Forgiving Ourselves for Being Imperfect: Sermon Preached on 7th April 2024 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 4: 32-35; John 20: 19-31

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.”

Why can’t you lot be like those Christians in our first reading? They were “of one heart and soul”. They held all their possessions in common—even selling their houses and sharing the proceeds, so “[t]here was not a needy person among them”.

Painting, oil on canvas, in a style derived from Raphael. Ananias is dead - and has a terrible skin tone - and Sapphira is in mid-collapse, about to join him. A crowd of several dozen looks on.
Ananias and Sapphira, Sir James Thornhill (1729-31). Hangs in the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Now, I could go from here to say that while it was a pity that few of us seemed to be able to be really live like these first Christians, but if were even a little more like them, the world would be a better place; and afterwards you would say “What a nice sermon, Rector.”

As I preached it, I would also know that there wasn’t a cat’s chance in Hell of me giving my savings to a common fund, still less selling my retirement flat. I mean, who would control this fund? The Church of England’s central bureaucracy? No thanks. My PCCs? I love you all dearly, but, also, no thanks. I’d also know you weren’t going to sell your possessions, and if you were to sell your house and give the proceeds to a common fund, some of your children would have very angry conversations with you.

Now, this vision of the Church at its foundation has inspired some Christians in every generation since the dawn of the Church to live totally different lives from most people, and sometimes great things have resulted. And, I don’t know about you, but sometimes that leaves me feeling pretty inadequate. Then I also remember that some of the Christians inspired by this vision end up going a little crazy.

So with all that in mind, let’s return to this story and not over-romanticise it. Yes, it’s a wonderful vision, probably a time in the life of the early Christians when they experienced, here on Earth, a foretaste of Heaven. But let’s be clear, the apostles and their companions didn’t manage to live that way for very long.

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Wilderness and the Garden: Sermon Preached on 31st March 2024 (Easter Day)

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

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

“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).”

When we get to the end of a journey, it’s sometimes helpful to remind ourselves where it started.

Painting of a garden, in which Mary Magdalen, in a red dress and bending down, is trying to touch Jesus cloak - he is walking away from her, but looking back at her, and putting his palm out in admonishment.
Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere (1440-2), in the Basilica di San Marco, Florence.

Jesus’ public ministry started with His baptism by John the Baptist, then immediately being taken out into the wilderness for forty days. His public ministry ended with His crucifixion, or so it seemed. Because on the first Easter morning, a few of His closest followers encountered Him risen from the dead. They were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.

The season of Lent consists of forty days of fasting that are intentionally modelled on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Lent also ends on Easter morning—in other words, it too ends in Resurrection.

So travelling through the wilderness seems to be an essential part of experiencing Resurrection. In the wilderness we are confronted by the sheer scale of God’s creation, and how much of that creation lies outside our normal day-to-day experience. In the wilderness, our illusions of being in control die, and we learn just how limited the power of human beings is.

It seems to me that the Western world is entering a wilderness. The financial crisis of 2008, and the very slow recovery from it, was perhaps first warning signthat the existing political and economic order might be in trouble. Other signs include the ever widening gap between the rich and the rest, the fact that it’s often easier to make money by speculation than doing something worthwhile, and the increasing difficulties even relatively well-off young people have in finding security. All these have been warning signs, throughout history, of civilisations in trouble.

A gathering sense of crisis became acute after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One thing the two years since have told us is that the Western world is weaker than is thought by our pundits, our politicians, and the lobbyists and campaignerswho try to influence them. Western attempts to hobble the Russian economy through sanctions have, regrettably, been at best partially effective, and have been ignored by the rising powers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Western fantasies of power and control lie in tatters, and we seem to have entered a geopolitical wilderness.

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Making it in the World to Come: Sermon Preached on 24th March 2024 (Palm Sunday)

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A painting in mixed media: Christ, riding donkey and approaching from the left, is welcomed by a large crowd, greeting him with palm leaves; two angels appearing at top left.

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

Philippians 2. 5-11; Mark 11. 1-11

“he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

If you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got to get out there and sell yourself. The modern world is no place for humility, especially with the job market being the way it is. Pay close attention to your image, not only in the physical world, but especially on social media. To build your profile there, never forget that outrage sells and angry people click.

In the style of Giotto, Jesus riding on a donkey gives blessings to some passersby, some of whom have a halo and some of whom don't.
Giotto, The Entry into Jerusalem (1305). In the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

That’s a reasonable summary of the sort of advice that might be given, in an entirely well-meaning way, to an ambitious young person trying to make it big in a bad old world.

Now, we all know that St Paul has the reputation of being a real old curmudgeon, with views completely incompatible with the modern world. That is clearer nowhere than in this morning’s Epistle reading, when he writes:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who … emptied himself … humbled himself and became the obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Holy week turns the values of the 21st Century West upside down. Then again, it also turned the values of the Roman Empire upside down, and it turned the values of Second Temple Judaism upside down. Our Western obsession with self-fulfilment dies on the Cross, just like the Romans’ obsession with power, and the Jewish leadership’s obsession with piety.

And within Holy Week, if there is one story that really speaks to our own times, to the manias and failings of the 2020s, it is that of Palm Sunday. At its core, Palm Sunday is a story about the fickleness of celebrity.

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Sin and Grace: Sermon Preached on 17th March 2024 (Passion Sunday)

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Preached at St Michael and All Angels’, Urchfont (at the Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Exodus 7. 8-24; Romans 5. 12-21

“…where sin abounded, grace did much more abound…”

When we hear the strange story of Moses and Aaron confronting the Pharaoh, with sticks that turn into snakes and rivers turning into blood, its remoteness to our own world can make us dismiss its enduring relevance and power. For not only is the story set more than three thousand years ago, but it is told with a powerful dose of magical realism.

