sermon

Duty: Sermon Preached on 22nd December 2024 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Hebrews 10. 5-10; Luke 1. 39-45

“See, God, I have come to do your will…”

The painting depicts an intimate scene of two women in a dimly lit room. The woman on the right, dressed in a blue garment with a white scarf, stands with her hands raised in a gesture that could suggest surprise or conversation. She faces another woman on the left, who is partially obscured by shadow and an archway, wearing a dark cloak and holding something in her hand. The table between them is set with a bowl of oranges, bread, and a small cup, suggesting a domestic setting. The interplay of light and shadow creates a warm, almost ethereal atmosphere, highlighting the emotional connection between the figures. The overall mood is one of quiet interaction, perhaps of sharing or contemplation.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Visitation (1910), hangs in the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.

I never expect a bumper congregation on the Sunday before Christmas [it was a pleasant surprise to have an above-average congregation at both services I took!]. I always presume it will be composed largely of people who see going to church every Sunday as their duty. That’s OK, because I see going to church every Sunday as my duty too, and I did so long before I was ordained.

Duty is a very unfashionable idea, but it’s hard to see how any society can function without it. In a culture where people have a strong sense of duty, we are more likely to know how things will work and that they’ll work at all. We will be clearer on our own responsibilities and clearer about where to expect the assistance of others. Societies where people have a strong sense of duty tend to have higher levels of trust and stronger social bonds—and they have all the benefits that flow from these things.

In times of crisis, we all depend on people doing their duty even at great personal risk. We will all remember the situation we faced in March 2020, when we depended on doctors and nurses doing their duty even though we knew little about Covid and we also knew there was a great shortage of personal protective equipment. At the other end of Europe, Ukraine’s survival as a nation depends on people doing their duty, in terrible danger and in horrible mid-winter weather, in the trenches that run the length of 700-mile front line.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have considered it their duty to gather to worship together on the first day of the week, Sunday, because it was the day of Christ’s Resurrection. They often did so in the face of challenges much greater than needing an extra morning to finish the Christmas shopping. Even now, this very Sunday, in places like North Korea and Iran, Christians will gather to worship Jesus Christ at the risk of their liberty.

If we, with all our freedoms, attend church every Sunday and follow the Church’s year—even on the odd Sundays when attendance tends to be low—we don’t just fulfil a duty that’s relatively easy for most of us, but we follow church’s year in its fullness, giving us a richer picture of our Faith.

What makes the Fourth Sunday in Advent interesting is that there is perhaps no other point in the year when the Church’s rhythm is so out of kilter with that of wider society. Most people assume that Christmas really started ages ago—how many weeks ago did you have your first mince pie?—with a lot of people finishing work last Friday, even the Christmas party season is starting to wind down. There is only the final blow-out on Wednesday to look forward to and that’s Christmas for another year.

But in Church, Christmas hasn’t even started yet. We are still in the season of Advent, the great season of waiting; in Advent the Church’s worship takes place in the key that forms so much of our lives—waiting with longing for God to break into a troubled world and our often troubled lives. We wait still for God to make His presence felt in all its fullness even as the rest of the world assumes the party has long started, because we know that God is often at work precisely in the opposite direction to where people are looking, in ways that will surprise everyone when they eventually come to light, through people the world considers of little account.

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You Brood of Vipers!: Sermon Preached on 15th December 2024 (Third Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 4. 4-7; Luke 3. 7-18

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

A scantily dressed man with a translucent shine around his head raises his right hand in the air as a group of women, men, and children gather round him with grim, sometimes excited, expressions of their faces.
Saint John the Baptist Preaching by Luca Giordano (1695). Hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Are you a viper? Have you, in the course of this year, exhibited any snake-like characteristics? You don’t have to answer that question out loud. But if the answer is yes, then you’re in the right place: because you need to repent, and church should be a place of repentance.

There is some contrast, isn’t there, between our two readings this morning. The crowds flock out through the Jerusalem Desert to be baptised by St John the Baptist, and he does the exact opposite of what a good PR man would tell someone to do today if they found themselves an accidental celebrity. The smart thing to do if you want to maximise your return on your fifteen minutes of fame is to make your biggest fans feel valued and loved in return for their loyalty—not to call them a den of snakes, and warn them that, “Even now, the axe is lying at the root of the trees”.

