sermons

Destined for Salvation: Sermon Preached on 19th November 2023 (Second Sunday before Advent)

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The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

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

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11; Matthew 25.14-30

“For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”

So, Jesus Christ will return like a thief in the night to judge the world, and He told a story about what that judgement would be like that ended with a poor servant of a harsh man being thrown out into the outer darkness—where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. I have to be honest, this morning’s readings make me uncomfortable, and I suspect they made most of you uncomfortable too.

Partly, I think, our discomfort come from not wanting to be like those Christians, you know, the ones who are very sure that they are going to be Jesus Christ’s personal hitmen when He returns, when they’ll happily help Him out as He casts a few wretches into the outer darkness. We’ve all met a few of them in our time. It is right that we don’t want to be like those Christians, far too certain for their own good that they have this Christianity business nailed down – and far too inclined to forget that Scripture is clear that judgement belongs to Christ and Christ alone, and not to them nor anyone else.

The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov
The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

But unless we ourselves are also too certain for our own good that we have this Christianity business nailed down, we should accept that if the Gospel is worth believing, it must be capable of disturbing our comfortable certainties. If Jesus Christ is going to actually come back in glory to judge the world – and He repeatedly stated that He would – that means He’s going to come back to judge us. And we all know that we aren’t quite the lovely people we like to pretend we are for public consumption – certainly, I know that I’m not. Quite apart from that, few of us could mount a case that we have made the spectacular 100% Return on Investment from the talents God has given us achieved by the profitable servants in this morning’s Gospel. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t solved many wars, ended many famines, or brought many people to Faith.

When I hear readings like these from the Bible, at first blush I can find myself thinking that God may be a being I need to fear, but He’s hard to love, and I even wonder sometimes if want to associate myself with this Jesus Christ fellow and His tales of mistreated servants.

But let’s dig a little deeper into the readings, because there are a few points that can be easy to miss, and which are far more hopeful.

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Render unto Caesar: Sermon Preached on 22nd October 2023 (20th Sunday after Trinity)

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Jan Lievens' 1629 painting of St Paul Writing to the Thessalonians; St Paul is depicted with a long white beard, and a thoughtful, almost mournful expression, holding a quill in his right hand with a ream of papyrus behind.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 1. 1-10; Matthew 22.15-22

“Paul, Sylvanus and Timothy, to the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.”

Jan Lievens' 1629 painting of St Paul Writing to the Thessalonians; St Paul is depicted with a long white beard, and a thoughtful, almost mournful expression, holding a quill in his right hand with a ream of papyrus behind.
Jan Lievens, St Paul Writing to the Thessalonians, painted 1629, now hangs in the Kunsthalle Bremen.

“Paul, Sylvanus and Timothy, to the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.” These words may not seem very significant, but it is likely that they are the earliest written in all the New Testament. St Paul dictated them in the year 50 or 51 to the Church in Thessalonica. Thessalonica remains very much a part of today’s world, the second largest city in 21st Century Greece, roughly comparable in size with Bristol. In St Paul’s time, Thessalonica was also an important city, and a wealthy one, capital of the Roman province of Macedonia.

We are all used to hearing Paul telling off Churches in his letters for backsliding from his teachings. But there is no hint at all of this in today’s reading. Instead, the Thessalonians are praised for their faith, and the power with which they have received the Holy Spirit. It also seems obvious from the way Paul congratulates his readers on turning “to God from idols”, that this church comprises one of Paul’s first big successes in converting Gentiles to faith in Christ. In particular, Paul praises the Church in Thessalonica for its endurance, persisting in the faith “in spite of persecution”.

Why might these gentile converts, in a diverse Roman provincial capital, have faced persecution? Well, their faith in Christ would have meant that they no longer participated in important local pagan cults – for example, we know Thessalonica was the stronghold of devotion to Isis. Nor would they have participated in the cult of the Emperor. None of this would have endeared them to politically and economically powerful interests. When faced with a choice between Christ and Caesar, the Thessalonians chose Christ, and perhaps this most of all is why Paul is so fulsome in his praise of them.

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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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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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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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“The Word was Made Flesh”: Sermon Preached at Midnight Mass in St George’s, Belfast, on Thursday 24 December 2020

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Readings – Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-14

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

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

The Incarnation by Murillo, c. 1677

Our epistle reading at this Midnight Mass, the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, states that God “has spoken to us by a Son.” 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 that didn’t involve anything connected with this rather odd claim that God “has spoken to us by a son”.

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.

Ancient Near Eastern cultures were quite comfortable with the idea of divine messengers; indeed the word ‘angel’ comes directly from the Greek work for “messenger” and the Old Testament claims to record angelic appearances from as early as patriarchal times. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus. But while angels announced that Jesus was about to come into the world, they don’t seem to have been able to do the work that God required Jesus to do.

God didn’t dictate a series of writings to Jesus, nor to His followers, at least not directly. That was a way that God had communicated with His chosen people in Palestine in the past, when he gave the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Horeb. God continues to communicate with His people today through the series of writings we call the Bible, but Jesus wasn’t their author, nor were they handed down from on high, but instead were the product of centuries of laborious debate by the Church. But the only record we have of Jesus writing is with his finger, in the dirt on the ground, at the time when a woman was brought to Him to be stoned for adultery.

