culture

Lest We Forget: Sermon Preached on 7th May 2023 (Coronation Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Joshua 1: 1–9; Romans 13: 1–10

“For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the high-water mark of British imperialist triumphalism. Seventeen carriages, let by Victoria’s open-air affair, processed from Buckingham Palace through to St Paul’s Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Eleven colonial prime ministers and the representatives of more than a dozen overseas monarchies were present, from as far away as Iran, Japan, and Thailand. But the spirit of the day was incarnated by the partying throngs on the streets, enjoying a celebratory special Bank Holiday at a time when workers’ rights were much fewer than they are today. Edward Elgar’s wonderful Cockaigne Overture is perhaps that day’s most enduring legacy, with its rambunctious major-key crescendos capturing the boisterous fun of Cockney celebrations.

A black and white photo taken in 1897 as an escort of Indian Cavalry passes the Houses of Parliament in London watched by crowds for the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, on 22 June 1897
The “pomp of yesterday” – an escort of Indian Cavalry passes Parliament during the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, 22 June 1897.

One cultural figure we might have expected to join in the mood of artistic imperialist triumphalism was the chief propagandist of Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Yet he only wrote towards the end of the festivities, and even then solely in the form of a poetic commentary on them, sounding a warning note that was particularly surprising from a man only marginally religious.

“God of our fathers, known of old, 
  Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
  Dominion over palm and pine —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

[…]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
  On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”

All of our blessings as individuals, as nations, as the human race, flow only from God. All of us forget this from time to time. Certainly the policy-makers of Victorian imperialism at their worst often forgot in whose name they held that dominion over palm and pine, forgetting too often also the care for the outsider and the poor that He commanded His followers to bear always in mind.

We should not damn the Victorians entirely for their worst faults, which were real but not the whole story. From the factory acts to universal free schooling to the final suppression of the slave trade, they sincerely believed in bettering the lot of all. Yet it is hard to see the spirit of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth in the deliberate suffocation of indigenous leadership in the emerging Church of Black Africa, or the many famines of Victorian India, or the big famine in Victorian Ireland.

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Good Enough As We Are: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2022 (Midnight Mass)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9: 2, 6–7; John 1: 1-14     

“For a child has been born for us … authority rests upon his shoulders.” 

The international situation is darkening with a series of protracted and frightening wars, while domestically people are setting their hearts against God. Religiously-minded people see that abandonment of God as a direct cause of the obvious collapse in standards in public life, especially among political leaders. I am not referring to the present day, but to the time when our Old Testament reading was written by Isaiah, around two-thousand seven hundred years ago.

In the midst of this darkness, Isaiah wrote down a vision of a brighter future.  In it, a child is born who will have authority to lead people from darkness into light. He will establish peace and justice, and even be known as “Mighty God”.

Hundreds of years later, about the same distance in time as separates us from knights in armour and feudal lords, the vision still inspired many people to keep hope in difficult times. Some of them had been followers of a wandering preacher called Jesus, whose life was so extraordinary and so surrounded by miracles and the seemingly impossible that they reached the conclusion he was the Son of God. As they reflected on the sacred writings of the Jewish faith which they all devoutly held, this was one of the pieces they thought had foretold Jesus all along.

Our Gospel reading was also a product of those followers, as they wrote down their own reflections on what they had experienced through Jesus. Its first sentence is particularly famous – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Famous it might be, but it can be a little difficult to unpack. So let me try to explain. The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. But the Word was also apparently with God in the beginning. So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?

Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck (1436)

Now here’s another strange phrase from our Gospel reading – “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” You might have noticed that I knelt when I read that phrase. That’s because it expresses the thing that is so unique about the Christian faith – not only that there is a God, but also that God holds us human beings in such high esteem that He actually became one of us, took on human flesh Himself, to open the way to eternal life for us.

