sermon

God, Khrushchev, and St Luke – Sermon Preached on 18th October 2026 (St Luke’s, Day)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Timothy 4. 5-17, Luke 10.1-9

“Only Luke is with me.”

The biography of Nikita Khrushchev by the American academic William Taubman is a doorstop of a book. I mean that literally. It’s so big and heavy I sometimes use it to hold my interior doors open whenever I air the house. It’s 900 pages and runs to well over a quarter of a million words. It’s a very good biography – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in fact – and it’s an enjoyable read, but I’ve only ever managed to dip in and out of it, despite owning it for many years.

Book cover of “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era” by William Taubman. A sepia-toned photograph fills the cover, showing an older, balding man in a dark suit, white shirt and striped tie. His mouth is open as if mid-speech, and his clenched fist is raised in the foreground. Behind him, a blurred dark shape appears to be a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The author’s name is in white capital letters across the top, and a red band at the bottom carries the title in large white letters, with the subtitle beneath it in smaller capitals.
A banging read – William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003). 

Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, has been the subject of nine significant biographies in English, at least another three in Russian, two in French, and one in German. So you might assume that he must have been a very important figure but I think it’s still too early for history to have come to a mature judgement of that. He led the Soviet Union during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall, so I think he will be of interest to historians and enthusiastic ordinary people for centuries to come – in the way that Metternich, or Montezuma, or Charles II still are. But he was a man who was made and ultimately deposed by the winds of history, not one who changed their direction. Will people still call themselves followers of Khrushchev in two thousand years? Or be reading any of his speeches? My dears, they don’t even do so sixty years after he lost power.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, has only four biographies, and three of them use a lot of the same material – together they have far fewer words than William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. We know them as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that’s how they have been known since ancient times, although none of them actually identifies its author in its text. We owe the people who wrote these works nearly everything we know about Jesus Christ and His life, and excerpts from their biographies are read in our church every Sunday, and will be in literally millions of churches around the world this very day. Well over three thousand languages have had at least one of the Gospels translated into them.

Today we celebrate St Luke’s Day. So, what do we know about St Luke? Not very much. St Paul mentions a Luke, “the beloved physician”, in his Letter to the Colossians, and the Church has long believed he wrote both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which are really two halves of one work. He was probably a gentile, perhaps from Antioch, the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He stayed with Paul to the end, as we heard in our first reading. But across his two volumes, which together constitute the largest contribution by any single writer to the New Testament, he never once tells us his name.

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No Judgement, No Justice – Sermon Preached on 11th October 2026 (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Readings: Philippians 4.1–9; Matthew 22.1–14

“The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”

Today’s Gospel reading is all about judgement – severe judgement at the hands of a powerful king who is clearly meant to represent God the Father – and we don’t like it. We want Jesus to be the meek and mild gentle Jesus who cuddles lambs. Talk of divine judgement scares us. Probably we should indeed have a healthy respect for it, although if any of us is genuinely consumed by fear of it, we’ve either misunderstood Jesus Christ or perhaps misunderstood ourselves.

Close-up, shallow focus, of the lower sleeve of a white clerical alb. A gold-and-cream embroidered band in an interlaced Celtic-style knot pattern runs round the cuff. Below it, a dark navy shirt cuff and a relaxed, slightly curled hand are softly out of focus. The background is a warm, blurred amber.
Image by Alena Darmel on Pexels. Public domain.

We may not like to contemplate judgement, but without it there is no justice. A Christianity without judgement is one where Jimmy Savile and Joseph Stalin get away with it, perhaps after God tells them how very naughty they’ve been. That may be the action of a God who is good, but certainly not a God who is just.

So unwelcome is the idea of divine judgement – especially from this unbending and angry king – that the Internet is full of sermons on this Gospel reading ducking it entirely, saying things like the king isn’t really meant to be God, and Jesus is identifying Himself with the man without the wedding garment cast into the outer darkness. No way, José. That parable is about divine judgement. That should be obvious since Jesus is telling it to the chief priests and Pharisees, the top holy men of His world, in the Temple, which is their stronghold. It is just before the Passover festival in which they’ll plot and bribe one of Jesus’ closest friends to betray Him, and then they’ll have Him killed. They may not have worked out the details, but they know where they are heading. Here, He is warning these holy men that they are embarked on their own destruction, a terrible and violent destruction exacted by God but provoked by their own cruelty, arrogance, and stupidity. A few decades later, Jesus’ prophecy would be fulfilled when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

In fact, this is the third Sunday in a row to give us a parable Jesus told to the Jewish leadership in the Temple in Holy Week. Each warns of the loss of the kingdom, or of destruction..

