Can We Really Do Likewise?: Sermon Preached on 13th July 2025 (Fourth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 13, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Colossians 1. 1-14; Luke 10. 25-37

“Go and do likewise.”

A vibrant painting featuring two figures riding a horse along a path. One figure, dressed in a yellow robe and blue pants, carries another figure on their back, who wears a red headscarf. The background includes swirling, textured landscapes with trees, a river, and a figure standing near a wooden cart, rendered in the distinctive brushstroke style of Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, near Arnhem.

Does the name Olive Cooke mean anything to you? Ten years ago, Olive, who was ninety-two years old, was found dead in the Avon Gorge in Bristol. This generous lady, still tireless in charity work into her nineties, had given so much money to charity that she was constantly plagued by begging letters, receiving up to 3,000 a year. Some of the charities she gave money to passed her details on to other charities, and she eventually became so distressed by the tragic stories they sent her, and her inability to do more to help than the huge amount she was already doing, that she took her own life.

The Good Samaritan is one of the most famous of Jesus’ parables and it still resonates with people even in our post-Christian culture. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, it allows us to thumb our nose at hypocrites. We all hate hypocrites. In particular, it allows non-religious people to thumb their nose at Christians for being hypocrites, with Jesus’ approval (or so it seems). That allows them to keep doing what they want to do, which is to ignore what Jesus actually taught. But the second reason this parable resonates is because, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold, we all know that we do pass by on the other side, far too often. It’s true that we all hate hypocrites; but we also all are hypocrites, at least in some situations.

But hold on, we don’t want to end up like Olive Cooke, driven to despair by our inability to fix everybody’s problems. So let’s ask ourselves if Jesus was doing something more with this story than just telling people off for not always practising what they preach.

For there are different ways of exploring this parable, all of them tell us something interesting. One is to note is that the Samaritans were the traditional enemy of the Jews in Palestine. The Samaritans agree with the Jews about many religious matters, but also disagree with them about some very important things[1]—so they’re the classic example of the enemy similar and familiar enough to be truly hated. Therefore, I’ve often heard sermons on the Good Samaritan that read it as a warning against prejudice generally and religious bigotry in particular. That isn’t wrong. It’s an important part of the message of the parable, but I want us to explore it from a different angle today.

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Things Don’t Always Get Better: Sermon Preached on 6th July 2025 (Third Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 6, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Galatians 6. 7-16; Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20

“…do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”

We’re all shaped forever by the world of our young adulthood. Some eras leave a particularly profound mark. Those who were young adults during the Second World War were defined by the words “Never Again”. They were the generation who built international institutions to try to build peace between nations, and social safety nets within them to try to prevent the sort of embittering poverty that did so much to pave the road to war in the 1930s.

Two men in suits are shaking hands and embracing on a tarmac in front of an airplane. The man on the left has dark hair and a red tie, while the man on the right has gray hair and a blue tie. In the background, there is a staircase with "Belfast Int" written on it, and a few other individuals are visible. The scene appears to be a formal or diplomatic greeting.

The years when things could only get better? Clinton and Blair in Belfast, 1998.

That generation has mostly passed to its reward. Many of you here, however, were formed by the Swinging Sixties, when the world changed dramatically in just a few years, with a huge expansion of individual freedom and self-expression, and huge changes in the status of women.

Both of these were times when the Church urgently engaged with the task of making the world a better place. After the war it sought, in the name of the Prince of Peace, to help create the means for a permanently peaceful world. In the Sixties, the Church set itself the mission of updating itself, fearing the rapidly changing world might leave it obsolete.

The era that formed me was the 1990s Golden Age that followed the end of the Cold War. It was encapsulated in the title of the song that accompanied Tony Blair’s triumphal march into Downing Street twenty-eight years ago – D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better. By this time, the Church had become very much weaker. Although the Church itself still expected to play a part in helping things get better, few others expected it to. Mine was the generation that devoured the works of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, especially after our youthful Golden Age was brought to an end when two aeroplanes shattered a bright September morning in New York

The optimistic world of my youth is now a long time ago—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of President Mandela; the Play Station and the arrival of the Internet. For those of you who are young adults today, the world that shaped my outlook is something you read about in history books.

