advent Archives - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

Patience Amid Shrill Voices: Sermon Preached on 14th December 2025 (Third Sunday of Advent)

18 December 202514 December 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Panoramic landscape photograph of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, viewed from the Israeli side. In the foreground, a flat, barren expanse of cracked, earthy brown desert soil stretches toward the shore. The strikingly blue, calm waters of the hypersaline lake occupy the middle ground, reflecting a partly cloudy sky with scattered white clouds. Along the far shoreline, a cluster of modern white buildings—hotels and resorts on the Jordanian side of the Sea—nestles against the base of dramatic, layered arid mountains in shades of beige, brown, and gray, rising steeply in rugged ridges. These Judean Desert hills dominate the background, emphasizing the stark, inhospitable yet beautiful desert environment. The overall scene conveys tranquility and geological extremity, with no visible vegetation or signs of life in the immediate foreground, highlighting the sea's unique mineral-rich, lifeless waters.

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington

James 5. 7–10; Matthew 11. 2-11

“The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient.”

"Saint John the Baptist" (c. 1410–1420), oil on panel by Robert Campin (also known as the Master of Flémalle), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The bust-length figure of Saint John the Baptist appears in three-quarter view, gazing solemnly leftward with curly shoulder-length brown hair, a full beard, and a plain gold halo denoting sanctity. He wears a white cloak draped and knotted over one shoulder, partially exposing a hairy chest to symbolize his ascetic desert life and hair shirt beneath. In his right hand, he holds a tall slender staff topped with a white banner bearing a red cross, symbolizing resurrection and his proclamation of Christ as the Lamb of God. The luxurious gilded background features intricate green damask patterns of vines, flowers, and foliage, contrasting the saint's humility with divine opulence. The aged surface shows extensive craquelure, fine cracks typical of early Netherlandish panel paintings. This work, likely once a wing of a triptych, exemplifies Campin's pioneering realism in the Northern Renaissance. — *Robert Campin, St John the Baptist (c. 1410), hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.*

A few weeks ago, I had a friend staying who is an early riser, and when I got up to get my first coffee of the day he was already in the kitchen, listening to some panel debate on the Today programme on Radio 4. Various clever panellists were screeching at one another at high pace and high volume—not what I needed before 8 am. The topic was the future of jury trials, which is very important, but the debate felt like performance art rather than an attempt to inform or persuade. Still lacking caffeine and my early morning pipe, I had to fight hard to resist the urge to snap at my friend, who was entirely innocent of just how much that programme annoys me nowadays.

When I was young, and absolutely obsessed with politics, I thought the Today programme was great. Nowadays, it grates with me so much that I have fled to Radio 3 at the start of the day. So many words. So much silly point scoring. So little wisdom. Do either the people who make the programme or the people who appear on it think that the public cares all that much about that shrill squabbling?

Most of us are unhappy with our leaders. And it doesn’t particularly matter what way our politics lean, either. In my experience, the vast majority of people are as disappointed and depressed by the leaders who come from their part of the political spectrum as they are with any of the rest of them. What’s even worse, it’s the same in most other countries, and not just in other Western countries. If you think the mood of cynicism and despondency is bad here or in our near continental neighbours, I suggest spending some time talking politics to people from any part of the complex and divided society that is South Africa. Or you could be in Peru, where the polls say that President Boluarte recently had an approval rating of 2%.

In this country, we have one government elected with a massive majority but the leader can’t even control his own backbenchers and rapidly becomes hated by the public, and then lurch to another government from a different party which retraces exactly the same path. It should be obvious that the problem isn’t with the personal qualities of the individuals or their parties, but is a problem with the system.

Where will we find leaders who knows how to navigate their way out of our present malaise? I have no idea. We’re going to have to wait. For whom or what I don’t know.

