sermon

Saviour in a Manger: Sermon Preached on 25th December 2022 (Christmas Day)

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Readings – Isaiah 52.7-10; Luke 2.1-20

“…to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Luke’s Gospel, from which we hear the Christmas story this morning, is the familiar and cosy Christmas Gospel. At first sight anyway. It is from here that we get all those elements that we like to see our kids or grandkids act out at their nativity plays – the angels, the shepherds, the baby in the manger. As we hear it so often, we can be inclined to snooze off when we hear it in church, and even more inclined to snooze off when we get a sermon about it when we actually want to get to our Christmas lunch. We can be tempted to dismiss it as a soppy fairy-story: great for kids to have a bit of fun with, but not something that self-respecting adults should take too seriously.

The Angels Appearing to the Shepherds, William Blake (1809).

Let me implore you to pay it a bit more attention on this Christmas morning, because when one explores this story a little, it holds a few surprises. For starters, it is set in a realistic and indeed rather gritty world. It is a world not as different from our own as we might expect. We see a cold and indifferent state bureaucracy; underperforming private services where the customer certainly is not king; and people working at vital jobs too poor to put a decent roof over their heads. All this was taking place in what was the mightiest empire the world had ever seen up; it is as if we were discovering the same conditions in Edwardian England, or in today’s California – which is, of course, we could well do.

So, St Luke gives his story of the birth of Jesus a true-to-life setting in the economy section of the Roman Empire. Oh, sure, the angels singing in the sky are otherworldly and mystical and strange (we’ll come back to them) – but they appear in a context that could be a setting for a film directed by Ken Loach. You know, Cathy Come Home, Kes, Daniel Blake, and then the historical one set in the Roman Empire about the unmarried mother giving birth in a stable.

Unmarried mother? Yes, our Gospel reading this morning is very clear about that; Joseph was only “engaged” to Mary. They hadn’t actually tied the knot yet, even after the archangel Gabriel, the visit to Elizabeth, the strange circumstances of John the Baptist’s birth, and all that. Let me be clear, this isn’t one of those moments like where the bishop denies the Resurrection on Easter Day or says God is just a metaphor for goodness: the biblical text is very clear that Mary was an unmarried mother.

All that is important context for the news that the angels give to the shepherds about the baby. They claim it is the Christ, the Messiah, the great leader long heralded in prophecy who was going to forcibly boot the Romans out of the Holy Land and then set up an enlightened and godly state where justice and peace would reign.

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Good Enough As We Are: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2022 (Midnight Mass)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9: 2, 6–7; John 1: 1-14     

“For a child has been born for us … authority rests upon his shoulders.” 

The international situation is darkening with a series of protracted and frightening wars, while domestically people are setting their hearts against God. Religiously-minded people see that abandonment of God as a direct cause of the obvious collapse in standards in public life, especially among political leaders. I am not referring to the present day, but to the time when our Old Testament reading was written by Isaiah, around two-thousand seven hundred years ago.

In the midst of this darkness, Isaiah wrote down a vision of a brighter future.  In it, a child is born who will have authority to lead people from darkness into light. He will establish peace and justice, and even be known as “Mighty God”.

Hundreds of years later, about the same distance in time as separates us from knights in armour and feudal lords, the vision still inspired many people to keep hope in difficult times. Some of them had been followers of a wandering preacher called Jesus, whose life was so extraordinary and so surrounded by miracles and the seemingly impossible that they reached the conclusion he was the Son of God. As they reflected on the sacred writings of the Jewish faith which they all devoutly held, this was one of the pieces they thought had foretold Jesus all along.

Our Gospel reading was also a product of those followers, as they wrote down their own reflections on what they had experienced through Jesus. Its first sentence is particularly famous – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Famous it might be, but it can be a little difficult to unpack. So let me try to explain. The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. But the Word was also apparently with God in the beginning. So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?

Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck (1436)

Now here’s another strange phrase from our Gospel reading – “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” You might have noticed that I knelt when I read that phrase. That’s because it expresses the thing that is so unique about the Christian faith – not only that there is a God, but also that God holds us human beings in such high esteem that He actually became one of us, took on human flesh Himself, to open the way to eternal life for us.

And it’s not just the fact that God became a human being that is amazing, but how He did it, the sort of human being He became. For there couldn’t be more of a contrast between Jesus’ supernatural beginnings and his earthly beginnings. Jesus was with the creator of the universe when it all started, and indeed was Himself the creator of the universe, grand concepts that seem to be full of paradox and which aren’t really understandable in human language. At the same time, Jesus became one of us in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to Him in poverty in a stable, as physically weak as any other baby, and absolutely vulnerable and dependent like any other baby. The maker of the universe and the baby in the stall are one and the same: both are the baby who was prophesied by Isaiah all those centuries before.

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Descended from David: Sermon Preached on 18th December 2022 (The Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25     

“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David…’”

The Fourth Sunday of Advent can be a difficult moment in the church’s calendar for a preacher. The outside world is already at the height of its Christmas party season, yet in the Church we are commanded to wait for a few days yet, to remain a little longer in that state of longing that defines much of our lives as Christians, that of waiting for a new and better world to emerge. We try our best to be patient, to avoid jumping the gun by celebrating the Christ-child coming into the world before Christmas Day, but St John’s is already full of Christmas trees and we’ve all probably been to a few Christmas parties.

The Christmas concerts and nativity plays we attend tend to jumble up elements from the different accounts of Christ’s origins. As Advent also begins the cycle of Gospel readings for each year, I thought this odd moment in the Church’s year might give us an opportunity to look specifically at Matthew’s account of Christ’s origins and what they might mean for us, because most of our Sunday Gospel readings through until next November will come from Matthew, including this morning’s Gospel.

The accounts of Jesus’ origins are very different between the four Gospels. Mark, the action gospel, doesn’t worry at all about Jesus’ origins – he starts by establishing John the Baptist as the messenger prophesied by Isaiah… and then simply gets on with the action, with the first scene being Jesus’ baptism at the start of his public ministry. John starts with the wonderful prose-poem proclaiming Jesus’ supernatural origins at the beginning of the universe, which we will hear as the Midnight Gospel next week, before also getting straight into the action of Jesus’ public ministry without worrying about his earthly origins. Luke is the source of most of the stories familiar from nativity plays – the shepherds, the angels, the manger, and all that. Its account of Jesus’ birth is also told from the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth, giving an unusual prominence to the voices of women for a work of ancient literature. Matthew give us the Wise Men and King Herod, and the terrible massacre of the babies of Bethlehem, all too believable as we look at the worst despots of our own world.

Yet especially in the light of Luke’s account, we can find today’s reading from Matthew about Jesus’ origins a little disappointing. The story of Mary’s pregnancy is told entirely from the perspective of Joseph. Given our own cultural context, we almost certainly find ourselves taking a sharp breath when we hear that Joseph “planned to dismiss her quietly”.

Also jarring is how obviously important it is to Matthew that Jesus is a descendant of King David, the greatest of Israel’s rulers. Both Jesus and Joseph had already been established as descendants of David in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel; in today’s reading, the angel who convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, addresses him as “son of David”. King David is a key element in the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel, yet we often neglect it in how we understand Jesus Christ today.

King David with his harp on the tower of Christ Church, Shaw. © Gerry Lynch, 24 June 2017

Partly, I think, that is because in our culture, most of us consider someone’s ancestry as being of little importance in telling us about the sort of person they are. Thank the Lord, this is now considered rather politically incorrect. But it also marks us out as being different from most cultures historically, and so we can miss why it was important to Matthew and his readers that Jesus was a descendant of David, and what they would have taken from that about His character and mission on Earth. I think it remains important for us too that Christ was descended from David, and given that David Evans’ Bible study group is looking at King David at the moment, it might be interesting for us to think about why.

