Our Weird Faith: Sermon Preached on 19th April 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” 

A young kitchen maid, of Moorish complexion, in a white headcloth and dark olive-green smock stands behind a wooden table, her head bowed and her hands resting on a cloth on the tabletop. On the table in front of her are two large earthenware jugs, a shallow metal basin, a small dark pot, a white jug with blue decoration, a stack of plates, a mortar and pestle, and a bulb of garlic. A small white cloth lies folded on the table. Behind her on the right hangs a cloth-wrapped bundle. In the upper left corner, visible through an opening or hatch in the wall, a smaller scene shows three figures seated at a table covered with a white cloth, with one figure gesturing towards another who sits opposite. The painting is lit from the left, with warm brown and ochre tones throughout.
Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1620–2). Hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.

Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.

But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.

This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.

“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.

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Christians Help Iraq to Qualify for World Cup

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Screenshot of a Church Times article headlined 'Christians help Iraq to qualify for World Cup', bylined Gerry Lynch, dated 7 April 2026, with the subheading: 'People were in tears of happiness, says Parish Priest of St Mary's Cathedral of the Assyrian Church of the East, in Ealing.' Below is a photograph of a floodlit stadium at night.

Thanks to the Church Times for publishing a short news piece from me on the hugely disproportionate number of Christians playing for Iraq’s second ever World Cup-qualifying squad—and also to its first World Cup outing, in 1986. A notably devout Christian, Ammo Baba, scored Iraq’s first ever international goal, against Morocco, in 1957, then coached the side to its first and most recent World Cup in 1986.

Read it all here.

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We All Need Doubt: Sermon Preached on 12th April 2026 (Second Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 12, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”

A dimly lit scene showing four men in close proximity, their faces and hands dramatically illuminated against a dark background. One man, bare-chested with his robe pulled aside to reveal a wound in his right side, guides the hand of a second man whose index finger is extended and appears to be probing the wound. The second man leans forward intently, his face close to the wound, brow furrowed in concentration. Two further men press in from behind, peering over the shoulders of the first two, their expressions conveying intense curiosity. The lighting falls sharply from the upper left, casting deep shadows and emphasising the physical, tactile nature of the moment. The figures fill the picture space almost entirely, with very little background visible.

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.

Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.

Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.

And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.

What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

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The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Christ Church, Worton, and Holy Cross, Seend

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

A large, densely populated painting set in an English churchyard. Figures in various states of undress emerge from tombs and from between pale stone grave markers, some stretching, some clambering upright, others still dazed. The scene is crowded and unhurried rather than dramatic — people appear bemused, curious, or quietly absorbed. A woman in dark robes kneels among flowers in the foreground. A robed figure reads from a scroll near the centre. Angels and armoured figures stand among the risen dead. The church itself is visible in the background, bright white. Flowers — daisies, lilies — grow abundantly across the grass. The overall mood is strange and domestic rather than triumphant, as if resurrection were an ordinary if unexpected event occurring on a quiet English summer morning.

Stanley Spencer, A Cookham Resurrection (1924-7) – in the ownership of the Tate Modern, London, but not currently on display.

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

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Awe and Glory: A Reflection for Holy Week (Wednesday 1st April 2026)

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Reading—Mark 9. 2-8

A vast, open landscape photographed at dusk or just after sunset. The foreground shows a recently harvested field, its dry golden-brown stubble occupying the lower third of the image, with a grass-edged farm track running diagonally from the lower right toward the horizon. At the centre of the horizon stands a single solitary tree, silhouetted in dark brown-black against a spectacular sky. The sky is the dominant feature: deep, rich cobalt blue at the top gradually softens through lighter blue into a luminous pale glow near the horizon, which itself blazes with bands of warm amber and orange where the sun has recently set. The effect is one of vast space, stillness, and solitude — the lone tree the only vertical element in an otherwise horizontal, almost minimalist composition.

Awe in the everyday. ‘I Touched Infinity’, Potterne Hill, 27 July 2024, © Gerry Lynch.

