sermon

Accepting Our Limits: Sermon Preached on 23rd October 2022 (The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 2 Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14

“…the time of my departure is at hand.”

On Tuesday, I went for a long walk on my day off, as is my wont. It was an extraordinary day for the time of year, almost cloudless and with temperatures in the high teens. As I walked over the fields into Bishops Cannings from Devizes, I was confronted by a magnificent sight – two trees at the very peak of their autumn colour, framing that majestic parish church and lovely village pub with a riot of reds and golds. The light was absolutely superb.

St Mary the Virgin, Bishops Cannings, St Luke’s Day 2022, © Gerry Lynch.

Yesterday, I drove through Bishops Cannings and noticed that those trees had lost some of their leaves in the storms of Friday, and that their colours were losing a little of their lustre. Although the temperatures remain extraordinarily mild for the season, it was a cloudy day, without the translucent light of Tuesday morning. It was still a pretty scene – but no longer possessed of the sort of transfiguring beauty it held just four days before.

Autumn is a particularly transient time of year. Fresh beauties emerge from the landscape and vanish again in a matter of days. Soon will come the bare trees and bare fields of winter. That is also the pattern of our lives. Everything has a finite end, a limit. Nothing lasts forever, and many things that enlighten and energise our lives are around only for a very short span.

The present moment is all we have.

In our epistle reading this morning, St Paul is near the end. He clearly expects to die soon – he has run his race. This has not made him a perfect person, and he still seems to have energy to vent his spleen at those who he feels let him down in his hour of great need, in the passive-aggressive tone Paul often adopts.

I love Paul, and I love his writings, but I can definitely see why almost everyone seems to have lost patience with him at one time or another. Even the man who was perhaps his closest companion, Barnabas, a man so sweet-natured that he was nicknamed ‘The Encourager’, took his leave of Paul once in Antioch when his constant arguing became too much.

Paul was not perfect but, to be fair, at the core of his writings is the idea that salvation is not a reward for passing a particular standard of goodness but something that God gives us as a free gift, because God is love. And for all that Paul was a man with obvious faults, he was also a man with tremendous gifts. Here, he contemplates the end of his life without fear, absolutely trusting God will receive him in heaven.

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Are You A Leper?: Sermon Preached in St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 9th October 2022 (Seventeenth  Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19

“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”

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

Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.

Two fences with a road running between them and two pedestrians passing with their back to camera.
Us and Them – the West Belfast Peace Line at Conway Street, 6 June 2020.

Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.

In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.

What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.

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Harvesting the Bread of Life: Sermon Preached in St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 25th September 2022 (Harvest Festival)

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“I am the bread of life. Who ever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Readings – Philippians 4: 4–9; John 6: 25–35.

On Thursday, I attended one of the Creationtide talks we are hosting in St Mary’s, this one by Damian Haasjes of the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. It was a very good talk, but I was amazed at the lengths its funders forced the Trust to go to assemble a hard economic and public heath case that spending time in nature is good for people, especially more vulnerable people. I would have thought it was obvious, because enmeshing ourselves in the web of life so transparently lifts the spirit and heals the soul. Our present Western culture often seems obsessed with the price of everything while being happy to be ignorant of the value of anything. The most transcendent, spiritual, and mystical parts of our lives are expected to justify themselves in pounds, pence, and additional Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years.

Please keep that in mind as we explore this morning’s Gospel reading, containing a phrase familiar to many of you, “I am the bread of life”.

Sunset with crepuscular rays shining behind some low hills t Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch
The obvious beauty of nature: sunset at Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch

It helps us understand this incident better if we know its place in the chain of events in St John’s Gospel. Firstly, it comes the day after John’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and indeed the crowd from the day before seems to have followed Jesus despite His attempts to slip away to somewhere quiet.

Many of these people, therefore, have only the day before benefited directly from Jesus working perhaps His most high profile and spectacular miracle, feeding thousands of them with just a few baskets of bread. More than that, they have benefited from a miracle that identifies Jesus as the true successor of Moses – because it directly parallels the way God fed the Hebrews fleeing Egypt under Moses’ leadership with Manna from heaven.

But despite having swallowed His miraculous bread, the crowd doesn’t want to swallow Jesus’ difficult teaching about the bread of life. They want another mega-miracle to feast their eyes on, and shortly after this morning’s passage, when he doesn’t give them one, the crowd turns on Jesus, and He starts to lose followers.

I think there is something profound and easily missed here about our insatiable appetites. One miracle, even if it’s, you know, pretty spectacular, is not enough to convince the crowd of Jesus’ nature. Accepting that we have enough is difficult for us. That lies at the root of our present ecological crisis.

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Transcendence Amid Our Troubles: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 28th August 2022 (The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Hebrews 13:1–8, 15–16; Luke 14:1,7–14

“When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.”