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Waiting Patiently: Sermon Preached on 11th December 2022 (The Third Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – James 5: 7–10; Matthew 11: 2–11

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”

The other day, I tried to order one of those little plastic ice scrapers for the car from Amazon, partly so that I could be sure of getting here to take this service this morning! Given the pre-Christmas rush, I couldn’t get one to arrive before the middle of next week.

“How dare they”, I fumed inwardly to myself, “I’m an Amazon Prime member specifically so I can get deliveries of almost anything I need overnight. Just because they’re busy, and just because half the factories in China have been shut for most of this year, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have nearly anything I need within 24 hours!”

A snowy scene as I left St Peter’s, Poulshot, after preaching this sermon.

Patience is a virtue: but not one I have ever been much possessed of! The structure of modern society doesn’t help, with its promise that it can satisfy any of our wants almost instantaneously. Yet fulfilling most needs more significant than an ice-scraper or a case of wine demands patience, and can’t be done with a few clicks on a website.

By the time John the Baptist came along, some strands of Jewish opinion were waiting with impatient fervour for a Messiah, a religious-political leader who they believed would remove the Roman occupiers and usher in a new political order of justice and righteousness in a godly independent state.

Now, Matthew’s Gospel identified Jesus as the Messiah in its very first sentence, and it does so again in this morning’s Gospel reading. But that is something intended for those, like us, reading the story much later: in the action of the story, even Jesus’ closest followers have not worked out his true identity by this point. When, shortly afterwards, Peter does work out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell anyone. The time was not yet ripe.

The messages that pass between John and Jesus here are interesting in that light. Firstly, John the Baptist, in prison at the hands of Herod Antipas, asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” So, despite the fact nothing could possibly be better news for John in those terrible circumstances than to hear that Jesus, the man he baptised in the Jordan, is the Messiah, he is prepared to wait if the time is not yet ripe for God to send it.

Another interesting thing is that Jesus doesn’t simply say that He is the Messiah. Instead, he asks John’s messengers to relay news of his miracles and says “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Jesus presents the evidence of what he is doing in the world, but respects John’s right to make up his own mind about his nature in good faith. Whether or not he accepts that Jesus is the Messiah, he will be blessed if he takes no offence Him.

There is a lot in this exchange that chimes with our experience of how God interacts with humanity in our world. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. Maybe it is possible, in the vastness of the universe, that some lengthy sequence of random events led to the existence not only of life, but intelligent, self-aware life, with a sense of morality.

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The Kingdom of Heaven: Sermon Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington, Sunday 4th December 2022 (The Second Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – Romans 15: 4–13; Matthew 3: 1–12

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

This morning’s Gospel doesn’t mention Jesus directly; it instead tells the story of the public ministry of John the Baptist. Yet, it is important for understanding Jesus’ ministry and mission, especially as related in Matthew’s Gospel, which will supply nearly all of our all of our Sunday Gospel readings between now and next November. For it directly connects the preaching of John and of Jesus. John in his preaching calls on people to: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Matthew later reports Jesus using this phrase habitually, word for word, in his own preaching.

The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence (1910) by Evelyn de Morgan.

“The kingdom of heaven” is a phrase specific to Matthew’s Gospel and it is repeated twenty-four times in it, so it is important to think about what it might mean, for we are going to be hearing it a lot in church over the next year.

The “kingdom of heaven” is a phrase that is never rigidly defined; Jesus explains it mainly in parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; it’s like treasure hidden in a field; like a merchant in search of fine pearls; like a net that was thrown into the sea; like a landowner who goes out in the early morning to hire workers.

Parables catch us in different ways in different points of our lives. The same story can present us with different truths and different lessons depending on how and where we hear it. So the kingdom of heaven seems to be hard to pin down, to be something that changes depending on the person encountering it and the context in which it’s encountered. It isn’t something that’s rigid or fixed, but instead lives and breathes and adapts and evolves.

