We Only See the Light in Darkness: Sermon Preached on 29th January 2023 (Candlemas Transferred)

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 2. 14-18; Matthew 2. 22-40

“…a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Today’s Gospel reading is set in a time when faith was thin and political realities were grim. Corruption and oppression reigned in the land but those most committed to change were often fanatical and violent. Religious leaders seemed more interested in power and privilege than praising God. It was a time and a place, in other words, like many others and not entirely different from our own.

Some did keep faith in these difficult circumstances – Mary and Joseph were two such people, presenting their baby son in the Temple for purification on the fortieth day after His birth as the Law of Moses required. The idea that ritual purification after birth might be important has become remote to us in recent generations. It can therefore surprise us that Candlemas, which we keep today as the feast that commemorates Christ being presented in the Temple, was one of the earliest Christian festivals and remains one of the most important.

A 13th Century drawing of Mary and Joseph presenting the infant Jesus to Simeon at the Temple in Jerusalem - or at least what a 13th Century artist thought that looked like - while Anna worships and nine onlookers watch.

Giotto, The Presentation of Christ (c. 1311).

Mary and Joseph were not the only people keeping the faith in those hard times. Simeon and Anna spent their lives deep in prayer and close to God. So much so that Simeon was led by the Holy Spirit to the infant Christ and knew he was the long-promised Messiah; Anna also knew the child was specially sent by God without anyone telling her. It is interesting that they were both very elderly, given that the elderly are often held to be of not much account in a world that is obsessed with vigour and power and achievement; but God has a more generous standard than the world of who is valuable and who is fit to do His work. The old are as valuable to Him as the young.

The marginal are also as valuable to God as those in the centre of things. God chose to become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ – not as a king, and not in one of the world’s power centres, but as the son of a woman who became pregnant in suspicious circumstances, to be raised as the son of an artisan, belonging to a people under a foreign occupation they bitterly resented.

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Once Again, America Chooses Ireland Over the UK

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Unherd published a piece of mine on US government interventions on Northern Ireland, and why Ireland’s special relationship with the USA usually trumps the UK’s (read more here).

Irish influence in America is not just about raw political calculation, nor entirely about the large number of Americans who proudly bear Irish ancestry. The technocrats miss that the founding myths of both the United States and the modern Irish state are the same story told in different contexts: a successful domestic revolution against British imperialism.

A screen grab of an online newspaper article with the headline 'Once again, America chooses Ireland over the UK', and a photo of Joe Biden wearing a shamrock in his lapel pocket.

Put bluntly, the Irish special relationship with America has trumped the traditional Special Relationship because the Irish can tell a more emotionally compelling story to an American audience. This is a powerful tool in an era that venerates sentimentally charged narratives.

[…]

As long as administrations in Dublin are headed by pro-market technocrats protective of American multinationals’ investments in Ireland, Washington’s pro-Irish stance is unlikely to change, and London will just have to take the geopolitical pain. Or, as seems increasingly likely, the UK government will have to accept that Northern Ireland will remain substantially within the EU’s regulatory orbit. This will be the price for a final dash to scrap EU regulations in Great Britain before the next general election.

For the full article, please click through the link.

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I Would Do Anything for Church Unity But I Won’t Do That: Sermon Preached on 22nd January 2023 (Third Sunday After Epiphany)

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes

1 Corinthians 1.10-18; Matthew 4.12-23

“…each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” …  Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?”

The divisions between the churches are often given as a reason why people reject Christianity. Therefore it’s a pity that we Christians can’t put aside our divisions and reunite the whole universal Church into one body, so we can witness far more effectively for Christ.

Many a sermon during Church Unity Week has begun with a statement like this. I happen, however, to forcefully disagree with it. (That wasn’t the bland and pious exhortation to ecumenism you were expecting twenty seconds ago, was it?)

Institutional unity wouldn’t mean we all agreed on everything anyway. I mean, as you’ll have noticed in the news this week, even in the Church of England we don’t actually agree on everything. The Roman Catholic Church the one body of any size that regards itself as being the only true and universal Church, is as internally divided as any other. Some of you may have seen in The Spectator a few weeks ago the deathbed letter of George Pell, the former Primate of Australia and leading Roman Catholic conservative in the English-speaking world, excoriating Pope Francis and his papacy. Given how deep the divisions within existing churches are, I wonder why so many of us seem to think reuniting into one big worldwide church institution is an ideal we should all aspire to. We’d still be divided within it.

Three men standing in front of a large banner saying "Homosexuality is Sin" with five other men behind them, two of them holding smaller placards saying "the precious blood of life" and "repent ye, and believe the gospel." A large warehouse-style building, brick built and old, is behind.

Some protestors perhaps not so keen on rapid institutional reunion with the Church of England, © Gerry Lynch, 28 August 2010.

