sermon

What if there were another Dunkirk?: Sermon Preached on 10th November 2024 (Remembrance Sunday)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8. 31-39

“If God is with us, who is against us?”

On 10 May 1940, Hitler finally embarked on the invasion of France and Belgium which had been dreaded all winter. Within days the allied armies, outmanoeuvred and pummelled by Blitzkrieg, found themselves with encircled on the Channel coast. The German High Command was able to boast with confidence that its troops were ‘proceeding to annihilate the British Army’. Winston Churchill found himself preparing to announce to the public an unprecedented military catastrophe involving the capture or death of a third of a million soldiers.

Arguments about why that didn’t happen, and the Miracle of Dunkirk happened instead, still sell books for military historians. Very few of them, however, allow for the possibility that it may, indeed, have been a miracle.

How many of you know that in a radio address on Thursday 23 May, as the sheer desperation of the situation became known, King George VI declared that Sunday, 26 May, should be observed as a National Day of Prayer?

Late on Saturday evening the military decision was taken to evacuate as many as possible of the Allied forces. The very next day, this country devoted itself to prayer in a way rarely seen before and never since. Eyewitnesses and photographs confirm overflowing congregations in places of worship across the land. Long queues formed outside cathedrals. Many millions came out to pray for national deliverance.

One woman wrote about her wartime childhood in Hertfordshire: “It is one of my vividest memories as a child of people streaming along the roads and pavements of the Ware Road. All Saints Church was packed with people sitting and standing. Coming out, the churchyard too was full to bursting”

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Without the Freedom to Do Evil There Is No Love: Sermon Preached on 2nd November 2024 (Fourth Sunday Before Advent)

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Some silhouetted figures, many bent forward as if walking into a ferocious figures, walk forward from left-to-right against a background of flames.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Deuteronomy 6. 1-9; Mark 12. 28-34

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

We all know that Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. We hear this at every Communion service, towards the beginning, when we bring our sins before God to ask for them to be forgiven. But I wonder how many of us have ever asked ourselves whether Jesus was the first person to say this, or if it came from somewhere else.

Against a background of bright yellows and oranges, a heavily muscled Moses wearing a kings grounds leaps up to grab the tablets of the Ten Commandments which are being handed down from the shekinah in the sky.
Marc Chagall, Moses Receving the Ten Commandments (1966)

Our first reading this morning reveals that, in fact, Jesus was quoting from the Hebrew Bible – what we call the Old Testament – and more than that, from the first five books of it, also known as the Law of Moses. The first great commandment, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength comes from the book of Deuteronomy, as we just heard. Does anyone know where Jesus’ second great commandment, to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from? It comes from the Book of Leviticus. It would be fair to say that while few of us have spent much time reading Leviticus, we know enough to think it isn’t our favourite book of the Bible—because most of us associate it putting people to death! Where is the love there, you might wonder! So most of us would, I think, be very surprised to find the command to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from Leviticus.

We need to remember that these were complex pieces of writing, through which God was working his purposes out over many generations, through the failings of human beings and respectful of their free will. These ancient documents have passages that strike us as being horrific. Yet they also contain these ringing declarations of love as the foundation of all true morality.

The encounter between Jesus and the Scribe, when he declared these the two greatest commandments, was part of a sequence of argumentative encounters that Jesus had in the Temple, in Jerusalem, in Holy Week. At first, as one reads the story afresh, one finds oneself wondering if this is a trap. Despite that, there is no doubt and no evasion in Jesus’ answer – to love God and our neighbour as ourselves are the two greatest commandments. All of God’s laws find their summit in the law of love, as stated by Jesus Christ who was God made human or, to put it another way, love personified.

Love isn’t an easy, cosy, thing however. We all know from our own lives that to love can be risky and costly. If we truly love God then we will try to love all of His creatures, without reservation, as much as we love ourselves; including those whom we find difficult to like—and even our enemies. How hard it is to live this out! I certainly don’t manage it very often.

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Earthly Power or Eternal Glory?: Sermon Preached on 20th October 2024 (Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington; St Mary’s, Potterne; and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Hebrews 5. 1-10; Mark 10. 35-45

“Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”

What do you want to get out of the Bible? Some of us seem to want a collection of wise sayings and inspirational quotes, and the Bible certainly contains these. Some of us get more from the earthier and more frank stories of sometimes appalling human behaviour, that speak to the human condition in ways that we often prefer to avoid thinking about. There are plenty of those sort of tales.