Live in Light: Sermon Preached on 30th November 2025 (Advent Sunday)

4 December 2025 by Gerry Lynch

Interior of a historic stone church bathed in warm golden-orange candlelight. A tall, vibrant stained-glass window dominates the upper half of the image, depicting multiple religious figures in rich blues, reds, golds, and greens, with halos and intricate leadwork. Below the window, a small side altar is set into the wall. On the altar stands a single tall white candle, its flame glowing brightly. The altar is draped in a dark fabric with a subtle white floral pattern and has a simple white cloth on top. To the right of the candle are two small pump bottles (likely hand sanitizer) and a donation box. A polished brass plaque with engraved text is mounted on the wall to the left of the altar. Carved stone details and part of a statue are visible on the far left, adding to the ancient, reverent atmosphere of the space.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton (Benefice Service)

Romans 13.11–14; Matthew 24.36–44

“Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light…’”

A warmly lit corner inside a Catholic church during Advent or Lent (indicated by the purple altar cloth). On the left stands a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, with a glowing red votive candle in a blue glass holder suspended by a chain in front of her. Below the statue, two white candles are lit on an ornate wrought-iron candelabrum. Behind and to the right, part of a side altar is visible with a purple frontal cloth and gold trim. Above are two colorful religious paintings in gilded frames: the left one depicts the Visitation (Mary visiting Elizabeth), and the right one shows two women in medieval-style dresses in a garden scene, possibly Mary and Martha or another biblical pair. The walls are of light-colored stone, giving the space a peaceful and reverent atmosphere. — *Light in a gloomy advent afternoon, Old St Paul’s, Edinburgh. © Gerry Lynch, 14 December 2018.*

I think to many of us, it feels like we are living in a dark time, doesn’t it? And that we just sort of stumbled into it without being aware of it?

When did you notice we were sleepwalking? When the Russians went into Ukraine? When Covid hit and it turned out we didn’t, in fact, have the second-best pandemic preparation plans in the world? Or was it another of the numerous other surprising crises or horrendous wars that have descended upon us in recent years?

In today’s first Bible reading, St Paul tells his readers to wake from sleep. The people he was writing to were a tiny Christian community of perhaps a few dozen souls, living in mighty Rome, which had recently become the first city in the world to reach a million inhabitants. How vulnerable they must have felt and how irrelevant they must have seemed even to the handful of people who had heard of them in that mighty metropolis of commerce and political power.

Yet Paul doesn’t tell them to be afraid, or to hide. He tells them to wake up, for God is on His way to rescue them. Their job, Paul writes, is to live honourably, and decently, and openly – ‘as in the day’ – even when things felt dark, because their hope was in God. Their hope was not in material things that seem secure one day but are gone the next, but in the eternal things. Paul knew that to live like that in a world that was sometimes dark, they would need God’s help. He uses a wonderful metaphor for doing that—that they should “put on the armour of light”.

When did things start seeming so dark in our world? It seems only a few years ago that we were living at a time of optimism: of low inflation, low interest rates, and cheap travel, when the Internet was making the economy stronger and bringing people together. How dramatically the mood has shifted in recent years as these material things have passed away!

The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)

8 December 20241 December 2024 by Gerry Lynch

A brightly coloured, abstract, plan-like painting of some houses with their many interior rooms visible and onion dome roofs.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13; Luke 21. 25-36

“…when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”

Happy New Year!

I haven’t got the calendar wrong by a month. The Church’s year starts now, on Advent Sunday. From now until Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday, we will journey through the great themes of the Christian story. Advent is a season of waiting, and so we start our journey in the waiting room. Advent is a season of humanity waiting through trials and exiles; of the disappointment of trying and failing that is so much a part of all our lives. It is a time which remembers how much of our lives are taken up with waiting, and also how much of the lives of nations and civilisations take place in periods when people see no obvious hope of things getting better on their own, and so wait for God to break into world.

A tempera on wood painting, originally an altar piece, of Christ teaching his apostles in the last days of His earthly life. — Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles, Duccio (1308-11) from Duccio’s Maestà; in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena.

God will indeed break into the world at Christmas, as a tiny baby. Then we will journey with that little baby as He becomes a man, go into the wilderness with Him during Lent, walk through death to resurrection and eternal life with Him during Holy Week, and then to the birth of the Church at Pentecost. After that comes the long season of Ordinary Time, the celebration of Christian life in the everyday, which starts as the summer begins and ends… well it ended yesterday. Today, the cycle repeats, Advent starts again, and we wait with longing for God to break into the world.

