failure

You Bunch of Failures – Sermon Preached on 5th July 2026 (Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Romans 7.15–25a, Matthew 11.16–19, 25–30

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The other day, straight after taking a funeral, I had a long chat with the immediate family, and I kicked myself afterwards when I realised I had been far cheerier than was appropriate with people who were clearly deeply in grief. Then there was the plan for a “good night’s sleep” that disappeared into Cape Verde’s late-night heroics against the might of Argentina. I could go on, but the worst things I’ve done aren’t things I’d volunteer to reveal from the pulpit on a Sunday.

An oil painting of an elderly man seated on a simple wooden chair beside a fireplace. He is bent forward with his face buried in both clenched fists, his elbows resting on his knees. He wears a loose blue working suit and heavy, worn leather boots. His hair is thin and pale. The brushwork is thick and visible throughout, with strong directional strokes following the contours of the figure's hunched body and the grain of the wooden floorboards. The chair is painted in muted olive-yellow. To the left, a low fire burns in a plain hearth with a dark mantelpiece. The background wall is rendered in pale grey with broad, textured strokes. The overall palette is dominated by blues, ochres, and muted earth tones.
Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

We all know the feeling. We all do things that strike us as quite mad afterwards – self-destructive or sometimes just wrong – sometimes things done in the spur of the moment, sometimes wrong courses of action that we’ve continued with for some time.

St Paul recognised this in his own life, writing this morning that even when he was overjoyed by God’s commandments, he saw “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin”. St Paul’s great insight was that human beings could never become truly good just by trying to follow God’s commandments, because we are all so prone to self-sabotage. That’s why the story of the Jewish people, although they were God’s chosen people, included the same failures and episodes of self-destruction as everyone else’s. Even when we know in our minds what the right thing is and set out to do the best, something inside ourselves, something that often seems out of our control, makes us turn to the worst.

Nobody’s perfect. We all know that.

So I find it odd that, if you pay attention to the way our newspapers are written and our TV programmes are made, they encourage us into a mood of feeling smug and superior. And that’s even before we discuss the algorithms of social media. It has all become much worse over the last couple of decades. I think that is because it is now possible to explore in minute detail what makes people tune in and tune out, what makes people disengage or click. The media and social media moguls wouldn’t press those buttons of smugness and superiority if they weren’t producing results for them.

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How to Win by Embracing Failure: Sermon Preached on 14th September 2025 (Holy Cross Day)

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

Philippians 2. 6-11, John 3. 3-17

“Christ… became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

A religious sculpture set within a stone archway, featuring a central wooden crucifix with a figure of Jesus Christ, flanked by two standing figures, likely the Virgin Mary and Saint John, all crafted in a stylized, weathered material. The scene is illuminated by soft lighting against a textured wall background.
The modernist rood in the Augustinerkirche, an Old Catholic parish church in Zürich. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

You lot are a bunch of failures! A load of hypocrites who often do things against your own principles, and fail to deliver what you say you’ll do. Fair weather Christians who cave in too easily when the going gets tough. More than that, I know that at least some of you are here in Church today for decidedly mixed motives.

Don’t think you can try to hoodwink me, because I know all those things to be the case. I know they’re true, because they’re true of me also. And if we read the Bible, we find all that was true of the apostles, of Peter and James and all that lot, and that’s before we even begin talking about St Paul. And that is one of the most important things about Christianity—it’s not, despite what the Good Friday hymn says, a religion that promises to make us good; it’s a religion that makes promises to people who often aren’t very good.

So let me wish you a happy Holy Cross day!—For that is why I started my sermon in the way I did. The Cross has become probably the most successful visual brand in history, and that’s why we often miss that it’s actually a symbol of human failure. God walked among us in the person of Jesus Christ, actual God, healing and teaching and refusing both power and violence, and we put Him to death in one of the most horrific ways possible. We put Him to death in part because He told the truth, and we often hate the truth. Cosy lies often seem more comforting that the sometimes harsh cleanser that is truth. But we’ll come back to that.

The Cross upends everything. That’s the point of it. The means symbol Christ’s defeat is actually the means of his victory, and the symbol of our failure is actually the means of our liberation. The major part of that liberation we will experience only in the world to come, which the Cross opens to us. But some of that liberation we experience in the here and now, in the freedom from needing to be perfect the Cross provides.

I mean, would you have been one of the few who stayed by Jesus’ side even on the Cross? Would you have been with John and that handful of women? I’ve actually met a few of people who thought they would have done – who really thought they’d have managed what Peter and James and Thomas couldn’t do – and all have been the most egotistical pillocks, lacking all self-awareness. The rest of us know better than that. It is at the Cross that our delusions must die—and strangely, it is precisely knowing that we would have failed then, just as we so often do in our day-to-day lives, that liberates us to accept the flawed real people we are, the real people that God loves as they are.

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