division

Beware the Vegetarians – Sermon Preached on 13 September 2026 (Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 14.1–12; Matthew 18.21–35

“another, who is weak, eateth herbs.”

Oil painting of a king and his servant seated at a table, the king pointing accusingly while the anxious servant sits with hands clasped; two clerks between them count coins and write in a ledger, illustrating the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.
Jan van Hemessen, The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (c. 1556). Hangs in the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA.

When St Paul writes that the weak eat only vegetables, he isn’t acting like the ancient equivalent of a social media influencer from the manosphere, recommending that his followers stick to a fat-rich diet of red meat and bone broth. He’s actually referring to a controversy that divided the ancient Church in exactly the same way that gay marriage or women bishops divide the Church of our own time.

For St Paul, the question at hand was what Christians should and shouldn’t eat. In the pagan cults of the Roman Empire sacrificing animals to various gods at their temples was a big thing, especially on their holy days. Of course, a lot of the meat was consumed at big parties at the various temples, but some of it was given away, perhaps to the poor or just to buy goodwill, and some of it was sold on the open market. So, if you were tucking into a nice ham sandwich in a big Roman city, there was a fair chance the ham had been sacrificed to a pagan god.

So, some people in the early Church avoided eating meat, because they were worried it might have been sacrificed to pagan gods. For St Paul, that kind of scruple was a sign of having a weak faith. After all, pagan idols weren’t actually gods – they were just dumb statues, or figments of people’s imaginations, after all, so if you really had a strong faith that Jesus Christ was Lord, then why would you worry about a bit of chicken that had been sacrificed to Jupiter or whoever?

This had big social implications, because just as now, a lot of Roman socialising and commercial life was done over a meal. Business deals were struck at the dinner table. Men of social standing invited others to dine and accepted invitations. The Christians who refused to eat meat that might possibly have been sacrificed to pagan gods were cutting themselves off from respectable society and job opportunities.

So, the Christians who abstained from meat sacrificed to idols thought that the people who ate it were barely Christian at all, unwilling to make the slightest sacrifice for God, completely captured by the pagan society round them. The people who ate meat thought the abstainers had totally missed the implications of Jesus Christ dying for us, which freed us from the idea that breaking arbitrary laws about diet and washing could put us on the wrong side of God.

This might seem obscure, but it was a topic that divided the Church along the lines of whether Jesus was calling Christians to be a group of particularly holy people quite separate from the mass of people; or whether Jesus was calling Christians to be an integral part of society to better lead others to Him – very like, for example, a lot of Christian arguments about whether or not the Church should embrace same-sex marriage.

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The Sword and the Sparrow – Sermon Preached on 21st June 2026 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 6.1b – 11; Matthew 10.24 – 39

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus, in white robes with arm outstretched, addresses a group of twelve men gathered on a rocky hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The apostles stand or crouch in clusters, some leaning on staffs, their expressions attentive and apprehensive. A smaller group of onlookers watches from the lower left. The landscape behind is arid and hilly, with pale water visible in the middle distance under an overcast sky.
James Tissot, Ordaining of the Twelve Apostles (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Musuem.

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t have many of those cuddly quotes you see on social media with AI-generated graphics attached to them. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, says Jesus, and to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven. Fear God, for He can destroy both your body and your soul in Hell. Not the sort of stuff you see on Instagram next to a photo of some pink roses.

This is hard stuff, about division and failure and judgement. It’s also about the sovereignty of God, His rule over the universe and His power to dispose of us as He sees fit; not only His power, but His right to do so. It is stuff that we often prefer not to think about. We want to stick with the idea that God is love and can forgive all, and there’s no need for anyone to suffer or struggle – in particular, we hope that there isn’t any need for me to suffer and struggle.

But we’ve had a week of headlines that ought to remind us that a world where there is no judgement is a world where there is no justice – from the monstrous abuse and murder of a baby by the people who adopted him, to warmongers perpetuating the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine at horrendous cost in human life. And if justice requires that God will judge the world, that means justice requires that God will judge each of us as individuals. So let’s turn back to the Gospel reading fully aware that we live in a world where all of us sometimes choose intentionally to do wrong things, and some people sometimes choose to do truly monstrous things.