There’s a negative way of thinking about the persistence of divisions among Christians, which is that they reflect our sinfulness, our pride, our inability to humble ourselves to truly discerning the mind of Christ.

I prefer to look at it another way. I prefer to start by noting that unity in Christ cannot mean uniformity, for that is not the unity that Christ modelled with His disciples when He walked the Earth. In the Gospels, Christ gives the disciples the freedom to argue and fall out with one another, and to misinterpret what He had to say. A generation later, Peter and Paul fought like rats in a sack. The Church of their heyday was as divided over issues like circumcision and whether it was morally acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols, as we are about same-sex marriage. Some of the issues that tormented the early Church seem obscure to us now, but if one takes time to understand their context they are about the same things that are most divisive in the Church today – identity, and the extent to which Christians should model a distinct way of life from the rest of society, or instead integrate within it to help it become more like the Kingdom of God.

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A Few Wise Men: Sermon Preached on Friday 6th January 2023 (The Epiphany)

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes, and on Sunday 8th January at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12

“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…”

Epiphany (1940) by Max Ernst.

The Epiphany is the fourth most important date in the Church’s year, after Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. Yet it is often neglected by secular society, and church-goers don’t generally turn out in great numbers for Epiphany services in my experience. Yet it’s a feast of great significance because, with Christ still in His cradle, it established Christianity as an explicitly universalising religion: by that, I mean one that seeks to make followers of people of every nation and language, rather than just from the Palestinian Jewish community who supplied Christ’s followers while He was on earth.

A lot is going on in our two readings this evening, so let me try to unpack some of it.

The fact that these men are identified by St Matthew as coming from the East, specifically, has interesting implications. The East was a place associated with wisdom and spiritual insight. The Wise Men are being identified by Matthew not as any old gentiles but some of the holiest and most intellectually gifted representatives of the entire gentile world. They already know that the new-born child they seek is destined to be king. In contrast, Herod, the temporal king of the Jews, is spiritually blind. This short-sighted and intolerant man can’t see anything in the arrival of these foreign visitors beyond a potential threat to his power. Wisdom and holiness do not come through ancestry: early in his story of Jesus’ life, Matthew has established an important principle.

Yet there is an obvious tension between universalism and the particular here. If Christianity is a universal religion, one might ask why Jesus should have been born as a Jew, as a male, in the Holy Land, in the 1st Century. Why there, and then, and in the form of this little baby born of Mary? Part of the answer must be that if Christian faith truly does encapsulate God’s plan for humanity, then God had to become human as someone in particular. None of us are blank slates. All of us have a culture and a heritage, and no single one of us can be everyman or everywoman. Indeed love can only truly be love if it is directed towards someone or something in particular; love in the abstract remains something unconsummated and unfulfilled.

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Dublin and Kilkenny

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

The last days of 2022 saw me make my first visit to Dublin since 2013 and to Kilkenny since, I think, 1995! A trip to interview the delightful (and Most Rev’d) John Neill for my doctorate. I did a day trip from Belfast to Kilkenny by train, which I don’t particularly recommend giving the timings, but it did give me a bit of time in both cities with my camera, given the long waits in Dublin for train connections.

One of the few days with decent light in a gloomy late December in Ireland as well.

The early Victorian gem that is Dublin’s Heuston Station. My 50th photo to make it to the Flickr Explore page.

Dame Street — classic Dublin.

The Four Courts reflecting on the Liffey at night.

Kilkenny Castle by the River Nore.

Rothe House, a late 16th Century merchant’s townhouse complex in Kilkenny.

St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny. One of Ireland’s oldest and finest buildings with a 1,200-year-old Round Tower.

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

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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)

Posted on December 11, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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 Power of Names

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.” In the Common Worship Daily Office, this verse from Isaiah 43 is recited three times on Thursdays. It was written for the community of Hebrew exiles in Babylon at a time of much fear, when some were losing faith and wondering if there could really be a single creator God. This was a silly ideal to their sensible neighbours in Babylon, to whom it was obvious there were many gods. There seems of have been growing apostasy from Judaism and assimilation into the cosmopolitan mass.

Therefore, God reminds them here that he has not forgotten them in their long exile, but remembers each individual by their name.

Names are powerful statements in Scripture. After winning an all-night wrestling bout with a mysterious angel, Jacob is renamed Israel, meaning, “I have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” But the successful contest has come at a cost – Israel’s hip has been dislocated in the struggle, and he will presumably spend the rest of his life walking with a limp.

*  *  *  *  *

The walls of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem are lined with black binders, each containing hundreds of pages bearing witness to those who died in the Holocaust. Stacked neatly on shelves, they stretch along the walls of the circular chamber like the rings of an alien planet. Decades of research means that by now 4.8 million names of roughly 6 million Shoah victims are now known and memorialised in those binders. With the passage of time, the identities of most of the remaining million or so will soon be lost to history – but not to God, who remembers His children by name forever.

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