sermon

Jubilee and the Holy Spirit: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th June 2022 (Pentecost)

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Readings – Acts 2: 1–21; Romans 8: 14–17; John 14: 8–17, 25–27.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”. 

Seventy years and a few months ago, a young woman was on an exotic holiday with her husband in Kenya. She was staying in the Treetops Hotel, which was literally a very fancy and well-serviced treehouse, watching the big game animals play on the savannah below, when she heard the news that, half a world away, her father had died.

The death of a parent, as many of us know, is a wrenching moment in life, when one’s own personal world is knocked off its axis. What was different for this young woman was that she not only had to grieve as any child does a parent, but she also had instantly to become a Head of State, for this was the moment when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI.

Among the many tremendous changes that have taken place over the seven decades since, perhaps the most profound has been that in the status of women. The world of 1952 was still a man’s world. Women in positions of power were rare: Elizabeth’s first cabinet had not a single female minister. It was essentially unheard of for a young woman – and Elizabeth was only twenty-five – to be in any position of authority in society except with respect to children.

It took remarkable strength of character to thrive in that context – and she did thrive, through staggering changes. Her reign began as head of an Empire that stretched from Malaya to Jamaica, and continues into the age of Brexit. China was an impoverished global backwater seventy years ago, while the now-disappeared Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers. The Queen has seen two female Prime Ministers come and go, something unimaginable when she took office. Her reign began when homosexuality was against the law yet eventually saw marriage opened to couples of the same sex. In 1952, the Pill had not been developed, Elvis Presley and John Lennon had not been heard of, human beings had yet to set foot in Space, and the world’s few computers occupied vast sheds of tape reels and valves.

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The Worth of Doubters: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 24th April 2022 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Readings – Acts 5: 27–32; John 20: 19–31

“Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

I wonder when you last heard a friend or an acquaintance described as “a bit of a Doubting Thomas?” Perhaps you have even been described as a “Doubting Thomas” yourself. It isn’t usually intended as a positive assessment. A Doubting Thomas, including the original in today’s Gospel reading can often be presented as a cynic who is committed to nothing.

‘Still Doubting’, by John Glanville Gregory, after Caravaggio.

Yet ‘uncommitted’ isn’t the picture of Thomas we get from other passages in John’s Gospel. To shed light on this and some other things in this morning’s Gospel reading, we need to jump back to the 11th chapter of John. As I don’t expect you to remember what happens in every bit of the Bible by chapter number, let me reassure you that this is a passage of scripture familiar to most of you: it’s the story of the raising of Lazarus. One significant thing about it is that it’s the last miracle and indeed last major “action scene” in John’s Gospel before Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem.

Back then, when Jesus’ life was under threat by stone-throwing mobs, Thomas was the one who responded to His suggestion of a trip into deeply hostile Judaea by telling his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Here we see not an uncommitted backslider but a deeply loyal follower of Christ; perhaps even a fanatic.

Despite his deep commitment, can we blame Thomas for being sceptical, faced with tales from his friends that Jesus had returned from the dead, walking through walls to appear in the middle of locked rooms? We have all experienced people reacting to shocking news, especially to the death of a loved one, with denial. Indeed, I have found myself engaging in denial at times, and I suspect most of you have done so too. It’s a natural human tendency; so personally I have more than a little fellow-feeling with Thomas in this passage when he is wary of his companions engaging in denial.

The Church needs its Thomases, because it needs Christians of all sorts of temperaments and outlooks. It needs its sceptics as well as its enthusiasts, its pragmatists as well as its romantics. And that means that the Church needs all of you, just as you are, otherwise God would not have called you to be here this morning.

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The Gardener of Life: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 17th April 2022 (Easter Day)

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Readings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’

What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?

St Mary’s, Potterne – a lovely place to celebrate my first Easter Mass. © Gerry Lynch

Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?

Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.

Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.

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Admit It, You Think Judas is Right: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd April 2022 (Fifth Sunday of Lent)

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Readings – Isaiah 43: 16–21; John 12: 1–8

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 

Admit it, a large part of you agrees with Judas when he asks Jesus this question… keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it!

A view of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery from the bell tower of St Sophia’s in Kyiv, 13 August 2017.
St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, 13 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch

If you have seen television news reports from Kyiv, you will doubtless have seen the magnificent St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. A huge trapezium of sky-blue with white vertical stripes, all capped by seven golden domes, and next to it an even bigger clock-tower in similar colours with a truly huge golden dome on top. It was originally built towards the end of the 11th Century, a few decades before our own St John’s, and like our St John’s it was developed in fits and starts over many centuries. It was hugely expanded in the ornate Ukrainian Baroque style which make Kyiv’s churches and monasteries a delight during the 18th Century, the period when many of our beautifully carved wall memorials in St John’s were erected.