Russell Brand in 2020, By Raph_PH on Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 2.0

This morning’s Gospel reading is one of my favourite stories from the Bible because it does both. It gives us one of Jesus’ most significant sayings, that those who wish to be great should be the servant of all; and then it addresses the reality that, even in the presence of God incarnate, most of us aren’t actually capable of being as good as that all of the time. We’re a bit more self-interested than that, or at least the vast majority of us are. While I hope I’m not as shameless in my desire for a comfortable, influential, life as James and John, when I’m honest with myself I know that I certainly don’t approach the Christlike ideal of pure self-sacrifice all that often. I may not be vain enough to demand to sit at Christ’s right hand, but I certainly enjoy being ‘the Rector’ and the social rôle that even in 2024 still goes with that in a place like rural Wiltshire.

The truth is that we all approach the throne of heavenly grace with mixed motives. There is, I hope, true faith and genuine devotion there for most of us. There are also other things. Sometimes it’s hope for an answer to a prayer that is really quite self-serving. ‘Go on, God’, I find myself saying as I see the Euromillions signs in the village shop, ‘I don’t want £112 million: but think of all the wonderful things I could do – for you, of course – with five numbers and a bonus ball.’

Our mixed motives aren’t always as avaricious as that. For some of us, church gives us a nice group of friends and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some of us are looking for an institution that will give a moral lead to a society that seems quite rootless, and there’s nothing wrong that that either. Still others want to be part of an institution that can campaign for justice for the poorest and most vulnerable, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But if earthly goals are the only aim of our Faith, then we miss much that is important about what Jesus Christ actually taught.

I suspect most of us have heard of the celebrity Russell Brand. Brand has been at the end of a number of very serious allegations about his behaviour towards women, and back in the days when he was still the darling of the BBC, he often had a notably cruel broadcasting style. But everything is OK now because in May, Brand was baptised in the River Thames by no less a figure than Bear Grylls, the celebrity survivalist and England’s Chief Scout. By September, Brand was baptising people in rivers himself.

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Soul Harvest: Sermon Preached on 15th September 2024 (Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity, Harvest Festival)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

James 3. 1-12; Mark 8. 27-38

“Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?”

The harvest comes at the end of a long process. Some of the seed for next year’s wheat will probably be planted in the next few weeks, to benefit from the last weeks of autumn warmth and sunshine, so it can develop a stable root system before the winter, and be less vulnerable to drought in spring.

A large combine harvester completing the reaping of a field, with dust atmospherically coming from its rear.
Taking in the harvest near Stanton St Bernard in the Vale of Pewsey. © Gerry Lynch, 3 September 2023.

Yet at the same time, this year’s harvest still isn’t complete. There are still, for example, a few fields of maize around that might not be harvested until well into October. The late apples and pears still won’t be ready to pick for weeks yet. And many of our root vegetables and leafy greens reach their prime in the middle of winter – the parsnips don’t taste their best until they’ve been through their first hard frost.

Managing all this takes enormous skill from our farmers and a lot of education in science and, if they want to make a living from it, business. It also takes machinery, and electricity, and fuel. And also, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, pesticides. Of course, the weather plays a major role, especially in a year like this when the spring and first half of the summer were so consistently cold and wet. In fact, during the first summer I spent in Devizes, between the lockdowns in 2020, terrible storms came in August and ruined much of the arable harvest, and I spent the autumn walking past fields left in a terrible state. Viruses can also ruin a crop; they hit plants in waves just like they hit humans.

Most of all, much patience is needed to take the crops from sowing to harvest, and while agricultural knowledge and technology makes us much less vulnerable to crop failure than our ancestors, even now there is no guarantee of success. Yet despite the risks from storms and disease, a crop can’t be harvested early—the crops aren’t fit for consumption until they are ripe.

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Disability, Demons, and Gays (Oh, My!): Sermon Preached on 8th September 2024 (Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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A black-and-white line engraving of some demons pulling at Saint Anthony's beard.