Your lives have instead been formed by a lengthy economic and cultural stagnation, by plague, and by failing institutions. Nobody believes anymore that things can only get better. The Church invested so much into trying to make the world a better place, but it may be getting worse anyway and, if it is, there’s probably little we can do about it. Like every generation before us, we are carried on great historical trends that are beyond the human capacity to identify fully, let alone control. It was always a bit naïve to think that these cycles of history would cease. Empires always rise and fall. Golden ages always turn to decadence. After any period of unity comes division. Thus it has ever been.

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What To Do When We Feel Powerless

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

This article appeared in the July 2025 edition of village magazines in Potterne, Worton and Marston, Seend and Bulkington, and Poulshot

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling powerless in the face of a world where power and the will to abuse it seem to be spiralling out of control. I feel powerless in the face of the grim events in Ukraine and the Middle East, where human ingenuity is put to building ever more ingenious ways for people to kill other people.

A close-up view of a green circuit board with intricate white pathways and numerous small holes, used in electronic devices.

Image credit – Pixabay.

I often worry that the fruits of our intellect are outstripping our wisdom to use them well. Why is it that every couple of months, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research pops up in the news to tell us it could wipe out the human race? Most recently, it was Professor Yoshua Bengio from Canada, whose research is cited more often than any other computer scientist in the world, who left Faisal Islam visibly shocked when he told him bluntly on Newsnight that “the worst case scenario” from AI “is human extinction”.

I feel powerless in the face of not only of Artificial Intelligence galloping ahead but also Genetic Modification. I worry about why we feel driven to develop these very powerful technologies quickly, even when we know things as seemingly innocuous as social media and video streaming are driving some people crazy, partly thanks to smartphones that follow us everywhere, constantly buzzing and demanding attention.

Despite these problems, technology is often presented to us uncritically as good of itself. We live at a time when people seek truth in spreadsheets rather than sonnets. Yet human beings are more than rational creatures. We are made not for power, which often brings out the worst in us, but for beauty, truth, goodness, and love.

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The Chickenhawk and the Oddball: Sermon Preached on Sunday 29th June 2025 (Feast of SS Peter and Paul)

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached in the Green Gardens, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 12.1-11; Matthew 16.13-19

The image depicts a detailed black-and-white relief sculpture featuring two male figures dressed in flowing robes, each with a halo around their head, indicating their saintly status. The figure on the left holds a large key with intricate designs, while the figure on the right holds a book in one hand and a sword in the other. Above them, a winged angel with a halo holds a crown, symbolizing divine authority or martyrdom. The background includes a textured wall and a tiled floor, adding depth to the composition.

The chickenhawk and the oddball.

Peter and Paul! We know these two names go together, but we tend to forget they were real people. Our image of them is, when we think about them at all, is like the image on the front of your order of service— two-dimensional men from a vanished era with stern faces and beards that would put a Hoxton hipster to shame. If we’re a bit less religious we tend to dismiss them as irrelevant, and if we’re a bit more religious we can turn them into plasterboard saints, beyond critique and therefore not really human at all.

But the Peter and Paul the Bible writes of are very real people, with strong personalities, and some real faults. Both of them could be quite hot headed for starters! Beyond that, they were very different.

Paul could be difficult to deal with. He seems to have been quite socially awkward and a little bit obsessive—maybe, to use the modern phrase, quite far out on the spectrum. Even his best friends found Paul hard to take sometimes. Yet this awkward, annoying, obsessive nature was possibly also why Paul had so much determination, stickability, and raw courage.