What I’ll tell you next is hard to believe, although we have learned in recent weeks the depth of hatred Stalin held for Ukrainian culture and identity, but those wonderful 18th Century baroque extensions were used as an excuse for the Soviet authorities to declare the monastery historically “inauthentic” in 1934, and it was demolished, replaced by a modern office block housing the administrative headquarters of Soviet Ukraine. What we see today has been entirely rebuilt over the last thirty years, as faithfully as possible to what was there before.

On one level, buildings are just stones: but they are also things that can move people to tears through their beauty, and be the repositories of the soul of a nation, or a family, or a faith. Stalin, among others, understood how much buildings mattered – St Michael’s was one of thousands of churches destroyed across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as the state tried to destroy Christianity. But he also understood the power of beautiful buildings to lift up and renew. Much of the centre of Kyiv was destroyed during the Second World War, and it was the site of one of the first rebuilding efforts in the immediate post-War years, especially around the famous Maidan, a handsome cityscape of optimistic wedding-cake towers and neo-classical pillars. The aim was to incarnate in stone the beauty of Communist ideals of progress and enlightenment, and inspire the people of Ukraine to play their part in rebuilding the USSR after the depredations of Hitler.

Domes of St Michael's in Kyiv
Domes of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, 10 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch.

Let us turn the clock back even further, before the construction of St Michael’s in Kyiv and St John’s in Devizes, before even the times when Christ walked the earth, to the time when the Scythians were the people who dominated the great Eurasian plain, from Ukraine in the west as far as Mongolia in the east. A few years ago there was an exhibition of their art at the British Museum. The Scythians had no writing, but worked gold with exquisite skill, the equal of the Greeks and Persians of the same period. Complex depictions of Tree of Life, sometimes a foot high, reveal a people with a keen sense of spirituality and the wonder of creation. The instinct for beauty seems to be hard-wired into us.

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The Cost of Love: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th March 2022 (Mothering Sunday)

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Readings – Colossians 3: 12–17; John 19: 25b–27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” 

Let me start this morning’s sermon with a verse of poetry:

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.

So begins the greatest poem of Bill Vanstone, seen by many as the most impressive Anglican thinker and theologian of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. At this time of year, with the weather magnificent and the air full of the scents and new life of spring, even in times as troubled as those we are in, one can be enraptured by this sort of mood, simply by being alive. It feels like heaven! Perhaps indeed it is an intimation of heaven.

A beautiful morning for another away match at Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch

Of course, even in our brightest moments, that is never the whole story. Many of us will come here this morning with serious problems of our own; even those of us fortunate enough not to be in that position will be deeply worried about serious problems faced by people we love.

Love is the greatest gift given to any of us by God. It is the most wonderful and miraculous and life-giving thing about being human. Yet it also has a tremendous cost. It opens us up to feeling the pains of the people we love.  The second stanza of Vanstone’s poem is clear about that cost, as it continues:

Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Some people seem to think that even to celebrate this Sunday as Mother’s Day is somehow excluding and potentially wounding for those without children or whose relationships with their mothers were difficult. Well, as a childless, single man, let me say that it is simply an obvious statement of fact that mothers have a particular and unique relationship with the children they have born in their womb, an intensely physical connection that no male can ever have. Mothers perhaps more than any of us know just how costly and agonising love can be.

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War and the Devil: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 6th March 2022 (The First Sunday in Lent)

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Readings – Romans 10:8–13; Luke 4: 1–13

“Jesus … was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” 

One of my favourite films is a movie made eleven years ago named Margin Call. It is a fictionalised version of 24 hours in the life of a big New York merchant bank at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

In the small hours of the morning, two well-tailored bankers assimilate the possibility of the world economy collapsing thanks, in part, to their extreme investment risks. At one point, the younger one turns to the older and says, “This is bizarre. It’s like a dream.”

“Oh, I don’t know”, comes the reply, “Seems like we may have just woken up.”

The world of these men and women collapses in the space of a day, to their shock and horror. As the movie progresses, however, it becomes apparent that they knew all along that they were following a path that was unsustainable, but one that was making them all rich. They were lying to the rest of us, of course, but mostly they were lying to themselves. Part of the movie’s power comes from the way it depicts how the system rapidly seduces the young graduate trainees into believing that this world of greed and lies is normal, even good.

Subsequently disgraced – Kevin Spacey in Margin Call (2011).

Ironically, the wise old trader in that exchange was Kevin Spacey – soon afterwards disgraced, and deservedly so, for using his artistic genius as bait to exploit young men who dreamed of being stars.

