One Cross for a Divided Church: Sermon Preached on 21st July 2024 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

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A classic rood screen, late Victorian, with Mary and St John both facing the nave along with Christ, St Mary to the left.

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

Ephesians 2. 11-22; Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

“Christ … that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross…came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.”

The Church should be like one big family. We all agree with that, don’t we? It sounds very sweet and wholesome—until we remember what our own families are actually like in practice, and until we remember how we ourselves sometimes behave within them. As we all know, members of families don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything and they can sometimes fall out and start rowing. Don’t get me wrong—families are great. I wouldn’t be without mine. But they aren’t perfect.

A high modernist rood screen. St Mary and St John are squat and disordered, Mary buried deep in a headscarf; both are facing the congregation. Christ, in contrast, is lithe and sinewy, his contorted facial features hidden in shadow.
The rood in the Old Catholic Augustinerkirche in Zürich. This was executed by local sculptor Franz Fischer during the church’s reordering of 1958-9. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

This morning’s epistle reading, from Ephesians, is written to a church that is clearly, like many families, struggling with divisions. There are two factions here—one Jewish, and very clear that followers of Jesus Christ should, like good Jews, be circumcised; the other faction come from Gentile backgrounds, and cannot see why circumcision should be required for those of true faith in Christ. In fact, although this has traditionally been thought of as a letter to the Church in the city of Ephesus, no specific city or congregation is named in the text, and it may have been a more general letter to churches at a time when the number of Christians from non-Jewish backgrounds was growing rapidly, and tensions were rising.

From our perspective, circumcision seems like an arcane reason for a church to be divided, but pause and think about it for a moment, and it soon becomes obvious that it is rooted in issues that still cause deep divisions today’s Church – one is identity; the other is whether Christians are called to engage with the world to transform it, or instead to maintain our purity as a people set apart from the world. These are precisely the reasons why we’ve ended up so divided over women’s ordination, or same-sex marriage. Most of us are also terribly sure that only our side of those debates really understands what Jesus Christ taught us.

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Faith Heals Us: Sermon Preached on 30th June 2024 (Fifth Sunday After Trinity)

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A view across the Sea of Galilee from Magdala/Migdal towards the Golan Heights in afternoon sun.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and on Poulshot Village Green

Mark 5. 21-43

“your faith has made you well”

We’ve all been in situations where what people don’t say is more important than what they do. That’s certainly true of Jesus in this morning’s Bible reading. But to understand why, let’s look first at exactly where today’s reading sits in the overall story of Mark’s Gospel.

A realist painting. Jesus, standing upright and in white robes, holds the hands of a girl, who is lying on a bed, also in white robes, and somewhat darker skinned.
Ilya Repin, Raising of Jairus Daughter (1870), hangs in the Mikhailovsky Palace, St Petersburg.

Today’s reading consists of the last two miracle stories in a run of four, all set in Galilee early in Jesus’ mission, that Mark uses to establish Jesus’ power. Between them they establish Jesus’ power over the forces of nature, over disease, over demons, and over death. Last week in church, we heard one of the other of these stories, the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee; the other story, the casting out of demons into a herd of pigs from the poor tormented madman who self-harms constantly, is also one of the most familiar of Jesus’ healing miracles.

The supernatural elements of these stories can make them seem remote from our world. Yet look more closely and we see people who, while perhaps living in a very different culture with very different technology from us, are people who tick just like us. The way Jesus is constantly mobbed by crowds as He travels around these little market towns and fishing villages in Galilee reminds me very much of today’s celebrity culture. Not everyone in these towns and villages thinks well of Jesus, and as much as the adulation of the crowds, the abuse He receives from the Pharisees reminds me of our own culture and its toxic side, which social media has revealed to be regrettably widespread. A third reminder of our own world is the desperation of the chronically ill people who approach Jesus seeking healing, people like the woman with the issue of blood—and for all that we can cure many diseases in a way that would seem almost magical to the people of Christ’s time, the reality is that at some point most of us end up living with chronic and debilitating illnesses, and the fear and misery they bring is unchanged.

That’s the context for us to notice what Jesus doesn’t say here. He doesn’t say, “I’m the Son of God.” He doesn’t even say, “I’m sent from God.” He certainly doesn’t say, “I can heal people by magic, and I deserve to be paid for it—so front up with the readies, folks!”