Peter was very different. He was a natural leader of men, and a man’s man . It’s easy to imagine the young Peter sitting in a tavern in a port on the Sea of Galilee holding court, surrounded by his hired men. He was no sophisticated thinker, but Peter could be as sharp as a tack—this morning’s Gospel reading shows him being the first person to work out that Jesus was more than just a wandering teacher and healer. But although he liked to talk big and lead from the front, when the chips were down he wasn’t always so good at following through—at least not at first, but we’ll come back to that.

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Power and Glory (Trinity Sunday, 15th June 2025)

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Romans 5. 1-5; John 16. 12-15

“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.”

Why is it that every couple of months, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research pops up in the news, to tell us it could wipe out the human race?

Abstract painting featuring a surreal composition with a bird-like figure and a humanoid shape. The bird has a dark, feathered body with a red eye and outstretched wings, perched on a pedestal. The humanoid figure, with an orange and blue head, stands beside it. The background includes a cloudy sky and an orange base with abstract shapes.

Gethsemane by Mark Rothko (1944). In a private collection.

On Newsnight last week it was Yoshua Bengio, whose research is cited more often than any other computer scientist in the world. Sometimes called ‘one of the three godfathers of AI’, Professor Bengio told Faisal Islam bluntly that “the worst case scenario is human extinction”.  

It turns out that Bengio is based at the University of Montreal. Coincidentally, I had one of the most interestingconversations of my life on a bus to Montreal airport two years ago this month. I started talking to an American in his fifties, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities. When he outlined that the first thing functioning quantum computing would do would be to instantly render all existing cybersecurity obsolete, the young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”

We advance—to restoring sight to the blind and killing one another with drones; to conquering cancer and poisoning the planet. In recent decades, technology that changes what it means to be human has started becoming especially problematic, whether creating machines smarter than we are, or viruses more dangerous than nature would produce, or simply driving ourselves crazy with smartphones that follow us everywhere, constantly buzzing and demanding attention.

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Modern Medes and Parthians (Pentecost, 8 June 2025)

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17

“how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…”

A fresco painting featuring a religious scene with a group of figures seated around a table, each with a halo, suggesting they are saints or holy figures. Above them is an ornate architectural structure with arches and a blue sky background, adorned with a dove encircled by a halo, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The painting includes intricate decorative borders and shows some signs of wear and fading.

Giotto, Pentecost (1290-9). In the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi, Italy.

Hearing today’s reading about the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites reminded me of a Pentecost a few years ago in a Church in Belfast. I heard this passage read with a strong and distinctive accent—not mine, but an accent that as distinctive in Belfast as it would be in Wiltshire. It turned out this accent came from the land of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites—some of whom heard the apostles preach in their own languages at the first Pentecost. The lands that were once Parthia, Media, and Elam have been part of Iran for over a millennium, and the lesson was read by a member of what is by now a large Iranian community in Belfast, many of them converts to Christianity.

When the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, there were only around 170,000 Christians in the country, mostly from the ancient Assyrian and Armenian communities. While they were given a protected minority status by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government – as long as they kept their heads down – severe repression was unleashed against the small number of converts from Muslim backgrounds and the churches they belonged to. The Anglican priest in the city of Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was murdered at his desk within eight days of the Revolution. The repression has come in waves since. Right now, a mother of two young children and convert to Christianity named Aida Najaflou has been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for four months facing trumped-up charges of “acting against national security”.

We would expect a Church facing such persecution to be in terminal decline. Yet, while tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iran into exile, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.

If you told the average person in the UK that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran had converted from Islam to Christianity, they’d probably refuse to believe you. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.

Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for religious freedom for people of all faiths, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying just over a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.