And it’s not just the fact that God became a human being that is amazing, but how He did it, the sort of human being He became. For there couldn’t be more of a contrast between Jesus’ supernatural beginnings and his earthly beginnings. Jesus was with the creator of the universe when it all started, and indeed was Himself the creator of the universe, grand concepts that seem to be full of paradox and which aren’t really understandable in human language. At the same time, Jesus became one of us in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to Him in poverty in a stable, as physically weak as any other baby, and absolutely vulnerable and dependent like any other baby. The maker of the universe and the baby in the stall are one and the same: both are the baby who was prophesied by Isaiah all those centuries before.

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Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair

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A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.

I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.

I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.

Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.

But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.

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View from Yerevan in The Tablet

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It’s good to be in print in this week’s The Tablet (11 August 2022 edition) with a “View from Yerevan” – a piece about beautiful town planning, the revival and the absence of churches, losing a war, refugees from far away, and having one of the world’s most difficult geopolitical positions. It’s easy enough to … Read more

Faith, Gays, and Sandi Toksvig: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 7th August 2022 (The Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Hebrews 11: 1–3, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen”

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” – so writes the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Faith and hope are intimately connected – they are the twin foundations for imagining a future that is better than the present.

Smartly dressed man singing and banging a hand drum in Africa
You gotta have faith! Confirmation Day in Sharpeville © Gerry Lynch, 15 September 2019

We live in a society where faith is routinely derided as an unscientific delusion without evidence. Yet doing anything transformative requires us to dream dreams that go well beyond what the evidence will sustain; without faith we can only ever be anchored in a permanent present, unable to take risks because we’re afraid of going into uncharted territory, where there isn’t yet any evidence and we must rely on insight and inspiration.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why our culture seems to be so stagnant, trapped in an endless cycle of movie repeats and music that sounds like it could have been made thirty years ago. Our artists and musicians and writers and journalists are overwhelmed with data about what sells or what generates the clicks. Why take risks when you know what works? Even when the creatives themselves want to try something new out, the executives and editors have all the same data and seem to opt for profits over vision every time.

It seems that the more we know about the present, the less we are able to imagine an alternative to it. Drowning in numbers, we lack the sort of visions that can renew us into the future.

In practice, humanism has displaced Christianity as the official religion of this country. Of course, the Church of England still provides Christian liturgies for all the formal state occasions; but listen to the language of politicians of all parties, or our leading cultural figures, and it is almost always couched in the terms of humanism.

One of our cultural leading lights, Sandi Toksvig, gave the Archbishop of Canterbury a public ticking off this week about the Lambeth Conference. She was herself a humanist, she said, but she was sure that “the sort of message” Jesus wanted to send people was for them to “just be a good person”.

Just be a good person. That’s a charming sentiment – coming from a nursery school teacher, perhaps, or an eight year-old. It is genuinely startling to hear an intelligent person come to mature years and not observe that even good people sometimes do bad things – even when it is obvious what is good and what is not, which is not always the case.

I think that is another part of our present malaise – we tell ourselves that we’re good people, and indeed the official narrative seems to be that people are basically good unless they’ve been subject to some sort of horrific early childhood emotional trauma, or something like that. But we all know that we aren’t always good, indeed that we often hurt the ones we love the most, while that the people whom we love the most are often those who wound us most.

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Disappointed in Jesus?: Sermon Preached at Trinity Parish Church, Jersey, Sunday 17th July 2022 (The Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10: 38–42

‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Earlier this week, a member of the Trinity congregation told me they thought this was the hardest story in the Gospels to deal with. Many of us have a visceral emotional reaction to it, which we try to suppress because we want to be good Christians who value our Bibles. Yet we find ourselves disappointed in the Jesus who seems to bark at an overworked Martha when she asks for help. If that’s your instinctive reaction to the story, please don’t suppress it, but hold on to it as we unpack it.