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“Waiting”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 6 December 2020 (the 2nd Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-10

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you

Madonna and Child in an Advent-tide Old St Paul’s, Edinbugh. 14 December 2018. © Gerry Lynch

At the start of the week, I had to order a few items from a major online retailer. I’ll not give it any free advertising by mentioning the name. Suffice to say it’s a firm called after a major river in South America known for, how shall I put it, being very efficient in tax matters. Among the items I procured is the new external mic for the parish’s tablet to improve the quality of our streaming, which I hope those of you watching at home are enjoying, as well as some cabling to improve the internet connection around the curate’s house.

I wanted the cabling to arrive before the Advent course started on Tuesday evening, and I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t seem to find any delivery options earlier than Wednesday, even though I was willing to spend a few quid extra to do so. It’s absolutely ridiculous, after all, that in the middle of a global pandemic, I can’t have all my consumer desires satisfied within 24 hours.

Or, maybe not.

We have become a culture that has had our capacity to wait eroded by consumer industries that know we’ll spend more with them if they can satisfy our needs instantly. I’m not enough of a hypocrite to stand up here in the pulpit and pretend to you that I don’t love it, either. It is, however, only part of the story. For all of us life involves much waiting, not least when we are very young or very old, and for the most vulnerable among us life is largely a matter of waiting. We usually find ourselves waiting because we are in a situation where we are either dependent on others, or else dependent on circumstance and therefore in a situation where only God can help. Right at this moment, the whole world is in waiting in hopeful agony for the vaccines that seem set to deliver us from the nightmare that has been the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty.

To be human, in this world of matter, space, and time, is to wait. One of the gifts of this season of Advent is that it hallows and allows us to bring before God the waiting that punctuates our lives. After all, the Church has been waiting since the day of Ascension, waiting for the return of the Lord.

Our epistle this morning is from the Second Letter of Peter, which is very much a product of waiting – indeed a text which was written at a time when the waiting had become almost too much to bear. Despite its name, it was almost certainly not written by St Peter; as early as the 3rd Century, Origen regarded its true authorship as a matter of doubt, as did Eusebius who wrote some decades letter. Now, as I am not a scriptural literalist, I don’t think doubts about the letter’s authorship necessarily reduce its value to us. Firstly, I take seriously that all Scripture is God-breathed and written for our instruction, and that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit in the process by which it decided conclusively on the canon of Scripture. But that does not mean reading the Bible as if it were instructions for a piece of flat-pack furniture. Scripture teaches us as much as anything else through the blind spots and misunderstandings of the people who wrote it, for we are human beings just like them, prone to the same mistakes, and especially prone to co-opting God for our own agendas.

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“Like A Thief in the Night”: Sermon Preached for St John’s Devizes Digital Worship on Sunday 15 November 2020 (the 2nd Sunday Before Advent) by Gerry Lynch

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Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night=

© Used under fair use -The image is used for identification in the context of critical commentary of the work.

Before I sat down to plan my sermon for this morning, I thought I would want to say something optimistic and cheerful at a time when we were locked down for a second time, and locked out of our church for a second time. Then I looked at the readings for the day and found I had to preach on texts about the Second Coming, and about a worthless slave being thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Oh dear, I thought to myself. 

So I had a wee pray about it and I realised that I didn’t want to be cheerful and optimistic at all. I wanted to be hopeful in this new lockdown, which is something quite different. Hope is not optimism; it does not depend on taking a positive spin on the facts; nor is hope good cheer, for hope is the most powerful tool we have for carrying us through the times when we are at our bleakest. Real hope doesn’t come from talking about posies and fluffy bunny rabbits. One of the things that most often renews our hope is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well. Real hope must be capable of enduring the worst that the world and humankind can throw at it, for the worst will inevitably be thrown at it at some point. Hope outlasts optimism and good cheer, global depressions and planetary pandemics; along with faith and love it will endure unto eternity. Hope will survive the end of the world. 

We associate the Second Coming with the end of the world. We hear and read a lot about the end of the world a lot at the moment, or at least the end of the world we knew on New Year’s Day 2020. At moments we must all have lapsed into depression that this new abnormal will never end, that we will never again share the peace in church, that we’ll never again have a large group of friends round for a drink, that we’ll never lose the terror that we’ll wake up one morning not being able to smell the coffee, with a high temperature and a dry persistent cough. We lock down full of fear as the November days grow rapidly shorter and darker, and fear that the world has indeed ended, and we’re in a sort of hell. Then we learn the news about the vaccine trial and we wonder if we dare hope that there will again come a time when we sing hymns together and find ourselves chatting to a stranger in a pub who becomes a new friend and hug our loved ones without fear.