Both the movie and the real-life story of its star are metaphors for the world of the last thirty years, which indulged itself in the myth that humanity was starting to escape the restrictions of its nature, and that freedom and prosperity for all could be best ensured by each of us pursuing our desires and demands to the maximum extent.

We need to face facts: we are never far away from the wilderness, where the Devil lurks.

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Where is Your Faith?: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 20th February 2022 (The 2nd Sunday before Lent)

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Readings – Revelation 4; Luke 8:22–25

‘Where is your faith?’

I think we all know by now that the world’s Number 1 tennis player, Novak Djokovic, refuses to take a coronavirus vaccine. For many weeks now, this has been one of the most reported news stories all over the world. What I find odd is that nobody asks why his views seem to matter so much. He’s a great tennis player, but not exactly one of our era’s great minds. So why do we care what he thinks about any subject not related to a tennis court?

2022: Behold Your Idols!

The Church is considered irrelevant. More than that, Church is deeply insecure about its supposed lack of relevance, and spends a huge amount of time desperately trying to be relevant, sometimes making itself look stupid in the process. Yet, is it the Church that has a problem, or is it a wider society that turns professional sportspeople into oracles of wisdom on every subject?

Now, let me read you an excerpt from the work of another prominent figure in the debate about coronavirus vaccines:

“Shorty I’mma only tell you this once, you the illest
And for your loving I’mma die hard like Bruce Willis
You got spark, you, you got spunk
You, you got something all the girls want
You’re like a candy store
And I’m a toddler”

This is the lyrical genius of the rapper Nicki Minaj, one of the world’s most successful musicians. Last September, Minaj tweeted to her 24 million followers that her cousin’s friend became impotent as a result of the vaccine. Since then her ever shifting views on vaccination have been the subject of endless media debate. The same society that considers the Church irrelevant obsesses about what vapid celebrities think about matters of medical science.

None of this is to excuse the Church’s self-importance. It has been the architect of many of its own problems. This week, I read news reports of another disastrously managed safeguarding case of the period between 1960s and the 1990s. I can see why people lost faith in the Church. But where did their faith go?

Once people had faith in political leaders, or in trade unionists or captains of industry, or in thinkers and self-help gurus. All of these people squandered people’s faith as determinedly as the Church did.

At the moment, the professional upper-middle-classes still seem to have faith in one thing: science and scientists. Indeed the dominant religion of the English bourgeoisie has shifted from the Church of England to the church of experts. That doesn’t, however, translate into the rest of society. If anything, the way in which questioning anything presented in scientific terms is treated as ridiculous and laughable by the best off and best educated seems to provoke a backlash from other sections of society, as the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment shows.

While social media and fragmentation of the mass media doubtless play a role, the crisis in faith in science has deeper causes. We, the public, are another contributor to the problem, by asking too much of science, asking it to answer questions that are matters of ethics or political philosophy. Scientists themselves have, however, often colluded in the politicisation of their profession, something social media has made clear as scientists argue among themselves in full public view. It has become too easy to guess a scientist’s position on the left-right spectrum from the way they speak about their field of expertise.

With the last pillar of traditional authority crumbling, it seems the only people left with any moral authority in Western societies are stars of sport and entertainment, the Novaks and the Nickis. God help us all.

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Send Me: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th February 2022 (The Fourth Sunday before Lent)

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18th Century icon of the Prophet Isaiah, from the iconostasis of Transfiguration Church, Kizhi monastery, Russian Karelia

Readings – Isaiah 6: 1–8; Luke 5: 1–11

‘And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’’

I think it would be fair to say that as a congregation, we don’t think of ourselves as being pious or particularly holy. In fact, that sort of understanding of what being a Christian means rather freaks us out – and thank the Lord for that. In my experience, we tend to see ourselves as pilgrims on the road towards God, travelling as much with those outside our walls as within them, and certainly not as some sort of vanguard of God’s chosen people. That understanding is also big part of how I see my ministry as a priest. 

18th Century icon of the Prophet Isaiah, from the iconostasis of Transfiguration Church, Kizhi monastery, Russian Karelia
18th Century icon of the Prophet Isaiah, from the iconostasis of Transfiguration Church, Kizhi monastery, Russian Karelia

We are nothing special. We have the same failings as anyone else. And yet we are chosen by God to follow Him, each of us as individuals, and collectively as His people here in the centre of Devizes, worshipping the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this building as people have done for 892 years. It is awe-inspiring to think that the people who built St John’s in the decades after William had conquered were closer in time to us today than they were to Peter and James and John on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when they left everything and followed Him. Yet across these vast gulfs of time, we are all joined together in the chain of those who have broken bread and shared wine in Jesus’ name that stretches back, unbroken, to group of friends who shared supper with Him on an early Spring evening in Jerusalem, just before His death.

