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

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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)

Posted on November 27, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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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Must We Ban Russia Today?

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

The Critic kindly published my case that the UK and EU bans on RT are a betrayal of British and European values on free speech, that show an unwarranted lack of trust in the capacity of people in free societies to sort reporting from propaganda – read it all here.

“The liberation of Kherson, the results of US midterm elections and the mildest autumn in living memory in Western Europe have dealt a triple blow to Vladimir Putin’s grand strategy for the invasion of Ukraine — and possibly a fatal one. I’ve been watching RT’s attempts to spin the situation, and they’re desperately comic in a grotesque sort of way. If you’re in the UK or anywhere in the EU, you’ll have to take my word for that — because you’ve been banned from watching them since March. I’ve only been able to watch them because I’ve been in Israel and the Palestinian Territories for the last few weeks, where I can watch it freely. (RT, in case you’re wondering, is the official name for the TV station formerly known as Russia Today.)

“This bizarre ban flies in the face of a long-standing policy that media from other countries, even hostile ones, weren’t banned in Western countries. Adults were trusted to be able to sort propaganda from reporting for themselves. People in Britain were free to listen to Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War. During the Cold War, there was no attempt to censor Soviet Bloc or Chinese broadcasting.

[…]

“Today, free speech is seen as a threat, not just on the Left in the political Centre. Especially since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, many in the West who had been liberal with at least a small “L” have convinced themselves that the masses are feeble-minded and susceptible to brainwashing via old and new media, Russian-funded brainwashing in particular. Lacking the willingness to reflect critically on how their own failures may have contributed to the erosion of support for the liberal project, they have conjured a mind-controlling Russian bogeyman straight out of Eugene McCarthy’s America.

“Banning RT was always at best a failure of nerve. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now going badly, it is time to end what has become an embarrassing betrayal of our own values.”

For a more detailed argument and some fun anecdotes, click this link (and let my publishers know my writing attracts readers.)

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Northern Ireland is too Divided to Function

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Unherd published a piece of mine on the risk that the present political stalemate in Northern Ireland might prove very long-term, and the factors that got us there. (Read it all here.)

“Given that genuine ideological impasse, it is a mystery why there was no Plan B for stalemate. … Perhaps part of the explanation lies in a lack of capacity and expertise in the Northern Ireland Office, which has become a Cinderella department over the last decade. It is too easy, however, to blame the civil servants. Although Northern Ireland was obviously going to be a minefield in the context of Brexit, there have been six Secretaries of State since the Referendum in 2016. Thatcher and Major between them chalked up the same number in eighteen years. One struggles to think of a senior government politician in London who has much grasp of the region’s complexities.

“Meanwhile, the ideological gaps between the parties are so genuine that some of Northern Ireland’s most experienced political commentators are speaking in terms of a permanent end to the Assembly. Brexit is the ideological difference most noticed by outsiders, but having a mandatory coalition where the two main parties are, respectively, to the Left of Corbyn and comfortable with the U.S. religious Right presents constant challenges. Deadlock over issues from grammar schools to gay marriage has seen stop-start suspensions of the Executive total a third of the twenty-four years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

“Northern Ireland’s rigid form of intra-communal power-sharing seems to prevent its politicians from dealing with their constituents’ actual problems, yet nobody has so far produced a viable proposal to reform or replace it. Until that happens, expect intermittent deadlock.”

For the full article, please click through this link.

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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’)

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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)

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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)

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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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Strange outbreaks of positivity over Northern Ireland

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

I was published in Unherd over the strange emergence of good vibes about breaking the EU-UK bad blood over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Headline in Unherd from Gerry Lynch's article on the Northern Ireland Protocol

“After nearly two years of ugly in-fighting over the Northern Ireland Protocol, there has been a sudden outbreak of positivity from key players in London, Dublin, and Brussels about the possibility of a deal to amend or replace it. Even self-styled “Brexit hard man” Steve Baker, now a UK government minister in the Northern Ireland Office, told Tory conference-goers he was “sorry” his behaviour had weakened Anglo-Irish relations. He later asserted to BBC Radio Ulster his willingness “to eat a bit of humble pie” to achieve a deal.

[…]

“Although real gaps remain to be bridged, most parties have an interest in a deal being done. Above all, it would remove the risk of a UK-EU trade war erupting during a winter where it would be of primary benefit to Vladimir Putin. More subtly, it would be of assistance to both London and Brussels in the war of values, hard evidence that free democracies are better than autocrats at finding solutions in messy territorial and ethnic disputes. An agreed and flourishing post-Brexit Ulster would be a fine counter-blast to the hell Moscow has made of the Donbas.”

To read the rest, please click through to Unherd – it’s free.

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Worthless Slaves?: Sermon Preached in Christ Church, Worton, Sunday 2nd October 2022 (Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Timothy 1: 1–14; Luke 17: 5–10

“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

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

I don’t know about you, but I could have done without a Gospel reading like that. We are told to be like the poor slaves toiling in the fields all day, then as soon as they come home ordered to prepare their master’s dinner before they get the chance to eat and drink themselves. It’s not exactly the most encouraging text in the current circumstances.

Christ Church Worton, 2 October 2022.

I am tired after the last two and a half years of Corona-Christianity, of the endless chopping and changing of regulations and routines, of the closures and the re-openings, of putting huge effort into learning new skills that became obsolescent a few months later. It was blooming hard work, made more exhausting by being constantly told that the pandemic had forced the Church to confront that it has no money and that we need to get used to a leaner Church more dependent on volunteers. This comes on top of decades of the lay people in the villages, the Poor Bloody Infantry of the Church of England, being amalgamated into ever bigger benefices with ever fewer clergy even as the demand for share goes up. Of course, every clever reorganisation presents itself as the solution to the current problems, but ends up being superseded by the next clever scheme a few years down the line.

There is money in the system, but it’s never for churches or benefices like this; only ever for churches in student towns and big cities promoting a style of worship that is a million miles away from village Anglicanism. Strangely, those churches often seem to promote a sort of theology of success that is also a million miles from the Gospel Jesus is proclaiming this morning, where the reward for hard work is yet more hard work. It is enough to make you lose faith.

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Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Gerry Lynch

A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.

I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.

I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.

Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.

But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.

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