A new year for the Church also means a change to our Bible readings on Sundays. Our Sunday readings take us through a different Gospel on each year of a three year cycle – Matthew one year, Mark the next, and then Luke. Readings from John are scattered through all three of the years, especially around major festivals. This year, through to November 2025, most of our readings will come from Luke’s Gospel. There is much to be said about Luke’s unique understanding of Jesus’ life, but for the moment, let me just draw one point out: Luke is a Gospel of journeys

Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a lot of the same material, sometimes being word-for-word the same, but tell the same story from slightly different angles—John is really quite different. That’s why together Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, which sounds like a very difficult term, but synoptic just means seeing with the same eye. All three of them have Jesus’ ministry starting in Galilee, followed by a journey to Jerusalem, which leads to the final crisis of Holy Week. In Matthew and Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is a short interlude relatively late in the story. One thing that makes Luke distinct, however, it that this journey takes up almost half the length of the entire Gospel. That’s one of a number of ways that Luke presents Jesus’ life and our own as a grand journey: in Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, the whole world is on the move as a result of a great census called by the Roman Emperor; and the first witnesses to the Resurrection are two men on a journey to Emmaus.

Patience and Obedience: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Fourth Sunday in Advent)

24 December 2023 by Gerry Lynch

A painting in realist style. Elizabeth, standing at the top of the steps of her house, is smiling with her arms outstretched, while Mary, at the foot of the steps, looks up at her.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend (Benefice Service)

Readings – Romans 16. 25-27; Luke 1. 26-38

“Then Mary said, ‘Let it be with me according to your word…’”

Advent is a season about patience and obedience. If, as we do this morning, we follow the Church’s calendar obediently, and keep the season patiently to the end, Advent reminds us that God is always breaking into the world in ways that are little noticed and often among people who are held to be of little account by the conventional standards of the day.

This morning’s Gospel reading is about how God launched His great rescue plan for the human race thanks to the obedience of two ordinary women, who lived in rural communities, as members of a people under foreign occupation, at a time when women were held to be inferior and were excluded from public life.

Elizabeth, who kept faith patiently through years of barrenness, is given a child she could never have expected; Mary is given a child earlier than she could ever have imagined, in circumstances that will be difficult, but her obedience is such that she accepts.

Neither patience nor obedience are exactly fashionable virtues at the moment. Consumer culture mitigates against patience, while we too easily get obedience confused with acceptance of authoritarianism—they aren’t the same thing at all. Like people in every time and every nation, the presumptions of our culture leave us with much to learn and to unlearn about what God requires of us. That learning requires patience.

In our epistle reading, St Paul writes that in Jesus Christ, “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages…is now disclosed”. Why was the mystery kept for all these long ages? Why could God have not just given people some simple rules for living well together?

Waiting Patiently for Christmas: Sermon Preached on 17th December 2023 (Third Sunday of Advent)

17 December 2023 by Gerry Lynch

A medieval altar triptych displaying a dramatic scene.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24; John 1. 6-8, 19-28

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”

The supermarkets have been keeping Christmas since October. The big firms’ Christmas TV adverts came out just before Remembrance Sunday. We like to tut at them for their indecent rush to start the festive season, yet by this stage, we ourselves have all been to about fifteen Christmas parties, sang about fifty carols, and eaten nine thousand eight hundred mince pies. Even St John’s is full to the brim with beautifully decorated Christmas trees.

Yet according to the Church it still isn’t Christmas. It’s Advent, which is supposed to be a time of waiting, a time of reflection and spiritual preparation before Christmas, sort of like the junior brother of Lent. It’s hard to preach about keeping Advent faithfully rather than jumping the gun with the secular world when the building is full of angels and stars. It’s harder still to keep any sense of this being at least something of a season of fasting when David Evans is offering you another hot mug of his delicious mulled wine, sourced directly from Germany.

I’m not in a position to give you a lecture from the pulpit about keeping Advent properly, because I haven’t been keeping it very well myself. Indeed, pretty much the whole Church, across denominational boundaries, celebrates Christmas with the secular world during Advent, then during the Twelve Days of Christmas, supposed to be the time of feasting, it joins everyone else in having a good slumber.