A perfect sunset, a chord by Fauré, the giggle of a baby, the stars on a dark night – all of those can give us the most extraordinary sensation, for which we use the word awe. We become aware that we have encountered something that is more glorious than the language we have to describe it – much greater in scale and complexity, much greater in beauty and moral grandeur. We sense that we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. Wonder mixes with fear. We are lifted up out of the drudgery of our routine lives. Yet we also realise how small we are; if we are lucky, our ego deflates a bit.

Awe is more than just a feeling. It seems to remind us of facts of life that we often forget. The universe is indeed vast; each one of us is small and lives for the briefest of spans; yet we are distantly related to all life on Earth; the complex elements that make up our bodies were forged in the furnaces of long-dead stars. Everything does indeed connect.

Much of contemporary life seems as if it were designed to minimise the number of times we experience that sense of awe, and from thinking too deeply about it when it does happen. The constant buzzes and beeps, the 24-hour TV schedule, and the infinite scrolling websites aim to keep us chained to our screens so we never notice what is beyond.

To notice the truth of our lives, we need to escape their humdrum.

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True Power: A Reflection for Holy Week (Tuesday 31st March 2026)

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Worton

Reading—John 19. 4-16

Two men stand facing each other in a stone interior. The figure on the left is seen almost entirely from behind: a heavyset man in a richly draped golden toga trimmed with red, his right arm extended with palm upturned in a gesture of dismissive question. His head is turned in profile, revealing a clean-shaven, well-fed face. He stands in full sunlight, which pools on the tiled floor around him. The figure on the right stands in shadow against a bare reddish-brown wall: a lean, dark-haired man with an unkempt beard, wearing a plain dark robe, his arms apparently bound behind him. He meets the other man's gaze directly. The contrast between the two figures — one luminous and dominant, one shadowed and still — is stark.

Nikolai Ge, What is Truth? (1890). Hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Do they ever get under your skin, the men and women who hold power in our world? Those who casually snigger and sneer and tell obvious lies as they make decisions that will condemn many thousands to their deaths, or devastate the livelihoods of many millions.

Such powers in the land have always existed, although we didn’t always see their faces and hear their voices every day.

Pontius Pilate was such a power in the land. As Roman governor of Judaea, he only had to click his fingers and some of the finest troops the world had ever seen would be sent into action to do his bidding. Over non-citizens, such as Jesus and the apostles, he had the power of life and death.  He wasn’t powerful because of any notable personal qualities of his, not as far as we can tell, but because of the Empire he represented.

You didn’t set yourself against the Romans lightly. They were extremely competent and effective, but also ruthless and unafraid of brutality. Their power rested on a reputation that left no doubt they would inflict terror on their enemies, and inflict it capably. That’s why the Jewish leaders started plotting against Jesus in the first place – they were worried that such a charismatic preacher and teacher would attract the wrong sort of attention from the Romans and provoke a bloody reprisal, especially a figure who was developing a name for acts of mysterious power.

Yet Jesus had no ambition for power, rejected violence, and committed no crime. That clearly unsettles Pilate. Clearly he isn’t afraid of a bit of brutality, but such manifest injustice seems a bit much for him. Still, a man of the world has to do what he has to do.

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Keep ‘Er Lit in the Face of Armageddon: A Reflection for Holy Week (Monday 30th March 2026)

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Reading—Matthew 25. 1-13   

A watercolour depicting ten female figures against a dark nocturnal landscape. On the left, five women stand composed and luminous in pale robes, holding lit oil lamps on chains; the central figure extends her arm firmly, pointing to the right in a gesture of dismissal. On the right, five women in darker clothing react with distress — one kneels with arms outstretched in supplication, another throws her hands upward in anguish, a third slumps toward the ground. Their lamps hang unlit. In the middle distance, a city with illuminated domes and spires is visible against the dark sky, suggesting the wedding feast now out of reach. Above, a floating angelic figure blows a long trumpet, heralding judgement. The overall palette is cool grey and silver, with the warm glow of the lit lamps providing the only warmth in the composition.

William Blake, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (ca. 1800). Owned by the Metropolitan Museum, New York; not currently on public display.

