How to Win by Embracing Failure: Sermon Preached on 14th September 2025 (Holy Cross Day)

Posted on September 14, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Philippians 2. 6-11, John 3. 3-17

“Christ… became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

A religious sculpture set within a stone archway, featuring a central wooden crucifix with a figure of Jesus Christ, flanked by two standing figures, likely the Virgin Mary and Saint John, all crafted in a stylized, weathered material. The scene is illuminated by soft lighting against a textured wall background.

The modernist rood in the Augustinerkirche, an Old Catholic parish church in Zürich. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

You lot are a bunch of failures! A load of hypocrites who often do things against your own principles, and fail to deliver what you say you’ll do. Fair weather Christians who cave in too easily when the going gets tough. More than that, I know that at least some of you are here in Church today for decidedly mixed motives.

Don’t think you can try to hoodwink me, because I know all those things to be the case. I know they’re true, because they’re true of me also. And if we read the Bible, we find all that was true of the apostles, of Peter and James and all that lot, and that’s before we even begin talking about St Paul. And that is one of the most important things about Christianity—it’s not, despite what the Good Friday hymn says, a religion that promises to make us good; it’s a religion that makes promises to people who often aren’t very good.

So let me wish you a happy Holy Cross day!—For that is why I started my sermon in the way I did. The Cross has become probably the most successful visual brand in history, and that’s why we often miss that it’s actually a symbol of human failure. God walked among us in the person of Jesus Christ, actual God, healing and teaching and refusing both power and violence, and we put Him to death in one of the most horrific ways possible. We put Him to death in part because He told the truth, and we often hate the truth. Cosy lies often seem more comforting that the sometimes harsh cleanser that is truth. But we’ll come back to that.

The Cross upends everything. That’s the point of it. The means symbol Christ’s defeat is actually the means of his victory, and the symbol of our failure is actually the means of our liberation. The major part of that liberation we will experience only in the world to come, which the Cross opens to us. But some of that liberation we experience in the here and now, in the freedom from needing to be perfect the Cross provides.

I mean, would you have been one of the few who stayed by Jesus’ side even on the Cross? Would you have been with John and that handful of women? I’ve actually met a few of people who thought they would have done – who really thought they’d have managed what Peter and James and Thomas couldn’t do – and all have been the most egotistical pillocks, lacking all self-awareness. The rest of us know better than that. It is at the Cross that our delusions must die—and strangely, it is precisely knowing that we would have failed then, just as we so often do in our day-to-day lives, that liberates us to accept the flawed real people we are, the real people that God loves as they are.

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Should You Hate Your Mum?: Sermon Preached on 7th September 2025 (Twelfth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philemon 1–21; Luke 14. 25-33

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children … cannot be my disciple.”

So, should you really hate your Mum because Jesus told you to?

As a priest, one sometimes gets invited into intimate and difficult bits of people’s lives. Most of that work isn’t appropriate to talk about in front of others, even in private, but you’ll not be surprised to learn that not every family is a happy one. Sure, every family has unhappy aspects and difficult dynamics, yours and mine and everyone else’s, but some are much more difficult than others. Despite that, it’s exceptionally rare to find people who actually hate their mothers, and when one does, it’s quite an unsettling experience. And as for people who hate their children, well that’s what we have social services for!

A classical painting depicting a biblical scene with Jesus at the center, dressed in a red and green robe, surrounded by several figures including disciples and a crowd. He is shown interacting with children, one of whom offers a basket of bread or fruit. A small white dog stands nearby. The crowd, composed of men, women, and children in colorful robes and head coverings, is gathered around, some reaching out or sitting on the ground.

Christ Preaching to the Multitudes by Follower of Tintoretto, late 16th Century.

In fact, the Ten Commandments tell us to honour our Father and Mother. So what is Jesus playing at here? Is this just a bit of hyperbole, saying things that are completely over the top to grab our attention? We should never forget the Gospels are full of examples of Jesus cracking jokes, teasing people, and being sarcastic.

So is what this reading is about, then? When Jesus says you need to give up everything to follow Him, is it actually all exaggerated and sarcastic, so He doesn’t really mean you have to give up absolutely everything, but maybe quite a lot of stuff? Maybe you need to be ready to hate your mother but only if she’s standing between you and following Jesus, or something like that?