So this isn’t about us, is it? We aren’t top holy men and we aren’t plotting to have Jesus killed. We’re just ordinary Christians, trying to follow Him faithfully even through our moments of stupidity and moral laziness and all the normal run of human failings. We aren’t perfect – but none of us is beating God’s servants or anything like that, or at least I hope we aren’t.

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Paying the Rent – Sermon Preached on 4th October 2026 (Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46

“…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

A fresco of a crowd in a town square. On the right, a bishop wraps his cloak around a nearly naked young man, who raises his hands towards a hand appearing from the sky. On the left, an older man holding a bundle of clothes is restrained by another man, with onlookers behind them
Giotto, The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, one of 28 scenes of the life of St Francis in the Upper Basilica at Assisi, painted ca. 1296-1304.

Did you know developing countries don’t always make all the money they should from their natural resources, because so many of their products are processed and finished elsewhere, and that’s where the real money is to be made. So copper is sent from Zambia to China to be turned into wires, and cocoa is sent from Ghana to Switzerland to be turned into… Toblerones.

So, the tenants in today’s Gospel reading are really fortunate to have a landlord who hasn’t just let some land to them, but has also provided a winepress – a significant capital investment for their benefit. Rather than just selling grapes, they can sell wine, which is where the real profits are. Are they grateful to him for that? Not at all – they beat up and even kill his servants when they come to collect the rent, which is due in the form of produce of the land, specifically its fruit.

The landlord’s patience with these ungrateful tenants is incredible. Long after most would have hired some hard men to enforce payment, he persists in asking them nicely. In the end, he sends his own son – and they kill him too, hoping to steal his inheritance. Talk about ingratitude!

Maybe the money they’re making has led them to believe they’re landowners rather than just tenants, that they’ve made this profitable wine entirely on their own and haven’t needed help from the landlord.

The landlord is God; his son is Jesus Christ; the tenants are the Jewish leaders, who have not paid God back for what He has done for them. When Jesus told the chief priests and elders this story, they replied that the ungrateful tenants deserved to be put to a miserable death and their land given to a more co-operative tenant. Then they realised He was talking about them – and started looking for a way to arrest Him.

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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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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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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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Descended from Dogs – Sermon Preached on 16th August 2026 (Eleventh Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 11.1–2a, 29–32; Matthew 15.21–28

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

A manuscript page with two lines of Arabic script above and three below a framed illumination. Within a red border, Christ stands at left in a magenta tunic and blue cloak, barefoot, with a dark beard and a gold cruciform halo, his right hand raised and extended forward, his left hand lowered. Behind him stand two men, the nearer one grey-bearded in an ochre robe, the second visible only as a head and shoulder. At right a woman kneels facing him, wearing a grey-lilac veil and cloak over an orange-red robe, both hands raised with palms turned upward. Between the two figures a small tan dog stands on green ground with its head lowered. The background shows a grey wall with two dark arched windows, a magenta building with an arched doorway at right, an open doorway at upper left, and a gold sky. Red punctuation dots are scattered through the Arabic text.
Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (ca. 1684). Part of an illuminated set of the Gospels in Arabic, produced in Egypt. Now belongs to the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.

“That pack of dogs!” It isn’t a very nice way of talking about a group of people.

The exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman makes us uncomfortable because it shows Jesus cutting across one of the sacred principles of our own time and culture: not being nasty to people because of their nationality or race – or at least not being caught out doing so in public. The Canaanite woman is at her wits’ end, needing help for her possessed daughter; Jesus tries to ignore her, then implies that her people are dogs. It doesn’t strike us as very Christlike.

Jesus was truly human as well as being truly God. All human beings have a culture and a background – and that always involves complicated relationships with people not like us.

The Jews and the Canaanites had been living intermingled with one another for over a thousand years by this point, and there was plenty of bad blood between them. When the Jews came into the Promised Land after Moses led them out of captivity in Egypt, the Canaanites were one of the groups of people already living there. The Jews claimed they were just returning to their ancestral homeland; the Canaanites thought that was poppycock. The Jews said the Canaanites had a nasty history of sacrificing their own children. By the time Jesus came along, “Canaanite” was no longer the term in daily use anyway – the politically correct nomenclature was “Syrophoenician”, which was used by Mark when telling the same story. So Matthew’s use of the archaic term hints that he’s reaching back into history for something.