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

James 2. 1-17; Mark 7. 24-37

“…he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’”

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance messaged me out of the blue to tell me he was thinking about his relationship with God, and asked my advice on the best way to start reading the Bible. I gave him my usual advice: start with Mark’s Gospel – as it happens, the source of most of our Sunday Gospel readings in 2024 – then Genesis, then Revelation, then John’s Gospel, then Acts… and if you’re still keen at that point, it’s time to subscribe to some Bible Reading Fellowship notes.

This is the cover of Games Workshop's book "Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness". Brightly coloured painting of demons overseen by a dark god.
Did you spend some of your adolescence in the company of this book? © Games Workshop and used under Fair Use doctrine.

This acquaintance is a journalist, and it was obvious from some messages he sent me as he started his journey through Mark that he was comfortable with the rich multi-layered symbolism of the story, and indeed enjoying it greatly.

Then, a few days ago, he asked if I knew any disabled biblical scholars or theologians who were worth reading. As it happens, my acquaintance is disabled, and one consequence of his disability is a very severe speech impediment.

So, knowing that he had just read the section of Mark that I am preaching on this morning, I asked for his thoughts on a story of a deaf man with a speech impediment being healed when Jesus says: “Be opened.”

My friend, alert to the multiple layers of symbolism in the text, said this struck him as relating to being “open to and opened by the love of God”. As for healing, his disability is, to him, simply part of who he is—it must therefore also, he said, be part of his Christian Faith. “I don’t think Jesus would want me not to be disabled or spend every day hoping for a cure”, he wrote to me.

He has faith that God has made him as he is. Therefore, he needs no healing. Not from his disability, anyway—although, like all of us, there is doubtless much from which he does need to be healed.

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Angry People Click: Sermon Preached on 1st September 2024 (Fourteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8, 14, 15, 21-23         

“…let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger…”

Angry people click. If there’s a catchphrase that captures the nervous mood of the 2020s, it’s that one. On the Internet, and on our TV screens, there is a brutal competition for our attention and our time. With thousands of articles and programmes available to us at the touch of a button, websites and TV channels have to find ways of getting people to read or watch their content rather than any of the myriad alternatives.

A young man, head looking back over his shoulder, with a luxuriant moustache and neatly trimmed beard, looks angrily at the viewer.
Self-Portrait (The Angry One) by Ferdinand Holder (1880-81), Hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.

There are various high arousal emotions that, if the right words trigger them in us, make us particularly prone to clicking on a link or watching a programme. Excitement, joy, and fear are all examples. But the most powerful of all is anger—if an editor can create a headline or a twenty-word synopsis that makes us angry, we are far more likely to read or watch their stuff; and that means the advertising revenue comes in to pay their wages.

How does it feel to live in a world where people constantly need to make us feel angry, or at least in some other sort of emotionally heightened state, to pay the bills? Look around you. Switch on the news. We are left feeling, permanently, that we are on the edge of some sort of civilisational crisis.

It’s tempting to think this started as some sort of nefarious plan by the dark lords of the Internet to make the world a worse place. But that wasn’t what happened at all. Around the turn of the century, the Internet put a tool into the hands of news editors and publishers that they’d never had before – they could try out different headlines and see which one brought most visitors to their website. Headlines that made people angry were often particularly effective. Then towards the end of the 2000s, social media emerged, powered by its algorithms that just worked out what content got people to spend longer on their platform, entirely blind to what the content was let alone the emotions it aroused.

The Internet is many things, and one of those things is a big mirror reflecting our instant, often unchosen, emotional reactions back at us. What they reveal about us isn’t particularly pretty. It turns out that we human beings have plenty of dark aspects to our character, even before we reflect on the way we seem to spontaneously form tribes and mobs. You might even say it confirms the doctrine of original sin.

Anger has a power. It tends to overwhelm other emotions, and crowd out reason. Anger demands our attention. Perhaps that’s why St James warns his readers in today’s epistle to be “slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”

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Eat Me!: Sermon Preached on 25th August 2024 (Thirteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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The hands of a priest saying Mass, near a paten with a wafer host, with a chalice and purificator on one side and a Mass book on a stand on the other.