This morning’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, however, does not write about the end of the world, but the coming of the day of the Lord. This passage is often associated in the popular Christian imagination with the end times thanks to some very shaky theology from as recently as the 19th Century. Later there was a 1970s American film called A Thief in The Night, a second rate B-movie with a bit of Jesus thrown in, which was very influential in fundamentalist Protestant circles. In it, a lady wakes up to find that her husband and millions of other real Christians have been taken to heaven, leaving her and other fake Christians behind with the unbelievers under the jackboot of an oppressive world government run by the UN which wants to force her to have the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and damn her for all eternity! All of this got a high budget, Internet-era, makeover with the Left Behind series of books and films which were, if anything, even worse: a living reminder that while good taste can’t be bought, bad taste can.

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“Rebuild my Church”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 4 October 2020 (the 17th Sunday After Trinity) by Gerry Lynch

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Readings – Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

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

The Church of St Damian, Assisi. Photo credit Berthold Werner.
The Church of St Damian, Assisi. Photo credit Berthold Werner.

It is a time of troubles. Plagues, accelerated by the rapid growth in intercontinental trade, spread across the world with dizzying speed. The economic gap between rich and poor is yawning, and many of the young have given up on the ability of the existing order to usher in a just society and are seeking a completely fresh start, consigning the old ways to the dustbin of history with as much aggression as needed. The West and the Islamic world are at loggerheads, with Western powers embroiled in multiple bloody conflicts in the Middle East, which started so long ago that nobody much remembers how or why they started. I am not, of course, talking about the present day but about the first years of the 13th Century, a time when the older townsfolk of Devizes will still have remembered the Church of St John the Baptist being built. There is truly nothing new under the Sun. 

In that tumultuous time, a rich young party animal called Francis, whose feast we commemorate today, was having a life crisis. Set to inherit a family fortune, he had spent his youth hanging out with the troubadours, the wandering bands of minstrels who travelled around during the High Middle Ages making music, singing with them in his beautiful voice and partying with them. An attempt to settle down a little by turning his hand to soldiering had resulted in Francis spending a year as a prisoner of war. After that, his former life of drinking and dancing no longer had any appeal. He wandered the countryside of his native central Italy, half-starved and dressed in rags, begging God to show him a more meaningful way of life. One day, Francis stumbled across a church dedicated to Saint Damian, no older than the then relatively new St John’s, but already falling into disrepair. Amid the crumbling stones, he had a vision of an Icon of Christ Crucified that hung in the church speaking to him. “Rebuild my Church”, it said.

He took up the task with enthusiasm, starting with the physical rebuilding of that Church of St Damian, and going on to work for a spiritual renovation of the whole Christian world. Some of his schemes were perhaps a little overambitious: he once travelled to Cairo, reckoning that if he could only convert the Sultan to Christianity then he could end the wars connected to the Crusades. You will not be surprised to learn that he wasn’t successful.

But that isn’t the point – the point is that he gave things a go. Following Christ isn’t about following a series of step-by-step orders like the instructions for setting up a new mobile phone. As we know, that doesn’t guarantee success anyway. Richard Holloway once described the Christian journey as being less like marching to a heavenly military band and more like joining God in a jazz jam session, listening to the music God is playing and seeking to chime our own personal riffs with His. Christian obedience is about co-operating with God and recognising our own immense value to Him. God is not a cosmic sergeant-major waiting to scream at us angrily if we miss a beat. If God doesn’t pick up on the tune we’re playing, we can always get back into the beat in the next bar. New life can begin at any time. Following Christ is about trying to sense where the Holy Spirit is leading, trying different ideas, accepting that God will not pick up on some of them, because it’s only in a world of chance and risk and serendipity that other little tunes we toot can blossom into symphonies that are more magnificent than anything we could have imagined.

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Chapel Address at Evensong, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, 4 November 2019

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Chapel Address at Evensong, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, 4 November 2019
Gerry Lynch

St Stephen's House Chapel, Oxford

“When you talk to God, it’s called prayer. When God talks to you, it’s called insanity.”

That bon mot came to mind as I pondered today’s readings from the first chapters of Daniel and Revelation, two of the most misunderstood and misused books of the Bible, yet also among the most transcendent.

Prophecy has always been a tricky topic in the Church – St Paul admonished the Corinthian Church about it. The soldiers who beat up the blindfolded Jesus demanded he guess which of them had struck him. They were confusing prophecy and fortune-telling. It is still a common mistake, and made as much within the Church, or at last at its fringes, as it is outside it. The YouTube fanatics who drop random texts from Revelation to confidently predict the arrival of doomsday next Wednesday have done tremendous damage to the Church.

The Belfast of my boyhood was thick with these chancers. There was even a BBC children’s TV drama of the early 1980s, set in Belfast, about one of these street corner Jeremiahs, entitled The End of the World Man. Of course the title character was nothing but a hypocrite, setting himself up in self-righteous judgement while using his political connections to facilitate a corrupt land deal to destroy a patch of urban wilderness much loved by our televisual child heroes. If you want to lampoon the Church, these self-proclaimed prophets are an easy way to do it. And they are terribly unbiblical. The end will come like a thief in the night; it is not ours to know when and how it will come; Jesus says this very directly in St Matthew’s Gospel.

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