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Who Do You Say I Am? – Sermon Preached on 23rd August 2026 (Twelfth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Romans 12.1–8; Matthew 16.13-20

“…who do you say that I am?”

A large, plain tub-shaped stone font, weathered and pitted with age, standing on a rough stone base. A band of Latin lettering runs around its rim. This is Latin text from Psalm 42.
The Saxon font at St Mary’s, Potterne. © Lionel Wall/greatenglishchurches.co.uk

Our two Bible readings today are an interesting pairing – one asks who Jesus is; one explores what His Church should be.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus and His closest followers are on a bit of a road trip, away from the lakeside villages where He began His public work of healing and teaching. Apparently, the district is abuzz with gossip about Jesus. Everyone is talking about Him, because He is doing things well beyond what people have come to expect from local faith healers – powerful works, so much so that sometimes they even leave people frightened. Many people are wondering if Jesus is a prophet – perhaps one of the great prophets.

Jesus asks His closest followers, “Who do you say that I am?” This is one of the great hinges of the Bible. Peter gets it right first time – Jesus is far more than a prophet, but the Messiah Himself – the saviour of the human race, sent by God, the Son of God.

This is the perfect reading for a Sunday with baptisms and renewals of vows, because one of the promises we make in baptism is to turn to Jesus Christ as Peter identified Him, as our Saviour and the Saviour of the world. We join the biggest family in the history of the world, uniting people across time and space. This is a family that crosses divisions of nationality and race and class and political opinion. In baptism, we are united in the same family as baptised Christians in Albania and Zimbabwe, and all the other countries from A to Z. We are united across time with St Peter, and the people who built this church all those centuries ago. And we are united not only with Christians on Earth, but with those who have gone before us into heaven.

And here’s the thing, we aren’t united because we agree on everything, and certainly not because we’re perfect people – we are united by Jesus Christ, whom Peter correctly identified on that road trip all those centuries ago. We are united because we trust that Jesus Christ will save us even though we often mess up, because God loves us as we are.

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The Pearl and the Furnace – Sermon Preached on 26th July 2026 (Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Romans 8.26–39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.

“‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered ‘Yes.’

A woman stands bent over a large open trough or tub, her sleeves pushed back and her arms sunk into a mass of dough, working leaven through the meal. She wears long, plain robes gathered at the waist, her head covered, inclined toward her work. The setting is a spare domestic interior with a suggestion of a wall and floor behind her, and light falling from one side. The composition is close and shadowed, the figure filling most of the frame. Fine cross-hatching models the folds of cloth and the bulk of the dough.
Sir John Everett Millais, The Leaven (1864) in the Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, London.

Have you understood all this? The yeast and the flour and the treasure in the field, and the pearl of great price? And the good fish and the bad fish – and the furnace of fire?

The disciples confidently told Jesus that, yes, they had. But at this stage of Matthew’s Gospel, when He is still teaching and healing in Galilee, there is much they don’t understand about Jesus Himself. The disciples are far from working out that Jesus is the Messiah, further still from realising that Jesus is not here to bring them a lifetime of comfort and worldly success, but to die for the sake of their eternities. So perhaps one of the things that we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel is how much the disciples have yet to understand about Christ, how much work the yeast has yet to do, how far the mustard seed has yet to grow. As with them, so also with us – or at least let us hope that God still has much spiritual growth to raise in us.

One point of parables is that people can never understand them in their entirety – they land differently with each of us, and each of us will read them differently at different points of our lives. Like the kingdom of heaven itself, when we try to grasp the parables too tightly, to turn them into definitive statements of policy that we can use to make ourselves into insiders and others into outsiders, then they disappear into meaninglessness.

Yet there are insiders and outsiders, says Christ. Which is which is for Him to judge, not us, but there are good and bad fish – and the bad fish will be thrown into a furnace of fire. I always like to sidestep the implications the implications of the bits of the Bible where people get put in the fire by talking about the refiner’s fire, the furnace that turns a cheap alloy into gold or silver. But what is left when you throw an unhealthy fish into a furnace, but perhaps a few charred bones? This set of parables isn’t just hard to understand, it finishes on a hard and judging note.