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Fake Miracles and True Love (The Sunday After Ascension, 1st June 2025)

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 16. 16-34; Luke 17. 20-26

“I … will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them…”

The image depicts a dramatic scene set in a dimly lit, arched interior, likely a prison or dungeon. A central figure, dressed in a red and green robe with a blue cloak, stands with arms raised, appearing to be in a moment of liberation or proclamation. In front of him, a man in a white garment kneels on the ground, his hands extended upward in a gesture of supplication or release. Surrounding them are several other figures, some standing and others reaching out, all dressed in ancient robes, conveying a sense of urgency or emotion. In the background, a staircase leads to an upper level where armed guards with spears and a lit candle are visible, adding to the tense atmosphere. Chains and scattered objects on the floor suggest a recent struggle or captivity.

Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Paul and Silas in Prison (1666). Hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Basel.

When I was in my mid-teens and just starting to get serious about my Christianity, I went to a week of prayer services near where I lived in Belfast, simply because I saw it advertised on a poster in a shop. It was held in a very conventional Anglican parish church, in an overwhelmingly Catholic area, but with a very definite mission revivalist atmosphere. Sometimes a few of the ladies danced in the aisles. On the first five nights, a small congregation of perhaps twenty or so, from all sections of a divided community, gathered to pray and hear God’s word preached. They seemed to be very sincere and warm-hearted and I really enjoyed it.

Then Friday night came, the culmination of the week’s events. This service had obviously been advertised more widely, and there were several hundred people there. A high proportion of the congregation were women in the sort of 55-to-75 age bracket.

At one point during that Friday service, a man got up saying that he had some words to pass on from the Lord. He spoke as if God was speaking to him down a sort of invisible telephone line, and he was just repeating God’s words. Even at the age of 15 or 16, this left me feeling very uncomfortable. Then he said, “God’s telling me there’s a lady here with a bad back, and she’s in a lot of pain with it” – I looked around the room at literally dozens of ladies who might plausibly be struggling with back pain – then he continued, “But God says to tell you everything’s alright, it’s going to get better soon.”

I never knew this man’s name or where he came from: perhaps he just liked being the centre of attention for five minutes on a Friday night. It reminded me a bit of how astrologers work. If you ever pick at a horoscope description you’ll find it’s full of fluff that could apply to anyone. Thankfully it didn’t put me off Christianity for life; in fact I think the cheap emotional manipulation involved was a useful lesson at a formative age.

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The Feast of Waiting Patiently: (Ascension Thursday, 29th May 2025)

Posted on May 29, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 1. 1-11; Luke 24. 44-53

“While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”

A surreal painting depicts a nude human figure floating inside a transparent sphere, with arms and legs outstretched. The figure hovers above a glowing, honeycomb-like surface radiating yellow light. In the background, a dramatic, fiery red and black sky contrasts with a serene blue and white scene at the top, where a partially visible figure in white appears to be looking down. The overall composition evokes a sense of cosmic or spiritual transcendence.

The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali (1958). In a private collection.

Poor old Jesus. Even after all that the apostles had seen and experienced, even after all that happened and didn’t happen in Jerusalem, even after the encounters when He appeared to them on the lake and stood among them even though the doors were locked, the apostles really didn’t know what He was about.

“Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom” they ask Him. They’re still expecting that at some point, probably very soon, Jesus is going to seize power and put them, of course into top jobs. They still want Jesus’ to give them a kingdom that is of this world. Instead Jesus’ kingdom is something that can only be shared in in its fullness in a state that is higher than the one in which we live, when we are in the nearer presence of the Father. It is a state to which it seems that even Christ Himself must ascend to participate in fully, and to do so must withdraw from them. This kingdom is much greater than any state we or the apostles could imagine for ourselves on this Earth. For most of us, in this life, we can only detect little flashes of this kingdom for brief and wondrous moments.

Christ, truly God as well as truly human, knows what this kingdom really is, and how much greater it is than the kingdoms of the world. So, you can almost hear the exasperation when He answers the apostles’ question, “It is not for you to know.” Authority over everything belongs to the Father. The apostles wish to seize that authority, to rule over the Earth, and they think they’ll be much better than the world’s existing rulers and not corrupt or cruel or incompetent. No, not them! God knows what is actually best for them, however. The job of the apostles at this point is something very different—to wait for the Holy Spirit; to wait for God who is love to flow and blow and make His move.