The story of the human race has been one where we gradually, but continually, amass more knowledge, more advanced technology – and more power. Even before writing was invented, we were already unique because of the wheel, the domestication of fire, the domestication of other species, and perhaps most of all speech. These things also made us uniquely deadly to other life forms. Our kingdom is very much of this world.

In recent generations, we’ve also potentially become lethal to ourselves. We’ve lived with the risk of nuclear war for 81 years now, and the wars unfolding in different parts of the world at the moment are frightening and violent events. Experiments in Genetic Modification of humans and other life forms are rapidly increasing in ambition and potential to do good, but also in risk of disaster. But it is Artificial Intelligence that is currently most in the public eye as a potential risk to our survival. One after another, some of the world’s top computer scientists – in many cases people instrumental to making Artificial Intelligence a reality – have either quit the field warning that it could lead to our extinction, or called for development to be slowed dramatically to allow adequate safety checks before AIs are made more powerful.

The logic of human relationships, however, is such that the two great empires of our time, China and the USA, must race as fast as they can to develop more powerful forms of Artificial Intelligence. This technology could be as transformative of human existence as the wheel, or fire, or speech, perhaps even more so. If one country blinks, it risks ceding the future to the other. Such are the constraints that govern how human kingdoms relate to one another.

The kingdom of God is different. It lives in its citizens often because of what they are and how they approach life as much as what they do, still less what they achieve. It doesn’t have a capital city or any fixed territory to defend.

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The Madness of Mobs: Sermon Preached on 29nd March 2026 (Palm Sunday)

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Philippians 2. 5-11; Matthew 21. 1-11

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’”

A screenshot from the BBC television programme Wogan. Two people are seated facing each other in a talk-show setting with a neutral beige studio backdrop. On the left, a woman with short, voluminous auburn hair wears a bright teal blazer over a patterned blue and purple dress. She is looking toward her interviewer with a composed expression. On the right, a man with dark, collar-length hair, seen from behind and in profile, wears a dark grey suit and has his hands clasped together as if mid-conversation. The BBC logo is visible in the upper left corner and the programme name "Wogan" appears in the upper right. The styling and set design are consistent with British television production of the mid-to-late 1980s.

Lindy Chamberlain on the BBC Wogan Show in 1991. © BBC; used under Fair Use doctrine

Does anyone remember a lady in Australia named Lindy Chamberlain? If you don’t remember the name, you may remember her story. While camping at Ayers Rock in 1980, her nine-week-old daughter disappeared while she and her husband were making the evening meal at a barbeque pit. Chamberlain said she had seen a dingo leaving their family tent when she returned to check after hearing her daughter crying. Although other campers who were there that evening believed her, few members of the Australian public gave this unlikely story any credibility. I mean, “A dingo stole my baby…”—sure, love, whatever you say. Whipped up by the media, Chamberlain became a national and even international hate figure, with the hate exacerbated by the fact that she was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and therefore seemed insufficiently grief-stricken by conventional norms.

Two years later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murdering her own daughter, and soon exhausted every possible means of appeal. Yet she only served three years before the prosecution case fell apart: by chance, nearly six years after her disappearance, her daughter’s cardigan was found in a remote area with many dingo lairs; the prosecution’s forensic evidence also turned out to be full of flaws. Chamberlain was released: the hate figure turned out to be an innocent woman.

Somewhat closer to home, both in time and space, is Christopher Jefferies, a cultured and rather eccentric retired public schoolmaster from Bristol. When his lodger Joanna Yeates was murdered in 2010, the press went feral, portraying him as a sinister oddball who was almost certainly guilty. Yet he was entirely innocent; after the true killer was convicted, Jefferies sued multiple newspapers and won.

The social media era has brought a new arena for people to form mobs in. Because of that, the Internet gets blamed for changing human behaviour for the worse – and maybe it has – but the tendency to form badly-behaved mobs isn’t new at all. It goes back to the dawn of humanity.