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Risen, Not Restored – Sermon Preached on 17th May 2026 (Sunday After Ascension)

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

Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11

“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” 

The upper portion of Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, photographed looking upward. Christ sits enthroned at the centre within a pointed mandorla outlined in gold, wearing a pale white robe. His face is angular and gaunt in Sutherland's distinctive modernist style, with dark features rendered in bold, almost sketched lines. Both hands are raised, the right in a gesture of blessing. The background is a striking vivid green, woven in broad, uneven brushstroke-like bands. Flanking Christ on either side, set within smaller rectangular panels, are two of the four living creatures representing the evangelists — stylised, energetic figures with wings and haloes, depicted in earthy tones against darker backgrounds. Fine vertical lines from the tapestry's warp threads are visible across the surface, emphasising the monumental textile's handwoven character.
The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.

No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.

They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.

But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.

And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.

That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.

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Greetings, E-Mail Subscribers

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After many years, I’ve finally worked out how to send my posts as an automatic e-mail to those who’ve signed up to get an update whenever I post a new article. If you get this post as an e-mail from me, let me know if it has arrived safely, and let me further know if … Read more

Returning to God: A Reflection for Holy Week (Tuesday 15th April 2025)

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A dramatic painting shows an emotional scene with three figures in a dimly lit setting. An elderly man in a red robe tenderly embraces a kneeling younger man, resting his hands on the younger man's shoulders in a gesture of forgiveness. The younger man, dressed in tattered clothing, bows his head. A third figure, standing to the right in a red and green robe, watches with a stern expression. The background is dark, emphasizing the emotional intensity of the reunion.

Given at Christ Church, Worton

Luke 15. 11-32

A historical painting depicts four figures in a dimly lit room. An elderly man with a white beard sits at a table with papers and coins, engaged in a transaction with a younger man standing opposite him, dressed in 17th-century clothing with a white collar and brown coat. Two other figures, a young boy and a woman in a dark cloak, stand to the left, observing the scene. A red curtain hangs in the background, and a marble column is visible on the right. The atmosphere is serious and focused.
The Prodigal Son Receives His Portion by Murillo (1660s), hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Last year, I had occasion to be in Dublin, and ended up having most of a Bank Holiday Monday free just to wander around. I was spending time there for the first time in many years, having at one time visited the city several times a month. I found myself wandering into the National Gallery, which has a pair of paintings of scenes from the life of the Prodigal Son by the 17th Century Spanish painter Murillo.

In the first, the son’s eyes are so firmly fixed on the bag of money he has just been handed that he doesn’t even notice his father’s eyes, full of pain, riveted on him. Behind his father stands his brother, shooting him a look of withering contempt. In the other painting, the son, dressed in rags and surrounded by swine, is gazing into the sky with eyes imploring God’s mercy.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of those bible stories that speaks profoundly into our own time and place. Just as the Father in the parable gives the son free will to squander his inheritance, so our heavenly Father gives us the freedom to take the gifts He has given us and either use them for His greater glory, or to squander them, as we choose.

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Time to Change Direction?: Sermon Preached on 23rd March 2025 (Third Sunday in Lent)

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

1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9

“but unless you repent, you will all perish

If I’m being honest, I didn’t much like today’s readings when I sat down to prepare my sermon. ‘I know it’s Lent’, I thought to myself, ‘but surely we could have been set something a bit more hopeful than these.’ I’m not sure that I enjoy them any the more this morning.

A painting depicts a snow-covered medieval-style building, likely a church or cathedral, with a tall tower and a steeply pitched roof. The structure is made of dark stone, with small arched windows and a set of steps leading up to an entrance. A lone figure in a black cloak stands in the foreground, facing the building. The scene is set during a snowy day, with snowflakes falling and accumulating on the ground and rooftops. The sky is overcast with dark, moody clouds, and in the background, there are more buildings and a hilly landscape, also dusted with snow. The overall atmosphere is cold and sombre.
Repentance, by
Nicholas Roerich (1917). Hangs in the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York City.

But real religion, which actually sheds light on the human condition, is more than uplifting spiritual Prozac. I don’t think you’re always meant to enjoy what you read in the Bible, or always to be lifted up by it. Some of the most important things for healthy and wholesome life aren’t uplifting—like going to the dentist, or eating your greens.

A Bible that only ever gave us a lift would be a Bible that only made sense in a world where everything always turned out right in the end. But the good guys don’t always win, mistakes sometimes have awful consequences, and sometimes life is just hard.