I’ve heard that sort of sermon preached on this passage and…? I mean, OK, I suppose… It just feels a bit flat to tell you that Jesus’ message here is to give up lots of things to follow Him but not actually everything because He was just exaggerating to keep the crowd interested. Frankly, that interpretation leaves me wondering why Jesus of Nazareth, one of history’s great public communicators, had such a bad day at the office. It’s like watching Lionel Messi miss a penalty or something.

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Made to Flourish as Ourselves: Sermon Preached on 31st August 2025 (Eleventh Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes (Deanery Evensong)

Isaiah 33. 13-22; John 3. 22-36

“For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Before I came to live in the countryside, I didn’t really appreciate that there are many different harvests across the year. I mean, I sort of theoretically knew that, but I hadn’t quite twigged that the garlic is gathered in the spring but maize not until Hallowe’en. I only remembered that blackberries came in August because when I was a boy one of my uncles would take us up the high hills that overlook Belfast to pick huge bags full of them. It was a regular summer holiday activity which has buried itself deep in my memories.

A vast golden field of harvested grain stretches across the foreground, dotted with several large, cylindrical hay bales scattered at varying distances. In the midground, a solitary green tree stands prominently on a gentle hill lined with bushes and more trees. The sky above is dramatic, filled with heavy, dark gray storm clouds, with patches of blue sky and sunlight breaking through on the right, casting a warm glow over the landscape.

Harvested fields near All Cannings, Wiltshire, 14 July 2025. © Gerry Lynch

Not until I came to spend my working life driving between the fields in this area, and so many long days walking among them for pleasure, did I really start to understand the rhythm of the agricultural year. So divorced can modern humanity be from the food that sustains it.

Just as crops ripen each in its own season, so every year is different. This year, of course, we have had one of the worst droughts on record. But one of my neighbours in Potterne has just given me some of the most beautiful plums from her trees. In conditions where one crop struggles, another will flourish.

And different crops flourish in different types of soil too—some varieties of grape like sandy soil, others prefer chalk or loam. That’s one reason why wine has such varied flavours. This is one of the glories of God’s creation. God didn’t give us a wonder crop, a sort of manna that could flourish anywhere, but many different kinds of crops not only to flourish in different environments, but to enrich our lives with their flavours and scents.

So each of us is designed to designed to flower, mature, and ripen in different ways and in different contexts. Each of us is made to play a distinct role in the human ecology of our societies and to play a distinct role in the life of the Church. It would be no more a good thing to see every Christian and every congregation being the same than it would be to go to the market and see only one kind of vegetable on sale.

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Is Doing Good Enough?: Sermon Preached on 31st August 2025 (Eleventh Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend (Benefice Service)

Hebrews 13. 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14. 1, 7-14

“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid; what can anyone do to me?”

If you’ve ever wondered what a preacher does during the sermon, it’s to try and make sense of the passages of the Bible that are read at that particular church service, and connect them to the world we live in. So here we go.

A historic stone church with Gothic architectural features, including pointed arches and a tall tower with a clock. The church is surrounded by a well-maintained graveyard with weathered tombstones and lush greenery, including trees and flowering plants. A stone pathway leads to the wooden entrance door, and the scene is lit by soft evening light.

It was lovely to have such a good congregation in this gem for our Benefice Service. (Holy Cross, Seend in evening twilight, 11 July 2025, © Gerry Lynch.)

Are you worried about the state of the world? Does the news from Ukraine and Gaza make you anxious and depressed about the state of the human race? Does the state of this country worry you? If so, you are certainly not alone!

This is hardly unique to our times too. Some of the Hebrews to whom the first of this morning’s Bible readings was addressed must have been worried. We know that because the letter tells them not to worry!

It was written when the Church was very new, perhaps 30 or 40 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, when the Christians were a tiny and often mistreated group who had much to worry about in their lives. This long letter is full of intricate and beautiful theological and philosophical thinking, but our reading came from a section towards the end, which instead supplied practical instructions about living a good Christian life—one full of love for other Christians, hospitality to strangers, care for those in prison, faithfulness in marriage, and contentment with what one has.

That sort of practical Christianity is a big part of what village Anglicanism should be about.[1] Not showy, not loud – but being a community rooted in hospitality where people care about one another and seek to do good for our neighbours in a very individualistic world.

