charlatans

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

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The image is a colorful, pop-art style reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." It features a long table with Jesus and his twelve disciples seated, depicted in vibrant vertical color blocks. The sections are divided into shades of orange, pink, yellow, blue, red, and magenta, creating a striking contrast with the original muted tones. The figures are engaged in various gestures, with Jesus at the center and the disciples surrounding him, mirroring the composition of the classic painting.

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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We Preach Christ Crucified: Sermon Preached on 3rd March 2024 (Third Sunday in Lent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

1 Corinthians 1. 18-25; John 2. 13-22

“For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.”

I wonder if any of you have heard of the Bethel Bible Church of Redding, California? With 11,000 members, it is one of America’s biggest churches, in a little city smaller than Bath. With a firm faith in the power of God to work miracles, the Church is perhaps most famous for the “glory cloud” that sometimes appears at its services. This takes the form of a fog of golden dust that falls gently from the roof of its huge auditorium. Some scoff at the idea that this could be a miracle—but I think that it’s a real miracle that people haul all those heavy bags of glitter to the top of a huge building. I do envy the pastor there in some ways—it must make it easier to get people to pay the parish share when you can make godly glitter rain from the roof every time finances are a bit tight.

Matthias Grünewald's gruesome 1515 Crucifixion. Christ, visibly covered in cuts and wounds, is surrounded by St John, Mary, and Mary Magdalene with looks of horror on their faces while the Roman Centurion looks on with something more like awe.
Matthias Grünewald, Crufixion (ca. 1515), now hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel

St Paul writes in today’s Epistle that, “Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.” Today’s world is not so different from St Paul’s. It’s easy to scoff at Bethel Bible Church’s glory cloud but the world still wants the Church to prove itself by signs, and in our materialistic age that means to demonstrate its value in practical terms; people are often a bit suspicious of it, so they also demand that the Church prove itselves in alignment with the received wisdom of our own times. The Church is defensive and tetchy, as declining organisms often are, so while it usually happy to broadcast its good works, like a secular charity would, it gets a bit tetchy when its wisdom doesn’t align with the currently received wisdom, like a secular politician would. The Church is also very vain about being wise, even though it often conducts its internal affairs in a very unwise way.

Now wisdom is a funny thing. Like “beauty” it is usually a good thing, sometimes a divine thing, but it also has a second edge to it, a negative one when people get so wrapped up in wisdom that they ignore what’s right in front of them.

In that light, we need to ask if Jesus was, in fact, wise? Today’s Gospel reading is the very first act of Jesus’ public ministry as St John records it. In it, he goes off to Jerusalem, where His Galilean accent will stand out like a sore thumb, waltzes into the Temple, the epicentre of not just religious authority but local Jewish political power, overturns the money-changers’ tables, then chases them out with a whip. And why did he do that? So he could fulfil an ancient prophecy that He was the Messiah. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound “wise” to me, but a bit nuts.

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