These are also an awkward pair of readings to preach 0n because they seem to disagree with each other. St Paul warns that those who stray from God’s path risk being punished by Him; Jesus, in contrast, says the victims of a building collapse were no more sinners than anyone else, and nor were the victims of persecution by the tyrannical King Herod.

Scripture isn’t a soloist, it’s a choir. If we take seriously the idea that the Bible was inspired by God, then we also need to take seriously that God caused it be written in the messy form it actually takes. If the Bible is a choir, then sometimes it sings like a Palestrina Mass, all pure intervals and authentic cadences. And sometimes the chords of Scripture’s harmonies are more challenging, like something you’d hear from Shostakovich or Benjamin Britten, or even like Schoenberg and Stockhausen. Sometimes the Bible has to speak into the dissonance that is part of real life. Sometimes the Bible has to speak into lives that have no easy answers; into our lives when there are no easy answers.

So, to understand what God is saying to us through His written Word in our own lives, in our own time and place, we need patient discernment, to listen to what God is saying through the bits that sit least comfortably with one another, and the bits that sit least comfortably with us. We need humility too, because we may not always understand what God is saying to us through the Bible. We also need to understand that what God says to us may change through our lives as we change—today’s life-giving new insight may become stale and deadening over time. God may often ask us to change direction.

And that’s where we see the harmony in this awkward pairing of readings. Both agree that the Christian life is about repentance. Repentance is a very loaded word, but it simply means to turn around, and start living as God calls us to. Repentance should be a journey that lasts throughout our lives, and it may be one where we may need to change direction repeatedly to get to where God is calling us. Sometimes following God’s call is like driving at seventy on a motorway—but usually it’s like finding our way through a maze of winding lanes that twist and turn. God never changes, but the world changes and we change—or we should change, or else we become stale.

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When Only the Blind See: Sermon Preached on 27th October 2024 (Last Sunday After Trinity)

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In the middle of a crowd, a grey-haired man points at his unseeing eyes as a man in a blue robe stretches his arm towards him.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Hebrews 7. 23-28; Mark 10. 46-52               

“…he began to cry out, and say, ‘Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.’”

A blind man sits on a stool, playing a spike fiddle sitting vertically on his knee; he is on a bridge with a glass barrier, and below him is a main road.
A very elderly, blind, man busking in Chengdu by playing the erhu, a two-stringed, bowed, instrument which has a reputation for being difficult to play. © Gerry Lynch, 6 October 2024.

When I was on holiday in China a few weeks ago, I saw a very elderly, blind, man busking on a pedestrian bridge in the city of Chengdu, one of these Chinese cities that many people have never even heard of even though it has a larger population than London. He was playing an instrument called the erhu, a two-stringed instrument not entirely different from a violin, which my Chinese friend told me was known to be particularly difficult. He was playing it beautifully, little noticed by most of the Sunday shopping crowds that walked past, and completely invisible to the throngs of mopeds and buses passing below.

How often we miss what is truly valuable and extraordinary in the world, because it is in the hands of those not considered important.

This morning’s Gospel story works on many levels, some of them very clear from even a simple reading, and some of them less obvious. Let’s look at some of the less obvious things. The first thing to notice is how the blind beggar first speaks to Jesus—“Son of David, have mercy on me”, he cries. “Son of David”. That’s interesting, because it’s not a term that Mark uses often in his Gospel. That should lead us to ask whether its use here must be significant.

Firstly, it identifies Jesus, obviously, as a descendent of David. Now, this is interesting, because unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t start with his Gospel with a family tree for Jesus, but instead jumps straight into the action with John baptising Jesus in the River Jordan. More than this, however, Son of David was one of the titles that Jews of the time used to refer to the hoped for Messiah, a king who would deliver them from foreign occupation and usher in a truly godly kingdom characterised by fairness and justice.

So, this desperately poor, disabled, man has realised a profound truth about Jesus which those around him are blind to, and they don’t have the sense or patience to listen to what he’s saying.

How often we miss what is truly valuable and extraordinary in the world, because it is in the hands of those not considered important!

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Bread of Eternal Life: Sermon Preached on 18th August 2024 (Twelfth Sunday After Trinity)

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

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Ephesians 5. 15-20; John 6. 51-58

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…”

Funerals, and ministry with the bereaved and dying, are a big part of my job. Some people seem to think they need to sympathise with me for this. If people ask me what I’ve been doing in work, and I say I’ve taken a funeral, or spent time with someone who is terminally ill, they’ll often say, “I am sorry…”, or “How sad for you.”