There’s something else to keep in mind: what happened just before. Notice how this morning’s reading starts: “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” That leaves me curious as to where “that place” was.

It turns out that place was Gennesaret, by the Sea of Galilee, not much over twenty miles from where Jesus grew up, the area where He had started His public ministry of preaching and teaching, and a heartland of conservative Jews. What happened there was that as He was being mobbed by a crowd desperately seeking help, some Pharisees came up from Jerusalem – which was a hundred miles away – and started giving Jesus a hard time, telling Him He was breaking the Jewish religious traditions. Jesus in turn says the Pharisees are the ones promoting false teaching: in fact, they are blind guides, leading the people into a pit.

So Jesus has just had a spicy exchange with the self-appointed defenders of Jewish orthodoxy. For some reason, after that happens, He leaves the Sea of Galilee and goes to Tyre and Sidon, to what is now the coast of South Lebanon, away from the main Jewish centres of population and into the very heartland of the Canaanites.

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Of Course You Can’t Walk On Water – Sermon Preached on 9th August 2026 (Tenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend; Christ Church, Worton; and St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 10.5–15; Matthew 14.22–33

“…beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’”

A wide expanse of calm sea under a clear pale blue sky, occupying the lower two-thirds of the frame. The water shifts from deep teal in the foreground to a lighter turquoise towards the horizon, its surface finely rippled and catching the light. Across the middle distance lies a low, narrow island covered in dense dark green pine woodland, with a pale sandy shoreline and a few small buildings visible among the trees. A second, smaller wooded islet sits to the left, and further low islands are just discernible along the horizon on both sides. Several small vessels are scattered across the water: a white sailing yacht with a purple sail, another with white sails to the left, and a number of motorboats leaving thin white wakes. On the far right horizon, two larger ships are visible in silhouette. The photograph appears to be taken from an elevated position, looking down and out across the water.
“Here, fancy a walk over to those islands?” © Gerry Lynch, 26 July 2017.

A couple of summers ago, I was on the way to Jersey, on a very hot summer day, on a big slow ferry across the English Channel, when I decided to get off and go for a walk. The water was lovely and cool after the stuffy cabin, and it was enjoyably strenuous to climb up and down the waves, but my shoes were starting to get soaked and stained with salt water, and I worried about how they’d stink the cabin out.

Of course, this never happened. I made this up. People don’t walk on water. If God had wanted us to walk on water, we would be born with skis instead of feet.

Jesus can walk on water because Jesus isn’t just another small-town preacher and holy man, but the Messiah, sent by God as Saviour of the human race. This is one of the miracle stories in the middle part of Matthew’s Gospel where the disciples, and Peter in particular, are confronted with more and more evidence of Jesus’ divine origin. These form the backbone of our readings from Matthew’s Gospel through this late summer and autumn and Peter will, before too long, be the first to work it all out.

Peter was the first person to confess that Jesus is the Messiah. A great man. But Peter wasn’t God. So, Peter couldn’t walk on water. It isn’t that Peter couldn’t walk on water because he didn’t have enough faith – or that he was able to walk on water while he had his eyes on Jesus, but lost it when he got distracted by the wind. Jesus isn’t telling off Peter as “You of little faith” because he can’t walk on water. People can’t walk on water.

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Address at the Interment of the Mortal Remains of Caroline Jackson, 5 August 2026 (St Oswald’s Day)

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Preached at St Oswald’s, Widford

Psalm 121; 1 Corinthians 15.50–58

“Therefore, my beloved brethren … know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Interior of a small stone chapel looking east from the west end towards the chancel arch. Whitewashed walls tinged pink, an open roof of dark timber rafters with white plaster between. Two painted boards in decorated frames flank the pointed chancel arch, lettered with the Ten Commandments; traces of medieval wall painting survive around the deep-set leaded window on the left, where a vase of garden flowers stands on the sill. Box pews of pale, weathered oak fill the nave on both sides, with a dark carved wooden pulpit or reading desk to the left of the arch. Beyond, a small altar with two candles and a cross stands below a traceried east window. The floor is worn stone flags. In the foreground right, a book ledge holds stacked red hymnals and blue books, with laminated notices propped above.
St Oswald’s Widford © Gerry Lynch, 5 August 2026

The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.

The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.

It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.

Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.

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