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Waiting Patiently for Harvest: Sermon Preached on 16th June 2024 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

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The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.

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

Readings – 2 Corinthians 5. 6-10, 14-17; Mark 4. 26-34

“The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”

The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.
Tan Hill from Allington, 10 June 2024 © Gerry Lynch

On Monday evening shortly after eight, I popped into Devizes to buy a few things at Lidl, and was captivated by the quality of the late evening light; the amount of rain we’ve had this Spring has made the air unusually clear when the Sun does shine, and the greens of the landscape are especially vibrant at the moment. Luckily, I had taken my camera with me and, being at that side of Devizes already, set off along the road that goes through Horton and on into the heart of the Vale of Pewsey. There is a particularly attractive prospect on the north side of the road just before entering the hamlet of Allington from the Devizes side. Wheat fields, clambering up the foot-slopes and catching the late evening sun beautifully at this time of year, are overlooked by the ridge of hills crowned by Tan Hill, the second highest point in Wiltshire; which always looks to me like a sleeping dragon, the green of its scales being caught by the fire of the setting sun.

It is especially interesting to look at the individual stalks of wheat at the moment – the head and the stalk are certainly there, but we are still some weeks away from it being ripe enough to harvest.

We take plant growth for granted – yet it is a miracle. A wheat seed averages only around 6 millimetres in length, or a quarter of an inch, yet it can turn into a plant that is taller than we are. We bury the seed in the ground and God gives the growth. Mustard seeds are even smaller, only one or two millimetres in diameter. Around 1,500 could fit along the edge of the altar, literally millions of them piled on top of it. How does a mustard seed turn into a mighty tree so big that birds can nest in it? It seems impossible to believe that they are the same organism. Yet they are.

Animals, including humans, also grow from tiny simple seeds and tiny simple eggs into complex adult forms. Some creatures even change forms at different points in their lives – caterpillars turn into to butterflies; tadpoles turn into frogs and toads.

It seems strange to assume that growth, and indeed, transformation, can only take place in our physical bodies. Surely it can also take place in our souls.

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Was Jesus Mad?: Sermon Preached on 9th June 2024 (Second Sunday after Trinity)

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James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” is a vibrant, chaotic scene. A parade floods a wide street, filled with grotesque, masked figures, clowns, and caricatures. Amidst the crowd, a small figure of Christ, almost hidden, rides a donkey. Banners wave above, and the overall effect is flat and poster-like.

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

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4.13 – 5.1; Mark 3. 20-35

“When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’

Maurycy Gottlieb’s painting, “Christ Teaching in Capernaum,” depicts Jesus, identified as a practicing Jew, preaching in a synagogue. He’s surrounded by attentive listeners in Middle Eastern attire, with a Roman figure in a toga appearing bored. The setting features Roman architecture, including fluted columns and a coffered ceiling
Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Teaching in Capernaum (1878-9). Hangs in the National Museum, Warsaw.

Have you ever heard a passage of Scripture and thought to yourself, ‘Jesus could be a bit bonkers, couldn’t he?’ Have you ever formed that thought but immediately suppressed it as un-Christian and maybe a bit blasphemous? It would be understandable to suppress a thought like that.

But, in this morning’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus’ own family – His brothers, His mother who would remain with Him right to the Cross, thinking either that He was nuts, or at least that a mob might do Him harm because they thought He was nuts.

Indeed, in crazy times, it’s the sane people who can seem to be nuts. Jesus lived in crazy times for the Jewish people of the Holy Land. We, too, live in frankly crazy times, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve watched the news recently.

Sensible people want to do the right thing; sensible people want to be good. Doing good is, of course, a very good thing. We all know, however, that none of us is good all of the time.

People who aren’t Christians think the Church is all about doing good; they think it’s an organisation for good people to celebrate and promote goodness in the name of a good holy man called Jesus Christ who lived a long time ago. It’s therefore easily dismissed as irrelevant to people who want to live in the present, and who know they aren’t always good all the time.

The Church too often colludes with this, by constantly trying to justify its existence with good works, as if it were a charity or an NGO. The Church, however, isn’t about goodness, but something far more wonderful – grace. Goodness is something we try to achieve through our own efforts; grace is a gift from God.