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Unknown Bartholomew is the Saint for Our Times: Sermon Preached on 24th August 2025 (St Bartholomew)

Posted on August 24, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 5. 12-16; Luke 22. 24-30

“A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest.”

A decorative wall plaque shaped like a shield, painted teal blue, with three vertical knives mounted side by side. Each knife has a braided brown handle topped with a gold cap and a slightly curved, weathered silver blade pointing downward.

A shield with the Symbol of St Bartholomew in the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, Pennsylvania, USA.

We know almost nothing about St Bartholomew, yet he is hugely relevant to how we should live our lives in the 21st century. If that seems like a contradiction in terms, please let me explain.

Here’s what little we do know about St Bartholomew. He is mentioned by all three synoptic Gospels – that is Matthew, Mark, and Luke – as one of the Twelve Apostles. He is also mentioned in Acts, as one of the apostles who gathered in Jerusalem after the Ascension to choose Judas Iscariot’s replacement, so he was clearly a significant figure in the very early Church. Apart from that, we know nothing for certain – except for one thing: Bartholomew was a surname, because “Bar” literally means “son”—so he was the Son of Ptolemy.

While Bartholomew is mentioned in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts – that name isn’t mentioned in John. But because Bartholomew is a surname, we are pretty sure that he is the same person as someone who is named in John’s Gospel and only there, and who like Bartholomew is always paired with Phillip when he appears—and that is Nathaniel. So he was probably named Nathaniel Bartholomew.

John’s Gospel tells of Philip bringing Nathanael to Jesus, who said he was an Israelite without deceit—which was very generous of Jesus, as Nathaniel’s first reaction to Philip telling Him about Jesus was to ask if anything good could come from Nazareth. But when Bartholomew did meet Jesus, he recognised him immediately as the Son of God.

Some stories have come down to us about Bartholomew’s later life. It is said that he spread the Gospel beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Firstly, he is said to have gone far to the east, perhaps even as far as India; then he went to Armenia, which we know was one of the first countries in the world to have a substantial Christian presence. But these stories vary considerably in their details, and none of them seems to have been written down until the 4th century, so we’re not entirely sure what the truth of Bartholomew’s later life was. All of the accounts agree that he was martyred somewhere in Greater Armenia, probably around the year 70.

In the West, it was always believed that Bartholomew was flayed alive, which is why his symbol is three knives, one on top of the other. You’ll see it on churches and other institutions dedicated to him, as well as in windows of the twelve apostles. Even by the standards of the apostles this was a pretty gruesome death.

We don’t know whether or not Bartholomew ever married and had children. We don’t know the details of his journeys, or if he made any converts. His life may have been, by any reasonable standards, a complete failure. Yet, still, the Churches still have a special day to commemorate Him 2,000 years later.

Why is all this relevant to our lives today?

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Peace—But Not On Earth: Sermon Preached on 17th August 2025 (Ninth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Hebrews 11.29-12.2; Luke 12. 49-56

“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.”

Does anyone remember the 1960, black-and-white, British science fiction film called Village of the Damned, set in Midwich, a place that could be a fictional version of Seend? The first sign the twelve mysterious children with eerie golden eyes are sinister aliens out to dominate Earth is the way they seem to think and act as one.

A black-and-white close-up photograph from the 1960 horror film "Village of the Damned," featuring three young children with pale skin, neatly combed light-colored hair in bowl cuts, and formal attire including collared shirts and dark jackets. They stare directly at the camera with serious, emotionless expressions and eerie, completely white glowing eyes devoid of pupils or irises, creating a supernatural and unsettling atmosphere.

Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?

More than half a century later, in another British sci-fi classic, The World’s End, a group middle-aged men back in their Home Counties hometown for a nostalgic pub crawl, slowly work out that the bland sameness of the pubs and the creepy cooperativeness of their customers is because the humans have been replaced by robots from an interstellar bureaucracy that wants to ‘civilise’ the primitive human race.

And, of course, any Star Trek fans among you will know all about The Borg!

The point of the digression into science fiction is this – all these films use the idea of a group of people agreeing too much with one another as a sign that an alien intelligence is at work. It’s not in the nature of humans to agree too much, too often.

There is no human organisation more intimate and where people have so much in common than families, yet at their worst families can be defined by conflict. And actually, a reasonable degree of conflict in a family is a healthy thing. A family where everyone always agrees is one where someone is dominating everyone else behind the scenes.