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

Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-69   

“…whoever eats me will live because of me”

Let’s imagine that one Sunday, after church, over coffee and cake, that I told you… to eat me. Would you think I’d gone a bit nuts? You probably wouldn’t be entirely sure what I was getting at, but let’s be honest, you wouldn’t think I meant something entirely wholesome if I, you know, told you to eat me.

What if I went on to tell you to drink my blood? Tell the truth, you wouldn’t just find that weird, but completely disgusting. You might even send an e-mail to the bishop’s office when you got home from church, asking him to have strong words with the clearly wayward Rector of the Wellsprings Benefice.

So, I have a fair bit of sympathy for the disciples when they start complaining to Jesus about the strange and difficult teaching He’s asking them to accept in today’s Gospel reading. I mean, ‘I am the living bread come down from heaven, and whoever eats me will live forever’—it’s really bizarre stuff isn’t it? We tend to accept the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood because the Church has been teaching it for 2,000 years; and we’re all familiar with the idea from childhood; and we also acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, so we’re prepared to accept things being said by Jesus that wouldn’t accept from anyone else. But don’t let that obscure how strange these ideas are.

An oil painting of St Peter, with a beard, wearing a tunic, clasping his hands, looking upwards with a pleading look on his face.
St Peter Penitent (1639), by Guercino. Hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

And to the disciples in those early days, Jesus was just a teacher from Nazareth. A very clever teacher who seemed even to be able to perform miracles. But just a teacher. Once you heard Him asking you to drink His blood, you might even start wondering whether His power to work miracles came from God or from, you know, the other direction. It’s no wonder that a lot of His followers walked away from Him at this point.

Christianity is weird. It’s a profoundly strange faith. It isn’t about common sense—not the common sense of the 21st Century West, but also not the common sense of anyone at the time of Christ: not of pious Jews nor clever Greeks nor imperious Romans. At the heart of Christ’s teachings, are things that turn our conventional view of the world upside down. At its core of it is the concept that God gives us what we don’t deserve, because in fact we aren’t good enough to deserve anything; what God gives us, He gives us freely out of His love. And because we could never be good enough to pass any purity test, God closed the gap that humanity’s sin opened between us and Him Hithrough giving up Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, on the Cross.

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The Limits of Good Works: Sermon Preached on 11th August 2024 (Eleventh Sunday After Trinity)

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A view across the Sea of Galilee from Magdala/Migdal towards the Golan Heights in afternoon sun.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Ephesians 4. 25-5.2; John 6. 35, 41-51

“Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Do you find some of the teachings of Christianity a little hard to swallow? That eternal life is a reality? That Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead? That Christ is actually present today whenever Christians break bread and share wine in His name? All this stuff is quite challenging to the common viewpoint of our times that only material things that really matter and that the main goal of the Church is to change the world.

He’s got the whole world in His hand… and about a septillion other worlds too!

These days, we tend to put the difficulties that many people have with these mystical beliefs – difficulties, indeed, that some of us here probably have with these beliefs – down to living in an era of science and reason. When people find the more mysterious teachings of the Faith hard to accept, it is tempting to reduce Christianity to the Cult of Militant Niceness, where the Church is all about its good works, and we don’t talk too loudly about the weirder stuff Jesus Christ taught.

But none of this is new. The section of John’s Gospel from which this morning’s reading comes from is all about that. People got into little boats and sailed across the Sea of Galilee to keep up with Jesus, because they wanted to see Him feed them and heal them—but instead He gave them a cryptic message that the He was bread come down from heaven, that whoever ate this bread would live forever, and that the bread He would give for the life of the world was His flesh. No wonder they started muttering. Soon after today’s Gospel reading, the complaints got so bad that even some of Jesus’ closest followers abandoned Him. The things that Christ taught about His own nature, about death and eternal life, have always been hard for people to believe.

If we say the Church is all about its good works – which is what most people who aren’t particularly committed Christians want to hear – then we are making the same mistake as the crowds who muttered when Jesus didn’t give them the good works they wanted. Here’s one problem with a Gospel of good works—I hope none of us thinks that we are better people than others because we are Christians. That’s not what Christ taught at all. We all know atheists, and Jews, and Muslims whose basic goodness puts us to shame; we all know that being a Christian hardly makes us perfect.