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Cow Parsley and Heaven: Sermon Preached on 2nd June 2024 (Second Sunday after Trinity)

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A head of a cow parsley plant, in flower.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4. 13-5. 1 ; John 3. 1-17

 “…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

A sprig of cow parsley in full flower, close-up.
Cow parsley: in June, as common as muck, but a sign of life’s persistence; © Gerry Lynch, 24 July 2017.

Driving from Worton towards Seend the other day, I marvelled at the quantity of cow parsley in the hedges. The landscape is particularly thick with new growth when blossoming May gives way to bowery June. Yet I was struck by a rather sombre realisation. In just a few months, it will start to die back as we speed towards the dead, dark, weeks of December.

St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle reading that, “We are always being given up to death for Jesus’s sake.” Everything in this universe must eventually die. Not only living things, but, although we rarely think about it, the stars, and even the atomic particles which make up all matter, dead or alive. Their lifespan is almost beyond the human imagination, but is nonetheless finite. Indeed, science tells us that without the death of many stars over many billions of years, the complex elements which make up humans and all other living beings simply could not exist. Each of us too must eventually give way for new life. We are not meant to live forever, not in this universe, anyway—but as Christians, we have faith that Jesus Christ, the eternally living God, by dying opened the way to eternal life for us.

We human beings are indeed “clay jars”, as St Paul puts it: fragile creatures, with a limited lifespan, and far from perfect. Yet we are of such immense value that God gave Himself up to death for our sakes to give us the most valuable treasure possible, eternal life.

St Paul knew we were not meant to be perfect, any more than we are meant to live forever in our mortal bodies. Paul had once thought he was a particularly holy follower of God because he was so diligent in keeping all the rules which he found in Scripture. He forgot was that although God’s written word is indeed treasure, he was a clay jar. The vision of God he had on the road to Damascus was such a violent experience that it left him literally blind. Yet he considered it the most valuable experience of his life, one that taught this over-intense and rather self-certain man that it is a dangerous thing to be too sure you know God’s will.

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Love is Our Nature: Sermon Preached on 26th May 2024 (Trinity Sunday)

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A renaissance-style triptych; the central panel represents the Holy Trinity with the Father holding both hands of Christ being crucified, while the Holy Spirit flies out, i.e. proceeds, from them. The side panels show Judas betraying Christ, and John the Baptist in his loincloth of camel hair.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8. 12-17; John 3. 1-17

“When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

When we cry to God the Father, it is the Holy Spirit calling within us, rhyming with our own human spirit, and bearing witness to the fact that as children of God, we are His joint heirs along with Christ. That’s an attempt to paraphrase in more understandable language what St Paul wrote in today’s epistle reading from the Letter to the Romans. We are heirs of God, His legitimate inheritors, jointly with Jesus Christ, and the fact that we instinctively cry to God as our heavenly Father reveals that the Holy Spirit is at work within us.

A modern recreation of a medieval sculpture of the eponymous Holy Trinity, on the south column of the chancel arch at Holy Trinity Micklegate, York.
A modern recreation of a medieval sculpture of the Holy Trinity, at Holy Trinity Micklegate, York. © Gerry Lynch, 1 April 2017.

We often hear the phrase that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. This is not just a fundamental teaching of Christianity, but one that we inherited directly from the Jewish faith where this statement is made in the Genesis creation story during the ‘sixth day’. While Christianity has more in common with Judaism than it does with any other religion, we part company very dramatically in our belief in the Holy Trinity, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So when we say we are made in the image and likeness of God, we don’t mean that we are made in the image and likeness of the Father alone—although certainly in His image. But we’re also made in the image and likeness of the Son, Jesus Christ. That seems to follow logically, as Jesus is God made human. There’s something much more mysterious, however, about the nature of Jesus. Jesus is not just the babe of Bethlehem or the preacher of Galilee, but also the eternal Word who was with God before time began. We human beings are like God, Father and Son, perhaps most obviously in that we are begetters of life, as the Father begat the Son, and were also ourselves begotten by our earthly fathers and mothers.