Life often seems to be a waiting game – waiting for the train, waiting for exam results, or medical results, waiting for the money to clear into your account or, worst of all, for the contracts to be exchanged. The worst waiting comes when you don’t exactly know what you’re waiting for, when it feels like you’re going nowhere and being left behind. We can see why the apostles are getting a little impatient to find out what they’re supposed to do next.

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Happy to See Me Dead?: (Sixth Sunday of Easter: 25th May 2025)

Posted on May 25, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 16. 9-15; John 14. 23-29

“I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Will you be happy when I die?

A terracotta bust of a figure with one arm raised, hand resting on the head, and long black hair flowing down the back. The sculpture has a weathered, earthy texture and is set against a black background.

Mourner, suspected to represent Isis mourning Osiris. 18th dynasty, 1550–1295 BC. Now in the Louvre, Paris.

Often when I take a funeral, people tell me they want it to be a celebration. But I always reply that I hope that people won’t be too happy at my funeral.

The summer I finished university, twenty-five years ago, I went on a post-graduation trip to Turkey and Georgia – Georgia the country in the Caucasus, not the American state. One of my abiding memories of that trip is being invited to a wake, which in Georgia involves a full day of banqueting—and drinking. As the coffin was carried off from the house, Chopin’s Funeral March was played on old record player as a black and white portrait photograph of the deceased in younger days, resplendent in his Red Army dress uniform, was processed in front of the coffin. Most incredibly, professional mourners, all of them older women dressed in black, wailed at the top of their voices and pulled clumps of hair from their heads.

I don’t think I want people to go that far at my funeral, but I hope they’ll be at least a little bit sad that I’m gone.

According to this morning’s Gospel reading, that might make me a bad Christian. The reading comes from a speech Jesus made to his closest followers on the night before He died, and He uses a strange phrase “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father”.

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Lizards for Lunch! (Fifth Sunday of Easter: 18th May 2025)

Posted on May 18, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Acts 11. 1-18; John 13. 31-35

“But I said, ‘Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.’”

Do you like eating lizards? Will you go home from church and enjoy tucking into an iguana steak for your Sunday lunch? Or will you perhaps, to accompany a salad in this warm weather, rustle up a quick chameleon quiche?

A small lizard with a brown and green body, featuring an orange throat patch, is perched on a white stone surface in sunlight. The lizard casts a shadow, and the background is blurred, showing earthy tones of soil or rocks.

Your Lunch? © Gerry Lynch, 30 November 2006, Curaçao.

I’m guessing that most of you aren’t actually that into lizard meat. Therefore if I told you that not eating lizards was an essential criterion of getting into heaven, you wouldn’t exactly lose sleep about it.

That’s one of the problems with rules. It’s easy to keep rules that we would never in any circumstances want to break. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about rules we have no intentions of breaking being enforced on others, especially people we don’t like—even as we try to wriggle out of the rules we don’t enjoy following ourselves.

Of course we need rules. How many of us, if we’re being honest, would pay our taxes on full and on time every year if we didn’t know that HMRC would fine us otherwise? How many more deaths were there on the road when drink driving laws were laxer and less rigidly enforced?

But no set of rules can match the complexity of real life. After every major sporting event, we see fans of one team complaining about bad refereeing decisions that everyone else thinks were fair. I believe Man City fans were upset at the referee after they lost the FA Cup Final yesterday. A football match is a lot simpler than life. Every set of rules can be interpreted in different ways. They all also contain plenty of loopholes. We are all inclined to interpret the rules to suit ourselves, and see what we want to see. In that light, it should be no surprise that we all know people who are very firm about sticking to the rules and making sure other people do too, but are also unkind and selfish, perhaps even cruel.

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