That isn’t anything new either. Look at what St Paul had to write to the Christians in Ephesus – warning them against bitterness and anger and squabbling. Of course, they were called to live better lives than that, but they clearly often failed, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to write.

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Gratitude at Lammastide: Sermon Preached on 4th August 2024

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The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot for the Wiltshire Countryside Club annual service

Leviticus 23. 9-14; Matthew 15. 32-39              

“You shall eat no bread … until you have brought the offering of your God.”

For many people in this country, the wisdom and awareness of human nature that used to be provided by Christianity are now sought for in self-help literature, counselling, and the psychology of the Sunday supplement and the social media meme. It is therefore interesting when these modern forms of religion share the same perspective as the Old Faith. One thing Christianity and pop-psychology agree on is the importance of gratitude, and the benefits that flow from being grateful for what we have. No less a source than the Harvard Medical School’s in-house magazine – I googled it – tells me that when we are grateful, we improve our health, deal better with adversity, and build strong relationships.

A combine harvester in a cereal field on a day of thin cloud and hazy sunshine, almost completed its job.
Taking in the harvest at Stanton St Bernard in Wiltshire’s picturesque Vale of Pewsey, 3 September 2024 © Gerry Lynch

Lammas is all about remembering with thanks that it is God who us gives us all that we have. It is God who gives the miracle of natural growth – and it is a miracle, much as familiarity tends to blind us to that. It is God who gives the sun, and the rain, and the seasons that govern our production of food. And it is God who gives us the skills to work with the fruits of nature to sustain ourselves and our nature—not just the skills of the farmer, but of everyone else who makes a living from the countryside, from the man who repairs the combine harvester to the woman who organises the transport of the food to the supermarket. For as much as He is the provider of the bounty of nature, God is also the source of us, and of our skill and diligence. God does not only all this for us, but also gives us the beauty of the natural world, including so many of our agricultural landscapes, which sustain and nurture our souls.

On the face of it, offering of a loaf to God is a pretty limp thank you present for so much. But the loaf symbolises the deep gratitude of our hearts and our souls, and it is appropriate that we offer this symbol of our gratitude now, when the harvest is still ongoing.

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David Could be A Bad ‘Un: Sermon Preached on 28th July 2024 (Ninth Sunday After Trinity)

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A painting in rococo style; a beautiful if rather snooty-looking, Bathsheba, bare-breasted, is having her hair combed, surrounded by a retinue of ladies-in-waiting.

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

2 Samuel 11. 1-15; John 6. 1-21

“David wrote a letter… ‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’”

Our first reading today is a bit of a shocker! But that’s only part why I opted to have the Old Testament reading rather than the Epistle at this service. This reading doesn’t just have a plotline that would put Emmerdale to shame, but it speaks to two important questions about our faith. Firstly, what sort of people does God use to do His will in the world? Secondly, what is the Bible for?

A coloured lithograph in Naïve Art style by the painter Marc Chagall; it depicts King David standing upright, wearing a crown, and holding a harp, serenading Bathsheba sitting on an expensive-looking chair. They are sat outside, in what seems to be a garden, under a sunny sky.
Marc Chagall, David with Bathsheba (1980).

We’ll come to those in a moment, but let’s be clear that the soap opera plot was definitely one of the reasons why I chose this reading. It’s so memorable that I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard it. I can still remember that it was a particularly beautiful summer morning. I know it was relatively soon after I had started attending St George’s, the church in Belfast which did so much to form me spiritually. Now, because the readings in church run on a three-year cycle, it has to be an exact multiple of three years ago on the nearest Sunday. It was 27th July 1997, in other words twenty-seven years and a day ago, and the day before my twentieth birthday, a time when faith was really coming alive for me.

Now, this isn’t a particularly pleasant reading, but it grabbed my attention forcefully, as I’m sure it did yours. It stoked my already building interest in the Bible. Teenage males are often particularly gripped by the grizzlier bits of the Bible, and I heard it on my very last day as a teenager.

Most people think Christianity is all about being terribly worthy and a little beige, and is therefore something for worthy, rather beige, perhaps rather dull people. The truth is that God works through real human beings; there are a few saints and a few monsters around, but most of us are a mix of light and dark.

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