We are also made in the image and likeness of the Holy Spirit. There are two ideas from the sermon I preached on the Holy Spirit last week for Pentecost that I want to repeat on Trinity Sunday. The first is this: the Holy Spirit is many things, many of them beyond human comprehension, but one certain thing is that the Holy Spirit is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that the Father and the Son each have for the other, love as a person in its own right, flowing not only among the Father and Son but outwards into the Church and the whole universe. The second is this: the Holy Spirit is in many ways alien and difficult to understand; it is unbiddable—as St John records Jesus saying in today’s Gospel, when we are born of the Spirit, the wind blows where it wills and we have not the foggiest idea where it comes from or where it goes. We are made in the image of this Holy Spirit as much as the Father and the Son, and therefore made in the image of love, of this wild, unbiddable, uncontrollable, freely moving being. Love and freedom are at the very heart of what it means to be human, and the points at which our human nature most obviously touches the nature of God.

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Love, Truth and Fire: Sermon Preached on 19th May 2024 (Pentecost)

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An architect's design for the side interior wall of a church, containing many apses, statues, and a gallery.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

Pentecost is the Feast of the Holy Spirit. So, let me talk a little this morning about the nature of the Holy Spirit, because it is one of the truly distinctive things about Christianity. We share our faith in a loving, fatherly creator with Muslims and Jews, and indeed many traditional religions around the world. This seems to be something that human beings grasp quite instinctively.

Greek icon style painting of six saints, five of them with beards, and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Descent of the Holy Spirit (fragment) by Duccio, 1308-11.

The idea of the Son, Jesus Christ, God made human, has some very profound and perhaps intellectually difficult implications, but is something human and therefore not beyond us.

In contrast, there is something fundamentally otherworldly and inhuman about the Holy Spirit. Because there is no obvious human comparator for what the Holy Spirit is, we must attempt to shed some light on its nature by analogy. Here’s the odd thing—we need to remember that this very otherworldly, very inhuman, being is God, and as we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the Holy Spirit in all its strangeness and unbiddability is also something that we are made in the image and likeness of. Deep within us, often beyond the horizon of our senses, is part of our nature that is as uncontrollable and difficult to comprehend as the Holy Spirit.

So with all that in mind, let’s explore some of the things we do know about the Holy Spirit.

Firstly, the Holy Spirit is love, and therefore God is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows mutually between the Father and the Son, Love as a person in its own right. Love, therefore has a character, and a will, all of its own.

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Fame and Truth: Sermon Preached on 12th May 2024 (The Sunday After Ascension)

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

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“…and the lot fell on Matthias.”

The singer Bambie Thug, in heavy makeup, looks at the camera at Eurovision 2024.
Seeking El Dorado? Eurovision 2024, © Arkland, Used under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On the morning after the Eurovision Song Contest, it seems appropriate to reflect that fame and celebrity seems to be the El Dorado of the present age. It isn’t new, of course – even in the 19th Century, artists with a worldwide reputation like the singer Nellie Melba or the pianist-conductor Franz Liszt could often arrive in a new city to crowds of screaming fans, much as the Beatles and the Stones would a century later. The ancient Romans and Persians also had their celebrities. But this ancient human trait seems to have intensified since the turn of this century. Reality TV and talent shows began to crowd out more interesting forms of programme-making, while the Internet facilitated new forms of celebrity entrepreneur, willing to say, do, or sell anything to harvest attention from their own little world of fans.

People can make a good living from this. You’ve probably never heard of Charli d’Amelio. Charli is a social media influencer, someone who’s famous on social media because she’s famous on social media, and therefore attractive to people wanting to advertise and promote brands. Charli has 44 million followers on Instagram and a whopping 154 million followers on TikTok. Her most recent TikTok video, posted on Wednesday, shows Charli and a friend dancing to music while washing their hair with Garnier shampoo.

Compare this with the situation in our epistle reading. The 120 people Peter speaks to seem to comprise all the remaining Christians in the entire world. Even I have more social media followers than this. About twice that number came to church on Easter morning in our little country benefice.

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Of Vines and Eunuchs: Sermon Preached on 28st April 2024 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

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A cross section of an icon of Christ the True Vine, surrounded by the apostles as branches, by 16th Century Cretan artist Angelos Akotantos

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 8: 28-40; John 15: 1-11

“I am the vine – you are the branches.”

Just as it is today, the Holy Land of Biblical times was great winegrowing country. The terminology of winegrowing is a frequent part of Jesus’ parables and teaching, and indeed large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the grapevine was often a metaphor for the Jewish people.

The eunuch, very African in appearance, dressed in opulent appearance, and accompanied by a dog, bends down to be blessed by St Philip. Five retainers, one holding the Scriptures watch from the eunuch's horse and carriage.
The Baptism Of The Eunuch (1626), by Rembrandt. Hangs in the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.