I think it’s a great pity, because Advent is all about waiting patiently, sometimes in surroundings that are very dark, for the light of God’s eternal Word to enter into the world. And when that Light did enter the world, it didn’t do so in a blaze of glory, but almost entirely ignored, in the form of a tiny, vulnerable, baby. Given how dark the world has become over the last few years, we as Christians could do with preparing ourselves spiritually to be proficient at waiting patiently, and looking for where light is entering the world, vulnerable and much ignored. If we could be better at that, we could also be more of a blessing on our secular neighbours.

Descended from David: Sermon Preached on 18th December 2022 (The Fourth Sunday of Advent)

19 December 202518 December 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25

“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David…’”

The Fourth Sunday of Advent can be a difficult moment in the church’s calendar for a preacher. The outside world is already at the height of its Christmas party season, yet in the Church we are commanded to wait for a few days yet, to remain a little longer in that state of longing that defines much of our lives as Christians, that of waiting for a new and better world to emerge. We try our best to be patient, to avoid jumping the gun by celebrating the Christ-child coming into the world before Christmas Day, but St John’s is already full of Christmas trees and we’ve all probably been to a few Christmas parties.

The Christmas concerts and nativity plays we attend tend to jumble up elements from the different accounts of Christ’s origins. As Advent also begins the cycle of Gospel readings for each year, I thought this odd moment in the Church’s year might give us an opportunity to look specifically at Matthew’s account of Christ’s origins and what they might mean for us, because most of our Sunday Gospel readings through until next November will come from Matthew, including this morning’s Gospel.

The accounts of Jesus’ origins are very different between the four Gospels. Mark, the action gospel, doesn’t worry at all about Jesus’ origins – he starts by establishing John the Baptist as the messenger prophesied by Isaiah… and then simply gets on with the action, with the first scene being Jesus’ baptism at the start of his public ministry. John starts with the wonderful prose-poem proclaiming Jesus’ supernatural origins at the beginning of the universe, which we will hear as the Midnight Gospel next week, before also getting straight into the action of Jesus’ public ministry without worrying about his earthly origins. Luke is the source of most of the stories familiar from nativity plays – the shepherds, the angels, the manger, and all that. Its account of Jesus’ birth is also told from the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth, giving an unusual prominence to the voices of women for a work of ancient literature. Matthew give us the Wise Men and King Herod, and the terrible massacre of the babies of Bethlehem, all too believable as we look at the worst despots of our own world.

Yet especially in the light of Luke’s account, we can find today’s reading from Matthew about Jesus’ origins a little disappointing. The story of Mary’s pregnancy is told entirely from the perspective of Joseph. Given our own cultural context, we almost certainly find ourselves taking a sharp breath when we hear that Joseph “planned to dismiss her quietly”.

Also jarring is how obviously important it is to Matthew that Jesus is a descendant of King David, the greatest of Israel’s rulers. Both Jesus and Joseph had already been established as descendants of David in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel; in today’s reading, the angel who convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, addresses him as “son of David”. King David is a key element in the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel, yet we often neglect it in how we understand Jesus Christ today.

King David with his harp on the tower of Christ Church, Shaw. © Gerry Lynch, 24 June 2017

Partly, I think, that is because in our culture, most of us consider someone’s ancestry as being of little importance in telling us about the sort of person they are. Thank the Lord, this is now considered rather politically incorrect. But it also marks us out as being different from most cultures historically, and so we can miss why it was important to Matthew and his readers that Jesus was a descendant of David, and what they would have taken from that about His character and mission on Earth. I think it remains important for us too that Christ was descended from David, and given that David Evans’ Bible study group is looking at King David at the moment, it might be interesting for us to think about why.

Proclaiming Forgiveness: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th December 2021 (The Second Sunday of Advent)

5 December 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Luke 3:1-6; Malachi 3:1-4

“He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

It seems that in this pandemic, we’re always waiting. This time last year, we were waiting for the vaccines to arrive, having just heard news that seemed too good to be true about their effectiveness. This year, we’re waiting to see if they’ll still work as well against the Omicron variant. Waiting can sometimes be a nerve-grinding, exhausting, process, most of all when we wait poised between utter despair and relief. Let us be honest – the Second Sunday of Advent in 2021 involves just this kind of joy-sapping, emotionally fraught, waiting.