Similarly, a country where everyone agrees can only be a totalitarian state; and if we encounter a Church where everyone agrees, we know that we’re actually dealing with a cult. So, while too much conflict is obviously destructive, any healthy group of people needs a certain amount. Without division, we would just be robots.

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Jenrick spat isn’t Thought for the Day’s main problem

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Unherd published a piece from me on the spat about Krish Kandiah’s piece on thought for the day….

A person wearing a dark blue suit, white dress shirt, and a green tie, standing against a plain gray background.

“…Thought for the Day, the “God slot” on BBC Radio 4’s flagship breakfast-time news show Today, has added to its fine old tradition of political spats. Krish Kandiah, a Baptist theologian and refugee charity director, used Wednesday’s five-minute slot to have a go at Robert Jenrick for xenophobia after the Shadow Justice Secretary wrote in the Daily Mail that a series of incidents involving residents in refugee hotels “made him fearful for his daughters’ safety”.

“Kandiah’s speech was barbed and personal enough that it was edited retrospectively for use on BBC Sounds, while the BBC’s Director of Standards wrote to apologise to Jenrick without a complaint even having been made.

“Thought for the Day tends to share the BBC’s broadly liberal-Left tendencies, and during the Eighties it was regularly criticised by the Tories as a politicised bully pulpit for Left-wing bishops such as Tom Butler and Jim Thompson to attack the Conservative Party. Yet the programme has also showcased more than a smattering of trenchantly Right-wing contributors over the years, from Bishop Bill Westwood, the overtly Thatcherite father of former BBC DJ Tim, to agony aunt Anne Atkins, who caused a furore in 1996 when she used her slot to savage Southwark Cathedral for hosting the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

“Of course, a politicised programme is not in itself a bad thing. The alternative isn’t necessarily spiritual depth, but instead trivial blandness…”

CLICK THROUGH FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE!

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Can You See Love?: Sermon Preached on 10th August 2025 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 11.1–3, 8–16; Luke 12.32–40

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

The image is a medieval-style illustration divided into four panels, framed with ornate floral and geometric borders. The top left panel shows a tree with various animals, including a lion, a horse, and a dog, climbing or interacting with it. The top right panel depicts a figure in a red robe standing on a structure resembling a tower or castle, holding a book or tablet. The bottom left panel features a figure in a yellow robe with outstretched arms, standing on a platform, with a monstrous face on its lower body and legs. The bottom right panel portrays a group of people in medieval clothing looking up at a large, menacing creature with a gaping mouth and tentacle-like appendages. The artwork uses vibrant colors and intricate details typical of illuminated manuscripts.

Hildegard of Bingen, Vision of the Last Days (ca. 1150).

How can you be convinced by something you haven’t seen? Well you can’t see love, but I married a couple yesterday and they seemed pretty in love to me. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, whose identity remains a mystery to us, says that faith is “the conviction of things not seen”. When people are convinced about things they haven’t seen, others often dismiss it as blind faith, or even as wilful stupidity, at least if they don’t agree with them. But everybody has faith of some sort. Even if they don’t believe in God, even if they don’t think they believe in anything that can’t be measured or proven, everyone has some set of assumptions about the deeper nature of reality and how things work beyond the merely physical.

Of course we might say we can see the effects of love; they’re often rather wonderful. I don’t just mean romantic love mixed with sexual attraction – although that certainly is wonderful – but also the selfless love of a parent for a disabled child or the brotherly love of two old friends who’ve been meeting for a Saturday afternoon pint together for the last sixty years.

But you can’t physically measure love itself, in the same way you can measure electricity, or helium, or radioactivity. These things are undetectable by our five senses but we understand the physical processes behind them and have devices that can measure them all accurately. But you can’t buy a love meter from Amazon, or go to Google and look up today’s love maps and find out where the hotspots are.

So how do we know that love exists? Only because we have faith that love exists; we are convinced it exists although we can’t see it or measure it scientifically. We might say, as I noted, that we can see the effects of love – but we can only say that they are the effects of love and not something else because we have faith that love exists in the first place.