St Paul, in contrast, tells those reading his letter in the far off city of Philippi, “Do not worry about anything” for, “The Lord is near.” Rejoice therefore, he tells them, be full of peace and open gentleness.

Let me tease out this contrast between our two letters by repeating the question I started with: are you a viper?

If so, it’s time to repent.

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The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)

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A brightly coloured, abstract, plan-like painting of some houses with their many interior rooms visible and onion dome roofs.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13; Luke 21. 25-36

“…when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”

Happy New Year!

I haven’t got the calendar wrong by a month. The Church’s year starts now, on Advent Sunday. From now until Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday, we will journey through the great themes of the Christian story. Advent is a season of waiting, and so we start our journey in the waiting room. Advent is a season of humanity waiting through trials and exiles; of the disappointment of trying and failing that is so much a part of all our lives. It is a time which remembers how much of our lives are taken up with waiting, and also how much of the lives of nations and civilisations take place in periods when people see no obvious hope of things getting better on their own, and so wait for God to break into world.

A tempera on wood painting, originally an altar piece, of Christ teaching his apostles in the last days of His earthly life.
Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles, Duccio (1308-11) from Duccio’s Maestà; in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena.

God will indeed break into the world at Christmas, as a tiny baby. Then we will journey with that little baby as He becomes a man, go into the wilderness with Him during Lent, walk through death to resurrection and eternal life with Him during Holy Week, and then to the birth of the Church at Pentecost. After that comes the long season of Ordinary Time, the celebration of Christian life in the everyday, which starts as the summer begins and ends… well it ended yesterday. Today, the cycle repeats, Advent starts again, and we wait with longing for God to break into the world.

A new year for the Church also means a change to our Bible readings on Sundays. Our Sunday readings take us through a different Gospel on each year of a three year cycle – Matthew one year, Mark the next, and then Luke. Readings from John are scattered through all three of the years, especially around major festivals. This year, through to November 2025, most of our readings will come from Luke’s Gospel. There is much to be said about Luke’s unique understanding of Jesus’ life, but for the moment, let me just draw one point out: Luke is a Gospel of journeys

Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a lot of the same material, sometimes being word-for-word the same, but tell the same story from slightly different angles—John is really quite different. That’s why together Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, which sounds like a very difficult term, but synoptic just means seeing with the same eye. All three of them have Jesus’ ministry starting in Galilee, followed by a journey to Jerusalem, which leads to the final crisis of Holy Week. In Matthew and Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is a short interlude relatively late in the story. One thing that makes Luke distinct, however, it that this journey takes up almost half the length of the entire Gospel. That’s one of a number of ways that Luke presents Jesus’ life and our own as a grand journey: in Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, the whole world is on the move as a result of a great census called by the Roman Emperor; and the first witnesses to the Resurrection are two men on a journey to Emmaus.

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Tyrants and a King: Sermon Preached on 24th November 2024 (Christ the King)

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Bernardo Luini, Christ Crowned With Thorns (ca. 1522). Now hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

John 18. 33-38; Revelation 1. 4-8

“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight…”

Portraits of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin

I’m currently reading a book called Stalin’s War by an American historian called Sean McMeekin. It’s grippingly written, but also a fairly contrarian take on the Second World War, so it has been rather controversial. This week, I found myself engrossed in his account of the build-up to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler and Stalin were big men, with grandiose ambitions to impose their hellish visions of utopia on Earth. These icons of tyranny, and the terrible, grand-scale, war between them will, I suspect, continue to fascinate people for long centuries after the Second World War has otherwise been forgotten. But for all that these men casually disposed of the lives of millions, Hitler’s empire collapsed barely four years after that invasion, while it is now more than a generation ago since the Union that Stalin led collapsed. They were big men, and terrible men, but nothing now remains of what they tried to create.

Pontius Pilate was also a big man. He was the governor of a province of the Roman Empire – admittedly, not a very large or wealthy one, but he was a power in the land. He was a man who was used to pronouncing judgement, especially on those ranked well below him, such as the strange holy men from the fringes of the Jewish religion who occasionally stirred up emotions in Jerusalem.