On Friday, I accompanied Mike our churchwarden up into the tower, so he could have a look at why our church clock is currently broken and take some photos to send off to the experts. Having arrived here, as many of you will remember, in very strange lockdown circumstances, this was my first trip up the tower. This was therefore the first chance I had to see the wonderful Norman stone-carving in the bell-ringers’ chamber. It is of the same pattern as the stonework behind me in the chancel, but unlike the stonework on this level, it is essentially untouched by later restoration. What is remarkable is that the people who carved it must have known that, six metres or so up in the tower, it would be seen by very few people. Yet that seemed not to matter, as they were doing the work for the glory of God. In a strange way, it seems to be beauty created for its own sake that moves us most deeply; it seems to be the things that nourish us most emotionally do so precisely because they have not been made to be useful.

Restored Stonework on the Norman Pattern in St John’s Chancel

There is, to me, something about the depth of time here in St John’s that puts everything in perspective; the events these stones have witnessed put our present day troubles in their proper context. It is not that we do not face grave problems, but it helps to be reminded that people have always faced grave problems, and people have always, at their best, transcended them. Yet there is something more than that in the air here – it feels like prayer has been soaked into the stones, as if the way people have prayed here and celebrated the Eucharist here over nearly 1,000 years has worn thin the barrier between this world and what lies beyond.

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly bear to listen to the news at the moment. The world faces profound problems, and it feels like our political system has seized up entirely in the face of those problems. It is fairly obvious that there is going to have to be some tremendous re-configuration of our energy supply, and the response from our leaders seems to be to act like a rabbit in the headlights. For example, I have yet to hear any politician levelling with the public about the scale of very disruptive infrastructure work that will be needed, both to deal with climate change and to reduce our vulnerability to the like of Mr Putin. Beyond fears of climate disaster, many of us fear acutely and with good reason that we will be left poverty-stricken over this winter. One feels entirely powerless in the face of it.

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Keeping the Sabbath?: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 21st August 2022 (The Tenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Jeremiah 1:4–10; Luke 13: 10–17

“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not the sabbath day.”

Let me begin with a story from my mother country, about a young Presbyterian minister newly arrived in his first congregation, out in the rural parts of County Antrim where a strict observance of the Lord’s Day is considered essential, at least among Presbyterians. Having spent part of his training in Africa and another part in a deprived housing estate closer to home, the young minister was full of fire for God’s Kingdom to come on Earth as it is in heaven, and he tried to ensure his sermons inspired his congregation to work for social justice. Sometimes they may have even been a bit… whisper it… political.

Edinburgh Street Preacher, 14 December 2018 © Gerry Lynch

Not all of his congregation were impressed by these sermons, and one old spinster in particular would enjoin him Sunday by Sunday to return to more traditional themes. As the weeks turned into months she did so in increasingly shrill tones. Wasn’t it terrible Reverend Campbell, she said, that the supermarkets were open on a Sunday these days and, worse still, that some of members of this very congregation went straight from church to do their shopping, and wouldn’t he like to preach against that? Even worse, she later revealed, some villagers went to the pub for their Sunday lunch, and beyond even that, some of them went to pubs run by Roman Catholics. Now, surely that was something he needed to take a stand against instead of blethering on about the cassava harvest in Nigeria.

Eventually, the young minister had his fill of it, and found he had to say something, even to a lady who put a generously stuffed envelope on the plate every Sunday.

“Miss McDonald”, he said, “surely even our Lord healed people on the Sabbath.”

“Aye”, she replied, “And I didn’t think any better of Him for that either.”

I’m sure I’m not the only one here to have been at the wrong end of some obnoxious and aggressive Bible-thumpers in my time. It’s therefore always reassuring to rediscover, as we do in this morning’s Gospel, that Jesus, God made human, was the target for Bible-thumpers Himself. We’ve all known people about whom one might reasonably joke that “He would tell God he was wrong about the Bible.” Today’s Gospel reminds us that this quite literally did happen. We have the Bible itself reminding us that there are spiritual dangers in using it as a quarry to have a go at other people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rt Rev’d Christopher Herbert Sermon on Beauty

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This sermon, on beauty, was preached by Christopher Herbert on 25 May 2014 as part of St Paul’s Cathedral’s sermon series ‘What I Want to Say Now: Retired Bishops Speak Out’. Listening to it via YouTube more than eight years after it was preached, I was struck by its commitment to the appreciation of beauty as a means of apprehending as best human beings can something of the true mystery of God. Herbert criticises trenchantly the Church of England’s neglect of the patrimony of buildings, prayers, poetry, and hymnody it has been bequeathed. If anything, this has become more entrenched since 2014.

More optimistically, on the other hand, I think there are possibilities of the image-oriented Instagram generation rediscovering the joys in ‘reading’ a Church and its contents in a way that probably hasn’t been true since the Reformation, which Herbert inevitably misses and few in the Church have yet noticed.