A brightly coloured, early 14th Century, breviary illustration of Jesus, in blue robes and with a halo, observing many full baskets of bread being carried by the people around him, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove hovers over the scene.
The Feeding of the 5000, from the Breviary known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, executed ca. 1411-16.

This is less the case among churchgoers, I’ll grant you. It more often happens in the pub, or when I’m sitting outside Caffé Nero in Devizes smoking my pipe. Among those who actually practice the Christian faith, people are more likely to accept that death, while a cause of great pain to at least some of those left behind, is also the gateway to something else.

One of the great privileges of priesthood is to minister to someone who is going to their death in absolute confidence in the promises of Christ. There are times in every clergyperson’s life when they know they are being ministered to and fed by their flock, and not the other way around—and a situation like this is one of them. In a strange way these are times when one learns that a belief in eternal life is worth it for what it brings to this life alone; that even if it weren’t true then it would still be one of the most valuable gifts one could have. But this sense of rightness and peace with ourselves and with the cosmos that faith in eternal life brings is itself a sign that it is true—that this is the reality that God made us for.

Now, obviously some people think this eternal life business is rank nonsense: pie in the sky when you die and all that. But it was ever thus. That’s a big part of what’s going on in this morning’s Gospel reading. I preached about this a fortnight ago in this church, because we’re having readings from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel five weeks in a row. We could briefly summarise the story of John 6 like this: the people think Jesus is great when he’s performing miracles, but once he starts telling them that He’s bread come down from heaven that gives eternal life, they start muttering about how weird it all is and eventually turn on Him. And it isn’t just members of the general public who turn on Jesus in the end, but even some of His closest followers.

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Don’t Be Useful!: Sermon Preached on 4th August 2024 (Tenth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Ephesians 4. 1-16; John 6. 24-35

“…they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?””

We all want the Church to be useful. And what’s wrong with that? We all want to be useful ourselves, don’t we? But in that, there are grave dangers. Some of them are flagged up in this morning’s Gospel reading.

Half a loaf of artisan bread, covered in seeds, on a flat serving base with a buttering knife beside it.
By Cottonbro Studios, public domain, downloaded with thanks from Pexels.

In it, the crowd flocks to Jesus wanting signs and works. In John’s Gospel, it follows immediately after Jesus performs two spectacular miracles, feeding the Five Thousand and then walking on water. After the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd declares Him a prophet and tries to make Him king against His will—that was last Sunday’s Gospel.

The trouble with spectacular events, however, is that nothing is ever enough; the crowd always wants more. Just one hit of excitement and validation is rarely enough. We know that from the celebrity culture of our own times.

So it’s appropriate that this reading marks the start of a change in the relationship between Jesus and the crowds, one that defines the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. I’m always careful about reading too much into ‘chapters’ in the Bible: they weren’t created until the 13th Century and although they’re useful for us in finding our way around a massive collection of writings, they don’t always reflect natural sections. But John 6 is a coherent sub-story in its own right, it’s a very long one, and a very significant one, which we hear over five successive Sundays.

After the crowd’s initial delight at two miraculous works, Jesus doesn’t follow up with more, but instead gives them a strange teaching that He Himself is bread from heaven, giving life to the world, greater than the manna with which Moses miraculously fed their ancestors fleeing persecution in Egypt. Here’s a point that’s easy to miss—Jesus is pointing out here that He is greater even than Moses. Moses gave the people food to satisfy their physical needs, but Jesus will feed them with eternal life. So also, while Moses gave the people the law, Jesus will give them something even greater than a set of rules that nobody can keep correctly all the time—forgiveness of their sins. Jesus represents a new set of promises God is making with the human race, promises that will be sealed, it will eventually be revealed, on the Cross.

Soon after, the crowd will turn on Jesus because He won’t give them miraculous bread on demand but teachings that are hard to swallow. The sixth chapter of John will end with even some of Jesus’ own disciples abandoning Him. If our faith in God depends on Him giving us what we want, when we want it – if it depends on God being “useful” – then it is a faith built on sand, and it will crumble as soon as it faces a real challenge.

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