, and regarding their very expression of such as at best fake news and at worst an act of hostility.

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Crumbling Empires and Eternal Bliss: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 21st November 2021 (Christ the King)

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Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.

Readings – Revelation 1:4b-8; Mark 10:17–31

 “My Kingdom is not from of this world.” 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Some of you know, and some of you don’t, that I am a very keen radio ham, and a particular enthusiast for Morse code, which is still in use by hobbyists around the world on a daily basis. My love affair with radio started when I was an eight year old boy, on discovering that the radio cassette player my parents had given me as a Christmas present had a switch marked “Short Wave”. At first, tuning the dial on this strange waveband was unpropitious, as the adults had all assured me would be the case, revealing only strange bleeps and noises and a few stations in languages I didn’t even recognise.

Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.
Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv’s Paton Bridge, 11 August 2017, © Gerry Lynch.

Within a few hours, however, I had discovered programmes in immaculate English from Sweden, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and things developed from there over the following weeks and months. To a child always fascinated by maps and already at that tender age becoming interested in politics, that cassette player became like a magic carpet to distant lands, so much more remote in those pre-Internet days of the 1980s.

One of the most ubiquitous stations, and certainly the most bizarre, was Radio Tirana, which dominated large parts of the Short Wave spectrum with its creepy and unforgettable theme tune, introducing broadcasts that promoted Albania’s official state ideology in every language from Armenian to Zulu. It seemed to despise equally both what it described as American Imperialists and Soviet Socialist Imperialists, but its real ire was reserved for the oul’ enemy – the imperialists of Yugoslavia.

The undoubted king of the dial, however, was Radio Moscow, which in English alone had not only a North American service, and a World Service aimed mainly at audiences in Africa and South Asia, but for an hour at 8 o’clock every evening the wonderful Britain and Ireland Service. It was presented by gentlemen who were very well-spoken indeed, sounding like they had been educated at Marlborough and Cambridge – because they probably had been. They presented the failures of the Soviet Union as being the inevitable flaws of a system that was still merely Socialist, and that these would ultimately disappear as a perfect political system, a genuine Communism, inevitably emerged.

I discovered all this at Christmas 1985. Within a few years, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even the mighty Soviet Union all vanished from our maps. Empires rise and fall. They always have done and always will do, and they are always profoundly flawed entities.

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Have Mercy On Me: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Ramsbury, Sunday 24th October 2021 (The Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity)

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Winter afternoon sunlight on the lovely chancel at Holy Cross, Ramsbury. © Gerry Lynch, 22 February 2018.

“…he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’” 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s readings can be great sources of hope for us, but they can also be disturbing. It all depends what mood or what set of experiences we approach them from. In their very different ways, both Job and Blind Bartimaeus have been dealt a rough hand by God, and have suffered for years. Then, in response to prayer, God fixes each of their problems in a trice. The second part of their lives will be so wonderful they could hardly have dared wish it for themselves. The readings can also be disturbing, however, because God does not do this for everyone, not even for many people who pray faithfully. 

An exterior shot of Holy Cross, Ramsbury, in the Diocese of Salisbury in golden February light.
The preacher was “playing an away match” at Holy Cross, Ramsbury. © 22 February, 2018.

I read an article in Church Times a few weeks ago about a brilliant young academic, who met the love of his life when they were both reading for their doctorates. He had been brought up outside the Church, but thanks to his fiancée, he came to faith in Christ for the first time. The he was struck by what seemed at first to be a routine viral infection, but this left him with a crippling post-viral syndrome which has now lasted for many decades. He has lived in almost permanent exhaustion and pain. His career went nowhere, and his condition placed enormous burdens of caring on that young girlfriend who became his wife. Decades of faithful prayer for healing were met only with occasional false dawns; after so many years, the answer to his prayers was, finally, a sense of peace with his illness, with God, and with the world. 

Where, one asks, is the justice in all that? If we accept that God does at times answer prayer in miraculous ways – and I do accept that – it leaves us wondering why He doesn’t do it more often. 

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