A lithograph in Marc Chagall's classic brightly coloured, abstract, modernist style of Moses and Aaron appearing before Pharaoh on his throne surrounded by courtiers.
Marc Chagall’s Moses and Aaron with Pharaoh, from his 1966 portfolio “The Story of Exodus”—a time when this story resonated powerfully with the secular public, especially thanks to the African-American civil rights movement.

Look beyond the unfamiliar setting, however, and it could be a story from 2024. A persecuted minority protests to the authorities, and when that fails, they turn first to a demonstration of people power, and then an escalating campaign of civil disobedience, leading to non-violent direct action and then intentional property damage.

Pharaoh is also like many a hard-hearted ruler in today’s world, unable to read the signs of the times and all too quick to renege on promises of reform. He overestimates his own strength and underestimates the damage his opponents can cause him. In tonight’s reading, the campaign of the Hebrew people against Pharaoh’s persecution is still in its earliest phases. Everything will get much worse—but it will end in liberation for the good guys.

It would be nice if we could say that they all lived happily ever after. But the problem with stories like this is that yesterday’s freedom fighters almost inevitably turn into tomorrow’s oppressors. When they arrived in the Promised Land, the descendants of Moses and Aaron weren’t too worried about the rights and freedoms of the people already there.

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Death and Our Troubled Times: Sermon Preached on 17th March 2024 (Passion Sunday)

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Fields of wheat on a sunny early summer evening near Stanton St Bernard, Wiltshire.

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

Hebrews 5. 5-10; John 20. 20-33

“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Our Gospel reading this morning starts with one of those scenes in John that feels like it has been written in an intentionally surrealist way. It is set in Jerusalem, a few days before the Passover. The Passover was and remains one of the great Holy Days of the Jewish year. It is a celebration of liberation from slavery, of new life after a living death, that a long time ago was wrapped around an even more ancient festival celebrating the biological new life of springtime. This wasn’t any old Passover, either, but the one that would mark the end of Jesus Christ’s earthly life. During the build up to it, some Greeks come up to Philip, and say to him, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” He and Andrew go together to see Jesus.

A close up of many grains of wheat, perhaps around a hundred.

But we never get to find out if the Greeks ever saw Jesus. Like characters in a David Lynch TV show, they now vanish from the story, never to reappear. Instead, Jesus gives Andrew and Philip a cryptic response, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

To make sense of all this, we need to remember what is unique about the Holy Week timetable in John’s Gospel. Does anyone know? Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, John shifts the day of Jesus’ crucifixion to Thursday. So Jesus becomes the Passover Lamb, the animal sacrificed by Jews, to this very day, to celebrate the deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt: Jesus too be sacrificed to deliver people from slavery—from the slavery of sin. More than that, in going into the ground he will bear fruit not only for the Jews, but for the whole world, and these mysterious vanishing Greeks symbolise that in Christ, delivery from bondage will now be opened to the whole human race.

This is why the people who set our readings paired this passage of John with this morning’s other reading, from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Not only is Jesus the Passover Lamb for the whole human race, but he is a great High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek”, in other words a priest just like the Kohenites who were the only people permitted to perform the animal sacrifices in the Temple. These sacrifices were made for a variety of purposes, but some of them were offered in expiation for sin. It is not animal sacrifices in the Temple, however, that Christ the great High Priest offers, but Himself sacrificed on the Cross. And unlike the animal sacrifices which need to be continually repeated, Christ’s sacrifice of Himself is enough for the sins of the whole world forever.

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Motherhood and Apple Pie: Sermon Preached on 10th March 2024 (Mothering Sunday)

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Surreal apple pies in an MK Cirulionis fantasy landscape

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27

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

A mother helps her young daughter to make apple pie.
Who could argue with the idea of motherhood and apple pie? Well, most of us.

“Motherhood and apple pie!”—Who could argue against motherhood and apple pie? The Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary tells me that this is a phrase we have imported from North American English, and is “used to represent an idea of perfect home life and comfort.” All those of you in the congregation who are mothers can confirm, that’s what motherhood is, isn’t it?—Perfect home life and comfort!

Or maybe not.

Our Gospel reading for Mothering Sunday is not, thankfully, some sanitised, cartoonish, version of what motherhood is about. This is motherhood at its rawest—Mary watches Christ, even speaks with Christ, as He is put to death. The trauma from experiencing the death of a child, including an adult child, is perhaps greater than that of any other type of bereavement. One can scarcely imagine what it feels like to witness it at first hand, in these circumstances. As some of you know, my sister died when we were both children, and I know only too well how devastating the death of a child is to a mother – and to a father. Yet, look at the memorial tablets on the walls of our parish churches and it is obvious this was a distressingly frequent event until the last hundred years or so—and it was frequent even for the well-off. Such is the human condition.

To love is to open yourself to hurt. To bear children is to open yourself to being hurt, through the hurts they themselves live through, and sometimes even directly by them. So God too, in creating humanity in His image and thus granting us free will, opened Himself to being hurt by the life He had given birth to.

And here is the unique thing about the Christian understanding of God: Jesus Christ was God made one of us, and in that He exposed Himself to one of the worst fates the world can inflict on anyone—a brutal, humiliating, public, death, in front of his mother.

Motherhood as a perfect home life and comfort? If, only.

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