It is not, my brothers and sisters, because we are particularly good that we follow Jesus Christ but because the God who is love calls us to follow Him, as the people we are, and as the community of Christians here in St John’s that we are. 

God has always chosen people who didn’t think they were anything special. Isaiah, when he was granted a vision of heaven, cried that he was a man of unclean lips. Still remembered as a thinker and wise counsellor after 2,700 years, from a time when very few names survive except for those of warriors and kings, Isaiah was nonetheless a man well aware of his own limitations.

Dear old Peter, never a man who failed to say what he meant, was entirely freaked out when he realised who Jesus was and what He had just done shouting, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Our modern presentation of Jesus Christ rightly focuses on Him as our loving brother, but we have lost something of this sense of awe at the majesty of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

This awe-inspiring God is calling everyone in this church this morning to speak for Him, to serve Him, to be fishers of men. “Here I am – send me”, says Isaiah, in full awareness of his failings. God’s question to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” is addressed to each one of us.

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Fresh Wine and Springtime: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 16th January 2022 (The Second Sunday after Epiphany)

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Readings – 1 Corinthians 12: 1–11, John 2: 1–11

Everyone serves … the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.

A zoom on some of the detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana (1536) by Paolo Veronese, which hangs in The Louvre.
A zoom on some of the detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana (1536) by Paolo Veronese, which hangs in The Louvre.

I think you all know me well enough by now to know that I enjoy the good things in life. So, clearly, did Jesus. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus turns water into wine on an industrial scale at a wedding. The water filled six huge jars, each holding “twenty or thirty gallons”, which by my calculations would make more than 900 bottles of wine – which the guests found to be of superlative quality. This is a lot even for a seriously boozy wedding reception. It is so much wine that even the people at Friday evening lockdown parties at Number 10 Downing Street might not have managed to finish it all.

God wants you to enjoy life to the full. There are going to be enough tough moments in life as it is – the last two years, for example – so there is nothing wrong in making the most of the times when things are going well. Indeed, if you have been generally fortunate in life, do what you can to help others, but also be grateful, rather than being guilty, for your blessings, for your gratitude can inspire a wonderful lightness of life but your guilt helps no-one.

As well as enjoying the good things in life, most of you will also know by now that I like to preach about how Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly human, and how God loves us in our humanity. Our Gospel reading this morning presents a very human scene, which takes place in a real human culture: a Jewish one. If I made a film about this scene, I would cast Maureen Lipman as Mary and Adam Sandler as Jesus. Jesus is clearly annoyed with his mother for trying to get him to intervene and keep the party going; Mary completely ignores Him and tells the staff to do whatever He says. Jesus, completely outfoxed by his mother, complies with her request.

So here we have Jesus, God made man, enjoying and helping others to enjoy the best of what it means to be human. What does this mean for us and for today’s Church?

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Your Beautiful Bodies: Sermon Preached at George’s, Belfast, Sunday 2nd January 2022 (2nd Sunday of Christmas)

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Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial

Readings – John 1: 10–18, Ephesians 1: 3–14

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

One of my favourite activities when off work in the dark depths of midwinter is to go onto YouTube to watch television advertisements from commercial breaks of decades long past. I have a particular fondness for 1970s adverts for pipe tobacco; they really get across how much society has changed in the last half a century or so. Not so much because they showed men smoking their pipes on the telly, but because of how plain and sometimes even ugly the men in them were. Bald men in late middle-age, often a little tubby, sometimes with wrinkly foreheads or even unmanageable hair. In adverts for DIY superstores, these plain middle-aged men inevitably had plain middle-aged wives that they sat with in the ordinary kitchens of ordinary homes.

Watch a TV advertising break today and it is a different story. Everyone is beautiful; everyone has perfect hair and perfect teeth; nearly everyone is young. Where young people aren’t really appropriate for advertising the product in question – if it’s for a funeral plan, let’s say, or incontinence medicine – the few elderly people allowed to appear in advertising look like they’re just about to pop out for a 10 mile walk, just to wind down from the skiing holiday they’ve just jetted home from.

Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial
The beautiful people used to advertise to us in the ’70s.

Half a century ago, advertising executives thought we were most likely to purchase a product if we associated it with people we identified with, with people who were like we were ourselves. Now the theory is that we are more likely to buy products associated with the sort of people we aspire to becoming, or at least have idle fantasies about becoming, in the hope that some of their success will rub off on us in a sort of high-tech cargo cult.

It sounds like a minor change, but it goes to the heart of some of the most damaging social trends of today’s world. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves, negatively, with people who are prettier, richer, and more successful than we are – or who seem to be prettier, richer, and more successful than we are.

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