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Stinking Lazarus and Dry Bones: Sermon Preached on 22nd March 2026 (Passion Sunday)

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Ezekiel 37. 1-14, John 11. 1-45

“Lord, by this time he stinketh”

Against a deep blue sky, Jesus stands on the left, his right hand raised in command, a golden halo around his head. A crowd of disciples and mourners press close behind him, their faces expressing astonishment and distress. In the centre foreground, Mary Magdalene kneels prostrate at Jesus's feet. To the right, Lazarus stands upright before the entrance to a rock-cut tomb, his body still wrapped in white grave cloths, his face exposed. Two haloed women — Martha and Mary — stand near him. A small figure at the far right holds his nose against the stench. The composition draws the eye from Christ's commanding gesture across to the risen Lazarus.

Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus (1304-6). a fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Compared with our other senses, there is something particularly potent and unavoidable about smell. You can close your eyes, you can stick your fingers in your ears, but if something around you stinks, there isn’t a lot you can do to stop noticing it while you’re breathing. And the neurologists tell us something else—they tell us that unlike our other senses, smell doesn’t pass through our thalamus, which is the brain’s central relay unit, but instead goes straight to the parts of our brain which control memory, and which control emotion. It’s why particular smells can so easily trigger memories from our earliest years, and why they can also trigger such powerful emotions.

Smell can trigger disgust in us like nothing else can. I hope that none of you have ever smelt an untreated human body after a few days but I’m sure that, like me, you’ve at times come across big animals like badgers or even livestock in that sort of state. This is one of two cases in today’s readings where the King James Version is definitely superior to the NRSV: “there is a stench” isn’t half as memorable as “he stinketh”!

Lazarus stinks because he’s been dead for four days. That’s more important than it might seem on a casual reading. There was an old Jewish tradition that the soul hovered near the body for three days, hoping to re-enter it, and then departed when it saw the face beginning to change with decomposition.

So one thing St John wants you to know here is that Lazarus was totally stone-dead: not out cold, not in a coma, not in the exit lounge, not dead for a day at most like the resurrection miracles in the other Gospels—but absolutely brown bread. So this isn’t a case of Jesus merely healing someone; this is showing Jesus as the Lord of death and life itself, someone who can bring Lazarus’ soul back from the netherworld. This is showing that Jesus is God.

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Anglicanism’s “Schrödinger’s Schism”

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Article header image from The Critic, credited to Light Oriye Tamunotonye / AFP via Getty Images. An elderly Black man with close-cropped white hair stands in three-quarter profile against a plain interior wall with a large leafy plant behind him. He wears the distinctive vestments of an Anglican bishop: a magenta purple cassock, white clerical collar insert, and a gold pectoral cross on a chain, over a dark blue checked suit jacket. His expression is composed and watchful.

Thanks to The Critic for publishing my piece on Schrödinger’s Schism—why Anglicanism’s doom is so often foretold yet never comes to pass. Click through to read the whole article including details on developments in the last few weeks.

But here’s a taster.

“Two common misconceptions about Anglicanism are worth clearing up, because doing so reveals both why it often feels like a battlefield and why it has not entirely fallen apart…

“The first is that the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t really like that of the Pope. … While the Pope is the head of a single globe-spanning Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion is a loose confederation of 42 entirely self-governing “provinces”, or member Churches.

“Since the 19th century, some Anglicans have proposed some or other means of worldwide Anglican authority, but its member Churches have never been willing to cede their right to rule themselves. That’s why the 1998 vote on homosexuality wasn’t binding and could never have been, and why Anglicans in the USA were free to ignore it in consecrating the gay-and-partnered Gene Robinson in 2003, which hardened the divisions first exposed in 1998 to this day.

“The second misconception, shared by most Western commentators, is that conservative attitudes to homosexuality around the world broadly track conservative attitudes to women’s ministry. But this is, at most, loosely the case. In particular, while Africa can be a darkly homophobic place at times, senior women clergy are fairly common, both among mainline Protestants and in Pentecostal denominations.

[…]

“Even in Uganda, one of Anglicanism’s trio of ultra-conservative provinces along with Rwanda and Nigeria, Primate Stephen Kaziimba was at pains to tell the local press that his objection to Mullally was due to her (lukewarm) support for same-sex relationships. In 2022, Kaziimba publicly expressed his support for women bishops to be consecrated in Uganda. In fact, women were first ordained as priests in the East African nation as early as 1983, eleven years before the Church of England.”



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