A painting by Domenico Veneziano of St John the Baptist surrounded by bare mountains and scattered woodland. He is naked. — St John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Domenico Veneziano (1445). Now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Waiting is, however, part of the human condition. It is also a major theme of the season of Advent, where we wait for Christ to come into the world at Christmas. Even Jesus had to wait for the appropriate time to start his public ministry, which meant waiting for John the Baptist; and John himself presumably had to wait for the right moment to begin preaching, in a time and a place that was full of shifting political and religious tensions.

It is of note that Luke locates John the Baptist at a definite historical moment. His preaching didn’t happen at a random moment in history, but at a particular time and a particular place, and I quote from this morning’s Gospel:

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”

From the time when he is writing, Luke is probably looking back around sixty years to the ministry of John the Baptist. That is a long time, but well within the living memory of older people; prominent public figures of the time will still mean something to most people. John the Baptist’s ministry is presented as a historical reality, in the not too distant past. It is as if a modern writer were writing about, say the Cuban Missile Crisis or miniskirts, by saying:

“In the eighth year of the reign of Elizabeth the Second, when Macmillan was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Kennedy President of the United States, and Khrushchev and Mao Chairmen of the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and China, during the archiepiscopates of Geoffrey Fisher and Michael Ramsey.”

“Waiting”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 6 December 2020 (the 2nd Sunday of Advent)

6 December 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-10

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you

Madonna and Child in an Advent-tide Old St Paul’s, Edinbugh. 14 December 2018. © Gerry Lynch

At the start of the week, I had to order a few items from a major online retailer. I’ll not give it any free advertising by mentioning the name. Suffice to say it’s a firm called after a major river in South America known for, how shall I put it, being very efficient in tax matters. Among the items I procured is the new external mic for the parish’s tablet to improve the quality of our streaming, which I hope those of you watching at home are enjoying, as well as some cabling to improve the internet connection around the curate’s house.

I wanted the cabling to arrive before the Advent course started on Tuesday evening, and I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t seem to find any delivery options earlier than Wednesday, even though I was willing to spend a few quid extra to do so. It’s absolutely ridiculous, after all, that in the middle of a global pandemic, I can’t have all my consumer desires satisfied within 24 hours.

Or, maybe not.

We have become a culture that has had our capacity to wait eroded by consumer industries that know we’ll spend more with them if they can satisfy our needs instantly. I’m not enough of a hypocrite to stand up here in the pulpit and pretend to you that I don’t love it, either. It is, however, only part of the story. For all of us life involves much waiting, not least when we are very young or very old, and for the most vulnerable among us life is largely a matter of waiting. We usually find ourselves waiting because we are in a situation where we are either dependent on others, or else dependent on circumstance and therefore in a situation where only God can help. Right at this moment, the whole world is in waiting in hopeful agony for the vaccines that seem set to deliver us from the nightmare that has been the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty.

To be human, in this world of matter, space, and time, is to wait. One of the gifts of this season of Advent is that it hallows and allows us to bring before God the waiting that punctuates our lives. After all, the Church has been waiting since the day of Ascension, waiting for the return of the Lord.

Our epistle this morning is from the Second Letter of Peter, which is very much a product of waiting – indeed a text which was written at a time when the waiting had become almost too much to bear. Despite its name, it was almost certainly not written by St Peter; as early as the 3^rd Century, Origen regarded its true authorship as a matter of doubt, as did Eusebius who wrote some decades letter. Now, as I am not a scriptural literalist, I don’t think doubts about the letter’s authorship necessarily reduce its value to us. Firstly, I take seriously that all Scripture is God-breathed and written for our instruction, and that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit in the process by which it decided conclusively on the canon of Scripture. But that does not mean reading the Bible as if it were instructions for a piece of flat-pack furniture. Scripture teaches us as much as anything else through the blind spots and misunderstandings of the people who wrote it, for we are human beings just like them, prone to the same mistakes, and especially prone to co-opting God for our own agendas.