As it turns out, when the particular wandering preacher in today’s Gospel claimed, in a very strange phrase, that He was the ruler of a kingdom that was not of this world, He was telling the truth. He was indeed a king, a far greater king than either Pilate or the Jewish authorities could have imagined. He was king of the universe, God Himself, made incarnate as a human being. In handing Himself over to be condemned, Jesus Christ, God made human, judges every nation and every era, including our own, and their pretentions to justice and truth.

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The Birth Pangs of Something New?: Sermon Preached on 17th November 2024 (Second Sunday Before Advent)

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Old buildings, including churches and mosques, lit up by streetlights and flood lights, climbing up a hill, against the backdrop of a salmon-pink sunset sky.

“When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.”

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

Hebrews 10.11-14, 19-25; Mark 13.1-8

A large scale model in stone and wood of King Herod's Temple and the city of Jerusalem in the 1st Century, in the open air, underneath a sunny sky.
Herod’s Temple as imagined in the Holyland Model of Jerusalem; public domain image by Berthold Werner used with thanks.

There have been times recently when it feels like the anchors of our society and culture have come loose, and we are hopelessly adrift. In the last fortnight alone we have seen both the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the re-election of Donald Trump—the latter being another of those things that the “experts” had assured us wasn’t going to happen. The war in Ukraine is by far the most serious conflict in this continent since the end of the Second World War, while the Holy Land has seen no war remotely as long as the current one since long before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. These two conflicts have revealed terrifying new possibilities that advancing Information Technology is bringing to wars, and both are taking place in regions where the danger of escalation is real.

All sorts of things that we have taken for granted about the world since at least 1990, and often for long before that, no longer seem to be true. It probably isn’t the end of the world, but it is a worrying time, and perhaps even the end of an era.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, in the last days of his earthly life, Jesus looks down on the enormous Temple in Jerusalem and predicts its destruction. This did indeed take place in AD 70, a generation after Christ’s crucifixion, and it came during the brutal Roman suppression a Jewish uprising against the Empire. From the written accounts of it that have survived, that Jewish-Roman War seems to have been as horrific as anything happening in Gaza or the Donbas today, and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans was indeed the end of the Jewish religious world that had existed for a thousand years. After that, the Jewish religion had to reinvent itself entirely.

Our first reading this morning, from the letter to the Hebrews, was written anonymously to a group of Jewish Christians and draws heavily from the system of animal sacrifices that took place at the Temple until it was destroyed. Instead of animals being sacrificed by priests as an offering to take away sins, as at the Temple, Jesus Christ, the great high priest, gave Himself to death as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole human race for all time. God had come down to us and paid the ultimate price for the rift that human sin had opened up between God and humanity—that’s the central message of Hebrews.

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Following Christ in Our Place: Sermon Preached on 10th November 2024 (Third Sunday before Advent)

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

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

Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 1. 14-20

“And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.’”

Two men work on fishing nets in very shallow water perhaps 5 or 10 metres from the shore, while a man in white robes waves to them from the rocky bank.
James Tissot, The Calling of St Peter and St Andrew (1886-94), now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

Our Gospel reading today is one of the most famous of all Biblical passages, when Jesus calls on some fishermen to become “fishers of men”, and they drop everything to follow Him.

This can seem a little intimidating. We’re not all made to be the sort of people who just walk away from their jobs to convert the world. Most of us don’t have the right sort of personality, and some of us might be just a little too old for that sort of thing. More to the point, some of us might have responsibilities that we just can’t walk away from. Especially, we might have people we just can’t walk away from. I always feel a little sorry for Zebedee when I hear this reading, as his sons James and John simply walk off the job to follow Jesus.

Here are two little things to think about in relation to it. Firstly, remember that not all of Jesus’ followers were called to be apostles. The apostles are certainly in the centre of the action in the Gospels, but Jesus clearly has other devoted disciples who live in fixed places. Do you remember Jesus going to stay with his friends Mary and Martha in their home? Do you remember how, when Jesus and the apostles arrive in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, He clearly has other followers there who have made preparations.

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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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