This can seem frustrating when all we’re looking for is a few simple rules for life – if you’re looking for that, I recommend the Ten Commandments painted on the wall behind me – but remember, if the kingdom of heaven really is something that is truly from God rather than just being invented by people, then it must lie partly beyond human understanding.

More than that, and this really is good news, if the kingdom of heaven is truly from God, it isn’t something that can be grasped or controlled by human beings as a way of setting themselves up in power over other human beings. It can’t become an oppressive power structure, in the way even the most enlightened earthly kingdoms do from time to time. Indeed Jesus will say early in his public ministry, in the Sermon on the Mount, that this kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Those who seek power often seek to take the kingdom of heaven by force and prevent those they disapprove of from entering it – but they do not own it, for it is the possession of the humble and those who are the victims of unjust power. When we seek to control the kingdom of heaven, it seems to crumble in our grasp; yet it is so precious that people will sell all that they have to possess it.

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Jesus is Coming Back: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th November 2022 (The First Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – Romans 13: 11–14; Matthew 24: 36–44

“…the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

I want to start this morning with a question: Do you believe that Jesus is going to, you know, actually return and be your judge?

I know we say in the Creed every Sunday, that “I believe that He will come in glory to judge both the living and the dead”, but if you’re like me, you’ll be more than a little uncomfortable with the topic.

The famous late 15th Century doom painting at St Thomas’, Salisbury. © Gerry Lynch, 31 July 2016

Part of the reason for that is because there are Christians who spend entirely too much time not only thinking about the Second Coming, but also shouting about it. These people always seem to be bad, sad, or mad – or all three at the same time – full of angry judgementalism towards others while howling at the moon themselves. We rightly don’t want to be like them.

So well tell ourselves that Christianity isn’t like that, or at least our Christianity isn’t like that. We remind ourselves that the Bible also says in three plain words that “God is love” – in fact, had our epistle reading from Romans started one verse earlier, we would have heard St Paul state clearly that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” We tell ourselves that means something like “God is all-forgiving and all-accepting”. That allows us to leave the preaching about Jesus coming back to the headbangers and fundamentalists and get on with trying to be more like this all-forgiving, all-accepting God.

Yet avoiding guilt by association is only one reason why we don’t like talking about the Second Coming. Another part of it is, of course, that if all this stuff that Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel is true, then we’re going to be subject to judgement at His hands when He returns, and we’re worried about that. Now, the uncomfortable reality is that especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which is going to supply most of our Sunday Gospel readings from now until next November, Jesus talks about judgement a lot. In fact, He talks about carrying out the Last Judgement Himself, in the same section where he says the nice stuff about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Does that scare you?

Well, let’s unpack it a bit.

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Heaven in Our Hearts: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes, Sunday 30th October 2022 (Commemoration of the Departed for All Souls’)

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Readings – Isaiah 52: 7–10; Luke 24: 13–31

 “Now all the world she knew is dead
  In this small room she lives her days
The wash-hand stand and single bed
  Screened from the public gaze.”

The poem ‘House of Rest’ is not one of Betjeman’s more famous poems, but it is a lovely and profound one. It describes the life of a very infirm rector’s widow living in a nursing home. She spends her days living in her memories of the husband and children with whom she once shared an active, happy, life.

“Lincoln, by Valentine and Co.,
  Now yellowish brown and stained,
But there some fifty years ago
  Her Harry was ordained;

[…]

Aroused at seven, to bed by ten,
  They fully lived each day,
Dead sons, so motor-bike-mad then,
  And daughters far away.”

Death is part of all of our lives, yet we dislike contemplating it. That’s why we’re so keen to use euphemisms to describe death – passing away, departing from us – but death is as unavoidable and as real as it gets.

Funerals over recent decades have, on average, become much more jolly affairs, much more inclined to be celebrations of life than means of helping people process the overwhelming cocktail of experiences and emotions that proximity to death involves. It is almost as if a society where few people really believe in an afterlife doesn’t want to deal with how final and overwhelming death is.

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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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