An ’away match’ in Jersey in July; what a hardship posting?!?!? (Trinity Parish Church, 10 July 2022, © Gerry Lynch_

This reading, from Luke’s Gospel, is one of three Bible stories that mention Martha. The other two are in John’s Gospel: they are the raising of Lazarus, and then John’s version of the story of the woman pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet.

While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”.

The story in John’s Gospel of Jesus visiting the house in Bethany for a meal is so similar to the one we heard this morning that we might well wonder if they are different accounts of the same event. In that one, Martha serves dinner while Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with some very expensive perfume.

Any conversation between Jesus and Martha needs to be understood in the context that they are the closest of friends. He wasn’t snapping at a stranger.

So, I wonder was Jesus gently teasing his dear friend Martha here? Would Martha have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs and being the perfect host and told her just to take it easy for a few hours? Because basically He did tell her that – “you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing.”

We get the sense that perhaps Martha was the sort of very practical person who can’t relax until every bit of work is done – but then keeps finding another little job to do. Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.

It is tempting to get our sense of our own worth from what we do, rather than from accepting what we are. Of course, we all have a regular round of tasks we need to get done to earn our living and keep ourselves and our homes in order. But that is not what makes us valuable; you, I, and every human being in the world is of value simply because we are children of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes, therefore, we need to give ourselves space to just be – to be ourselves and to be with God, to accept ourselves as the people God made us, imperfect but loveable and dearly loved by God.

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A Vision for the Appointed Time: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd July 2022 (Feast of St Thomas)

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Readings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29

“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”

It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.

A carpet of flowers in the Namaqualand desert around a water-pumping mill.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011

On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.

The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.

There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.

This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.

It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.

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The Cost of Love: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th March 2022 (Mothering Sunday)

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Readings – Colossians 3: 12–17; John 19: 25b–27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” 

Let me start this morning’s sermon with a verse of poetry:

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.

So begins the greatest poem of Bill Vanstone, seen by many as the most impressive Anglican thinker and theologian of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. At this time of year, with the weather magnificent and the air full of the scents and new life of spring, even in times as troubled as those we are in, one can be enraptured by this sort of mood, simply by being alive. It feels like heaven! Perhaps indeed it is an intimation of heaven.

A beautiful morning for another away match at Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch

Of course, even in our brightest moments, that is never the whole story. Many of us will come here this morning with serious problems of our own; even those of us fortunate enough not to be in that position will be deeply worried about serious problems faced by people we love.

Love is the greatest gift given to any of us by God. It is the most wonderful and miraculous and life-giving thing about being human. Yet it also has a tremendous cost. It opens us up to feeling the pains of the people we love.  The second stanza of Vanstone’s poem is clear about that cost, as it continues:

Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Some people seem to think that even to celebrate this Sunday as Mother’s Day is somehow excluding and potentially wounding for those without children or whose relationships with their mothers were difficult. Well, as a childless, single man, let me say that it is simply an obvious statement of fact that mothers have a particular and unique relationship with the children they have born in their womb, an intensely physical connection that no male can ever have. Mothers perhaps more than any of us know just how costly and agonising love can be.

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Where is Your Faith?: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 20th February 2022 (The 2nd Sunday before Lent)

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Readings – Revelation 4; Luke 8:22–25

‘Where is your faith?’

I think we all know by now that the world’s Number 1 tennis player, Novak Djokovic, refuses to take a coronavirus vaccine. For many weeks now, this has been one of the most reported news stories all over the world. What I find odd is that nobody asks why his views seem to matter so much. He’s a great tennis player, but not exactly one of our era’s great minds. So why do we care what he thinks about any subject not related to a tennis court?

2022: Behold Your Idols!

The Church is considered irrelevant. More than that, Church is deeply insecure about its supposed lack of relevance, and spends a huge amount of time desperately trying to be relevant, sometimes making itself look stupid in the process. Yet, is it the Church that has a problem, or is it a wider society that turns professional sportspeople into oracles of wisdom on every subject?