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A couple of months ago, a book was published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s entitled A Companion to the Bible and the Arts, and in it is an essay by Nicholas Bielby, and that essay has not left me alone. It’s actually about the subtleties and difficulties of biblical translation, and in it almost as a throwaway line he writes this:

If beauty is an attribute of God and His Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of His Word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells us and we would hope to find it in the way it is told.

His essay is a delight, and thought it focuses on biblical translation, it ranges more widely into the whole field of aesthetics, and I want to quote him again:

An aesthetic experience has this sense of rediscovery of something unknown, but entirely familiar, because it feels right, and true, and beautiful.

You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t overload the word ‘feeling’. Because something feels right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.

Well, I’ve read and reread that essay with great enjoyment, partly because it is so carefully written, but also because it raises an issue to which I believe we need to give serious attention, and that is the whole question of beauty.

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Disappointed in Jesus?: Sermon Preached at Trinity Parish Church, Jersey, Sunday 17th July 2022 (The Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10: 38–42

‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Earlier this week, a member of the Trinity congregation told me they thought this was the hardest story in the Gospels to deal with. Many of us have a visceral emotional reaction to it, which we try to suppress because we want to be good Christians who value our Bibles. Yet we find ourselves disappointed in the Jesus who seems to bark at an overworked Martha when she asks for help. If that’s your instinctive reaction to the story, please don’t suppress it, but hold on to it as we unpack it.

An ’away match’ in Jersey in July; what a hardship posting?!?!? (Trinity Parish Church, 10 July 2022, © Gerry Lynch_

This reading, from Luke’s Gospel, is one of three Bible stories that mention Martha. The other two are in John’s Gospel: they are the raising of Lazarus, and then John’s version of the story of the woman pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet.

While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”.

The story in John’s Gospel of Jesus visiting the house in Bethany for a meal is so similar to the one we heard this morning that we might well wonder if they are different accounts of the same event. In that one, Martha serves dinner while Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with some very expensive perfume.

Any conversation between Jesus and Martha needs to be understood in the context that they are the closest of friends. He wasn’t snapping at a stranger.

So, I wonder was Jesus gently teasing his dear friend Martha here? Would Martha have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs and being the perfect host and told her just to take it easy for a few hours? Because basically He did tell her that – “you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing.”

We get the sense that perhaps Martha was the sort of very practical person who can’t relax until every bit of work is done – but then keeps finding another little job to do. Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.

It is tempting to get our sense of our own worth from what we do, rather than from accepting what we are. Of course, we all have a regular round of tasks we need to get done to earn our living and keep ourselves and our homes in order. But that is not what makes us valuable; you, I, and every human being in the world is of value simply because we are children of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes, therefore, we need to give ourselves space to just be – to be ourselves and to be with God, to accept ourselves as the people God made us, imperfect but loveable and dearly loved by God.

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A Vision for the Appointed Time: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd July 2022 (Feast of St Thomas)

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Readings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29

“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”

It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.

A carpet of flowers in the Namaqualand desert around a water-pumping mill.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011

On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.

The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.

There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.

This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.

It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.

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Recapturing the Imagination of Our Culture: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26th June 2022 (Patronal Festival)

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Readings – Isaiah 40: 1–11; Luke 1:57–66, 80

A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’

Some of you will by now know of my fondness for financial crisis movies. One, called The Big Short, tells the tale of the few who saw in advance the coming American mortgage crash of the late 2000s. They were a ragbag collection of outsiders – an autistic genius, bright young things with no stake in the system, and even a man so honest about his own greed that had no illusions about the probity of others. They were scoffed at for years, but they were right, and betting against the market made them earthly riches at the very moment when others were losing their shirts.

A photo of Christian Bale acting as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.
Eccentrically brilliant – Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.

Outsiders often perceive truths too disturbing for those comfortable with the existing order. Yet the line between genius and madness can be thin and it can be hard to tell those voices crying profound truths into the wilderness apart from the cacophony of those howling at the Moon. Is it is always safest to herd ourselves behind conventional wisdom, because then at least if we are wrong, we will have plenty of company in our mistakes.

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Our first reading presents us with a vision of God nurturing and feeding His people after a time of trouble. This is from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, the introduction to the second of Isaiah’s three distinct blocks of writing, and it was written in Babylon, probably towards the end of the half century of exile from Jerusalem. It sought to reassure people who had suffered much for their faith that God had not given up on them and would soon allow them to return home.

One verse is quite difficult and often glossed over. While Jerusalem’s “penalty is paid” that is because “she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” There is no attempt here to avoid the idea that the exiles, mostly from the ruling elite of Jerusalem, were themselves largely responsible for their own misfortune. Instead of justice, they chose selfishness, idolatry, and the path of least resistance. They silenced and persecuted those who told them difficult truths they didn’t want to hear. They had lost the Kingdom and they had blinking well deserved it.

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