Our Gospel reading is part of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve Apostles the first time He sent them out on their own to preach and heal in His name.

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Our Best Laid Plans: Sermon Preached on 30 April 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – Ezra 3: 1–13; Ephesians 2: 11–22        

“And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto the Lord; ‘because he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever…’”

Tonight’s Old Testament lesson is one of those ones that can make little sense when we hear it read. It can seem to be a confusing mass of difficult names, of Shealtiels, Zerubbabels, and Jozadaks. So, let me explain what it’s all about, and why it matters today.

The return from exile is depicted in this woodcut for Die Bibel in Bildern, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

The story comes from the Restoration of Temple in Jerusalem, seventy years after its destruction by the Babylonians. This architectural wonder of Hebrew culture and civilisation, built by King Solomon, full of beautiful art and craftsmanship, had been looted and then razed. Jerusalem was intentionally destroyed, and its citizens were deported to hundreds of miles across the desert to Babylon.

For long decades afterwards, the idea that the Temple would be restored must have seemed like a pipe-dream. Then, however, the political situation changed. The Persians became the new great power in the Middle East, and under Cyrus the Great they swept away the Babylonians and allowed the many nations kept in bondage in their mighty capital to return to their homelands. Among them were the exiles from Jerusalem.

The portion of the Book of Ezra we heard from this evening records the restoration of the Temple from its modest beginnings, when Jews first re-gathered on the ruined foundations of Solomon’s Temple, meeting in fear of the people of the neighbouring lands despite their sponsorship by their new friends, the Persian imperial authorities. Then it outlines how, through hard-work and sacrifice, the means were found to lay a foundation stone for the new Temple. There were even some elderly people present when it was laid who remembered King Solomon’s one before its destruction.

What did they people do when the foundation stone of the new Temple was laid? They praised God; they praised God in music and praised God at the top of their voices; they praised God because ‘his mercy endureth forever.’

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Stumbling Blocks and Salt: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26 September 2021 (The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – James 5.13–20; Mark 9.38–50

“Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

There is a striking and rather horrifying picture about our Christian past that occasionally does the rounds on the Internet. It is a photograph of two strangely shaped tombstones, located either side of a high wall. The tombstones are even higher, and from the top of each a hand stretches out to touch the other.

Grave in Roermond © memolands.com gallery
The touching hands between the tombs of Colonel van Gorcum and Lady van Aefferden in the Dutch city of Roermond. © memolands.com gallery and used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0.

The graves are located in the Dutch city of Roermond, and belong to Colonel van Gorcum, a Protestant cavalry officer, and his wife Lady van Aefferden, a Catholic minor noble. They were married in 1842, and after thirty-eight years of presumably happy marriage, the Colonel died and was buried in the Protestant part of the local cemetery, where the dead were divided from one another denominationally by a high wall. His wife therefore refused to be buried in the grand family plot, in the Catholic part of the cemetery, insisting that she would be buried on her own immediately across the wall from him. That is where she was laid to rest eight years later, in 1888, and their graves remain to this day a reminder of the capacity of love to triumph over bigotry.

Love conquers all – even tribalism and stupidity.

Christ presents a dire warning in today’s Gospel about those who place stumbling blocks in the way of faith. The horrid things done due to disagreements between Catholics and Protestants are a huge stumbling block to Christian faith for many, a major contributor to the decline of Christianity in this country and across Europe. Today we pay a heavy price for the sins for the past.

Of course, we’re not like that these days. We’re much more enlightened. Devizes is now absolutely normal in terms of today’s Christianity, certainly in this country, in that the social action of the Church, our commitment to supporting the needy, or the homeless, or people with addiction problems, is carried out absolutely ecumenically. Not only do Conservative Roman Catholics work hand in hand with staunchly Evangelical Protestants, but both work with people at the most theologically liberal end of the Quakers or Anglicans or Methodists, who might see themselves as following a Christian path towards a universal truth rather than understanding Christianity as even presenting a distinct truth at all. All of us seem to have taken on board Jesus’ command to the apostles today about the stranger healing in His name: “Do not stop him; for … whoever is not against us is for us.”

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