The language of the vine and the branches in the Gospel reading is so rich, that it is easy to ignore our reading from Acts this morning – and nobody wants to preach about eunuchs in case children in the congregation ask awkward questions. But Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch is tremendously important to the revolution in thought that clearly affected the apostles in the years after the Resurrection. This shift in mindset is all about who could be considered one of God’s chosen people. Acts records it as being clearly directed by the Holy Spirit.

The “Ethiopian” is, of course, a foreigner from a long way away; in fact, he’s described as a court official of the Candace, who was the ruler of the great city of Meroë, located in the present day Sudan. He was probably much darker-skinned than the people in the Holy Land, but that will have mattered much less in the Ancient world, which was much less race-obsessed than we are.

Although we often hear that to be a Jew, you have to be born a Jew, this isn’t actually the case. People from Gentile backgrounds can and did convert to Judaism in Biblical times, and they do so today. As this Ethiopian “had come to Jerusalem to worship”, he was clearly interested in the God of the Jews. The thing that ensured that he could never convert to Judaism wasn’t that he was a foreigner, but that he was a eunuch. That prohibition dated back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Ethiopian was reading from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah when Philip approached him, and shortly after the section quoted here, it contained a brief reference to a future time when God would give eunuchs something “better than sons and daughters… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”. (The reference to things being cut off is, almost certainly in this context, meant to be funny.) Yet writings from contemporary Jewish writers made it clear that prejudice against eunuchs was still very much alive in Judaism at the time of the apostles and that Isaiah’s prophecy was yet to be fulfilled.

So something revolutionary happens when the Ethiopian says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me being baptised.” The apostles by this stage have no sense of themselves as being anything other than Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. When Philip baptises the Ethiopian, it is a powerful sign that the followers of Jesus Christwill come not just from the Jewish people but from a myriad of ethnicities and nationalities, and will come even from people who had been forbidden from becoming Jews because of their state in life. This isn’t, for the apostles, a rejection of Judaism, but a clear fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.

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The Good Shepherd: Sermon Preached on 21st April 2024 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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A Byzantine mosaic of Christ as the Good Shepherd, surrounded by six lambs.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 4: 5-13; John 10: 11-18

“…he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.”

The Good Shepherd is one of the most familiar Bible passages, and the imagery is so beautiful, that we can fall into using it as twee spiritual wallpaper. When we look at the text more closely, it has a harder and more interesting edge, especially if we consider the different lives of the shepherd and the hireling.

Liz Truss on Easter Day, outside a Norfolk church with a round tower, holding a lamb as if she were Jesus in a twee American piece of religious kitsch.
We can fall into using the story of the Good Shepherd as twee spiritual wallpaper.

The shepherd owns the sheep; they are both his savings account and his working capital. They are how he earns his living, and also where he stores his wealth. To others, his flock may seem modest, but for him it is the fruit of a lifetime’s hard graft. Indeed, it may even have been handed down to him by his forefathers, the result of generations of sleeping out alone on cold mountaintops as wolves howled in the darkness.

The hired man, who works for the shepherd, is in a different position; he has no capital, no savings, he lives from payday to payday. He may have no particular reason to show loyalty to the shepherd, whose wealth may seem modest to people like the fancy Temple clergy in Jerusalem, but still like a king’s ransom to the man whose wages he pays. The shepherd may have started out with advantages in life that seem extraordinary and even unfair to the hireling. The hireling may be a hard worker, he may be loyal to and genuinely friendly with his boss, but things get really tough, like when a pack of wolves attacks on a bitter winter night, he has no skin in the game when it comes to the flock. Looking after these sheep is just another job, and not one that comes with the sort of pay-cheque that’s worth risking your life for.

Now, St Peter may have started out life as a fisherman, but by the time Jesus said “I am the good shepherd”, Peter fancied himself very much as Jesus’ co-shepherd. He was Jesus’ best mate and self-styled Second-in-Command. When Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep”, Peter was going to try to emulate him. So, at the Last Supper, Peter told Christ, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.” But Jesus knew Peter better than he knew himself, and told him that before daybreak, he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus, obviously, was right. When it came down to it, when the metaphorical wolves of the Temple were circling, Peter turned out not to be Jesus’ fellow shepherd, but just a hireling there for the payday he thought the Messiah would bring him.

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