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

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A row of six colorful pop art portraits in the style of Andy Warhol. From left to right: a man in a yellow and green outfit with a red background, a blonde woman with a pink and blue face against a peach background, a woman with black hair and a pink face on a beige background, a bald man in a red suit with a yellow face, a man with dark hair and a beard shirtless with a yellow background, and a man with short hair and a brown face on a yellow background.

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

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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)

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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)

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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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Would God Wind You Up?: Sermon Preached on 20th July 2025 (Fifth Sunday After Trinity)

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

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 10. 38-42

“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.”

A dimly lit painting depicting a solemn scene at a table covered with a white cloth. A central figure, dressed in a white robe, sits and gestures with both hands, illuminated by a warm candlelight from a candelabrum. Two other figures, one standing and offering a plate and another seated, are partially visible in the soft glow. The background features an arched wall and a hanging object, possibly a lamp or decoration, adding to the intimate, historical atmosphere.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905), hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA.

I remember hanging on the living room wall at my Granny Duffy’s house was a picture of the Holy Family. It was in the style of a grainy black and white photograph, and in fact I think it may have been a posed photograph from around the turn of the 20th Century. I can remember it distinctly in my mind and I looked for it on the Internet as I was preparing this sermon, without any luck. In the photo, Jesus and Mary are helping Joseph in his carpentry workshop. They have halos over their heads and they all look very serious.

That’s what we expect Jesus to be like, don’t we? Jesus and all those old saints? Serious, and humourless, and so holy they have halos floating over their heads as they walk down the street, and not like real people at all.

But the snatches we get of the lives of Martha and Mary and Peter and Paul and all the rest of them in the Bible aren’t like those old holy pictures, but real and three dimensional. These are real human beings, with real flaws and gifts and personalities. And one thing pretty much all serious historians agree on, including the ones who are committed atheists, is that Jesus of Nazareth, was an actual flesh and blood human being who really did live in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.

And so to Martha and Mary – this isn’t Mary the mother of Christ, but another woman with the same name. Martha is perhaps a bit of a fusspot. It was she herself who invited Jesus into her home, and there’s no sense that Jesus has asked her to go to a lot of trouble for Him. We all know people who see hosting someone as a test of their skills and dedication. Would Martha really have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs just to take it easy and hang out with Him for a few hours? I doubt it! Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.

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

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A vibrant painting depicting a figure with a beard, dressed in a green robe with diamond-patterned shoulders, holding a sleeping or resting man with dark hair. The figure's large, white, wing-like arms or cloak envelop the woman, set against a background of earthy greens and browns, suggesting a protective or comforting scene.

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)

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A large crowd of people is gathered on and around a graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall, with the Brandenburg Gate visible in the background. Many individuals are sitting or standing on the wall, some holding a German flag. The scene is lively, with people of various ages and styles, and the sky is clear, suggesting a celebratory or historic moment.

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

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

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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