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Change the World by Living for Heaven: Sermon Preached on 2 August 2025 (Seventh Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Colossians 3. 1-11; Luke 12. 13-21

“…seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”

A couple of weeks ago, our former MP, Danny Kruger, who now has a different constituency due to boundary changes, gave a speech to a nearly empty House of Commons that got bits of the Internet cheering, got a well-considered but critical response in the Church Times from Lord Harries, the retired Bishop of Oxford, but raised as little interest in the mainstream press as it did with his colleagues in parliament.

A dimly lit, old room with arched walls features a skeleton playing a violin, standing near a table with a seated man in historical attire, including a red hat and fur-lined robe. The table holds coins and papers. Shelves in the background display jars, bottles, and a skull, while a small painting and a window with a view are visible on the walls. Another skeleton and a figure in green stand in the background near a fireplace.

Franz Francken II, Death and the Rich Man (ca. 1610), hangs in the Galerie Lowet de Wotrenge, Antwerp.

I don’t always agree with Danny, and I disagreed with quite a bit of what he said in this speech. Just for starters, he takes a much rosier view than I do of the religious history of these islands – and the contribution of the Church of England to it. But his central point was very well made: that all of the blessings of democracy, tolerance, and freedom of thought and expression that we too often take for granted were built, painstakingly over many generations, on the foundations of Christianity. Those blessings were won in a society where Christianity was taken for granted as the shared moral and philosophical framework of almost everyone, even if they would never used fancy words like ‘philosophical’. Christianity was a shared way of looking at the world.

We moved away from that over the last two generations. We thought we could create a new shared way of looking at the world, one that was entirely neutral between faiths and was based only on rational principles and values that people of good will of all faiths and none could share. We hoped that as well as better fitting an increasingly post-Christian and religiously diverse country, it might also give us a means to manage a shrinking world of global problems across boundaries of culture, faith, and political system. The mainstream Churches mostly embraced this new idea of a religionless value system enthusiastically, and Lord Harries’ article in the Church Times was essentially about defending it.

But every society has a religion. Many of those religions have faith in God, but others are entirely materialistic. Our new value system is such a godless religion. Likewise, the Soviets with their godless religion of Communism also though they were creating a society based only on rational principles and values that all people of good will found could share. They thought that once they got superstitions like Christianity out of the way, along with getting rid of an economy based on the profit motive, people would improve morally. That was, of course, a matter of faith, faith in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. We can forget how for a time it seemed to be successful. In the long run, however, getting rid of God drove some people in the Soviet world to strange superstitions about everything from UFOs to forest spirits, and others to a bleak and cynical materialism. When the great storm came for the Communist economic system at the end of the 1980s, it turned out that their societies had been built on foundations of sand.

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Prayer, Persistence, and Peace: Sermon Preached on 27th July 2025 (Sixth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 27, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 11. 1-13

“…everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds…” `

A painting depicting a central figure in a white robe standing on a hill with arms raised, addressing a group of people seated around him. The background features a cityscape with ancient buildings and a golden sky, suggesting a sunset or sunrise. The people, dressed in robes and headscarves, appear to be listening attentively, with some raising their hands. The scene is set on a grassy hill with a distant view of mountains and a walled city.

James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always enjoy Matthew Syed’s programme on Radio 4 called Sideways, which often gives quirky, unusual, perspectives on quirky, interesting issues. It is currently running a three-part mini-series on ‘Chasing Peace’. Exploring different approaches to peace-making and peace-building, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions about human nature, and whether we are hard-wired for war.

I listened to the dedicated peacemakers he interviewed, some of whom had taken enormous risks with their personal safety in very dangerous environments to end conflicts, and I was full of admiration. Some interviewees also said things like that to prevent war we needed to train people to be more emotionally literate, I found myself muttering, “Good luck with that!”

Over this last decade or so, many of the things we’d previously taken for granted about the direction of humanity have broken down, and the idea of progress which animated us for so long has stalled. We seem a long way, for example, from the days when people really believed that the United Nations might ultimately bring an end to war.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from these years of gathering crisis is that too many of those dreams of progress thought they could change human nature, or flew entirely in the face of it. At their worst, especially in the darkest days of the Communist world, it was precisely the possibility of building a perfect society in the future that allowed people to justify to themselves their barbaric behaviour in the present.

Indeed, if we look at the world through the lens of Faith, then we know this world can never be made perfect, and that none of us can ever be all that good for all that long, or otherwise Jesus would not have needed to die on the Cross.

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