Now, let me read you an excerpt from the work of another prominent figure in the debate about coronavirus vaccines:

“Shorty I’mma only tell you this once, you the illest
And for your loving I’mma die hard like Bruce Willis
You got spark, you, you got spunk
You, you got something all the girls want
You’re like a candy store
And I’m a toddler”

This is the lyrical genius of the rapper Nicki Minaj, one of the world’s most successful musicians. Last September, Minaj tweeted to her 24 million followers that her cousin’s friend became impotent as a result of the vaccine. Since then her ever shifting views on vaccination have been the subject of endless media debate. The same society that considers the Church irrelevant obsesses about what vapid celebrities think about matters of medical science.

None of this is to excuse the Church’s self-importance. It has been the architect of many of its own problems. This week, I read news reports of another disastrously managed safeguarding case of the period between 1960s and the 1990s. I can see why people lost faith in the Church. But where did their faith go?

Once people had faith in political leaders, or in trade unionists or captains of industry, or in thinkers and self-help gurus. All of these people squandered people’s faith as determinedly as the Church did.

At the moment, the professional upper-middle-classes still seem to have faith in one thing: science and scientists. Indeed the dominant religion of the English bourgeoisie has shifted from the Church of England to the church of experts. That doesn’t, however, translate into the rest of society. If anything, the way in which questioning anything presented in scientific terms is treated as ridiculous and laughable by the best off and best educated seems to provoke a backlash from other sections of society, as the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment shows.

While social media and fragmentation of the mass media doubtless play a role, the crisis in faith in science has deeper causes. We, the public, are another contributor to the problem, by asking too much of science, asking it to answer questions that are matters of ethics or political philosophy. Scientists themselves have, however, often colluded in the politicisation of their profession, something social media has made clear as scientists argue among themselves in full public view. It has become too easy to guess a scientist’s position on the left-right spectrum from the way they speak about their field of expertise.

With the last pillar of traditional authority crumbling, it seems the only people left with any moral authority in Western societies are stars of sport and entertainment, the Novaks and the Nickis. God help us all.

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Your Beautiful Bodies: Sermon Preached at George’s, Belfast, Sunday 2nd January 2022 (2nd Sunday of Christmas)

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Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial

Readings – John 1: 10–18, Ephesians 1: 3–14

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

One of my favourite activities when off work in the dark depths of midwinter is to go onto YouTube to watch television advertisements from commercial breaks of decades long past. I have a particular fondness for 1970s adverts for pipe tobacco; they really get across how much society has changed in the last half a century or so. Not so much because they showed men smoking their pipes on the telly, but because of how plain and sometimes even ugly the men in them were. Bald men in late middle-age, often a little tubby, sometimes with wrinkly foreheads or even unmanageable hair. In adverts for DIY superstores, these plain middle-aged men inevitably had plain middle-aged wives that they sat with in the ordinary kitchens of ordinary homes.

Watch a TV advertising break today and it is a different story. Everyone is beautiful; everyone has perfect hair and perfect teeth; nearly everyone is young. Where young people aren’t really appropriate for advertising the product in question – if it’s for a funeral plan, let’s say, or incontinence medicine – the few elderly people allowed to appear in advertising look like they’re just about to pop out for a 10 mile walk, just to wind down from the skiing holiday they’ve just jetted home from.

Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial
The beautiful people used to advertise to us in the ’70s.

Half a century ago, advertising executives thought we were most likely to purchase a product if we associated it with people we identified with, with people who were like we were ourselves. Now the theory is that we are more likely to buy products associated with the sort of people we aspire to becoming, or at least have idle fantasies about becoming, in the hope that some of their success will rub off on us in a sort of high-tech cargo cult.

It sounds like a minor change, but it goes to the heart of some of the most damaging social trends of today’s world. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves, negatively, with people who are prettier, richer, and more successful than we are – or who seem to be prettier, richer, and more successful than we are.

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