fin de siecle

Our Weird Faith: Sermon Preached on 19th April 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” 

A young kitchen maid, of Moorish complexion, in a white headcloth and dark olive-green smock stands behind a wooden table, her head bowed and her hands resting on a cloth on the tabletop. On the table in front of her are two large earthenware jugs, a shallow metal basin, a small dark pot, a white jug with blue decoration, a stack of plates, a mortar and pestle, and a bulb of garlic. A small white cloth lies folded on the table. Behind her on the right hangs a cloth-wrapped bundle. In the upper left corner, visible through an opening or hatch in the wall, a smaller scene shows three figures seated at a table covered with a white cloth, with one figure gesturing towards another who sits opposite. The painting is lit from the left, with warm brown and ochre tones throughout.
Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1620–2). Hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.

Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.

But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.

This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.

“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.

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We Need Visions: Sermon Preached on 23rd February 2025 (Second Sunday before Lent)

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A vibrant painting of a swirling night sky with bright stars and a crescent moon, depicted in shades of blue and yellow. The sky features dynamic, curving brushstrokes above a dark, rolling landscape with cypress trees and a small village, rendered in deep blues and blacks. The overall scene is iconic and expressive, characteristic of Vincent van Gogh's style.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Revelation 4; Luke 8. 22-25

“…the one seated there looks like jasper and cornelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald.”

After a stormy week or so in the affairs of the world, the story of Jesus calming a huge storm on the Sea of Galilee seems obviously relevant. It’s tempting for me to say, “Well just read that again at home and trust Jesus in these stormy times.” Then we can all get our post-church coffee and get off to our Sunday lunch ten minutes earlier.

A vibrant, abstract mural featuring a central figure in a white robe with raised hands, set against a green background with yellow geometric shapes. The figure appears to be a stylized, solemn depiction, possibly religious, framed by an arch-like structure. Surrounding the central figure are dynamic, colorful panels with abstract representations of birds, flames, and human-like forms, adding movement and energy to the composition.
Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral is full of imagery from Revelation. © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

That feels inadequate, and trite, given that we’ve all been on complex journeys of faith through our lives. The truth is that all of us go through stormy periods in our lives where we find it difficult to trust Jesus; there are times when we find it difficult to trust that God wants good things for us in own lives, and also when we find it difficult to trust that a loving God is in charge of the world. In moments like that, I’ve never found being ordered from the pulpit to have more faith did me any good.

Another thing to bear in mind is that we can have faith, and lose faith, in many things, not just in God, or that Jesus Christ was God. This is a time in our history when people are losing faith in many things—especially in institutions and leaders. No doubt some of them have misbehaved or misunderstood their mission and got things wrong, but without leaders and institutions we have faith in, any country becomes a fractured place where the strong dominate the weak, the crooked break the rules without fear of consequences, and where even the strong and successful live much less pleasant lives than they otherwise might.

I think important light on what is happening in our society and politics is shed by the first reading this morning from Revelation. You’re probably surprised to hear me say that, because it’s a reading full of vivid, almost fantastical imagery, of living creatures with six wings full of eyes on the inside, singing constantly before the throne God. It openly acknowledges itself to be the result of a mystical experience where St John of Patmos is “in the spirit”. You can see why many people dismiss Revelation as the ravings of a madman, perhaps even of a drug addict. It doesn’t always make much rational sense—you know, what does it mean to say that “around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald”? Have you ever seen a rainbow that looks like an emerald?

It’s easy to dismiss this part of the Bible as worthless, and many people do. After all, what does this have to do with feeding the hungry and visiting the prisoners and all those practical things that Jesus commanded us to do? The things we are so often told are what Jesus was really interested in.

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Requiem for a Dream

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Also posted at Slugger O’Toole

European flag carpet, Gift from the Republic of Azerbaijan. World Forum for Democracy 2016, Strasbourg, France. © Northern Ireland Foundation

Today, the Netherlands reinstituted border checks with Germany and Belgium. The new policy, which will initially run for six months, aims “to combat migration and human-trafficking”. According to the EU, fourteen of the twenty-nine members of the Schengen passport-free travel area currently have some form of “temporary” border control; of these all but Malta’s relating to a major international conference feel at least semi-permanent, with Russian sabotage efforts and “risk of violent actions against Israeli citizens” cited by some countries along with irregular migration and organised crime.

This hits me particularly hard because of the ten summers in a row between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s I travelled by buses and ferries from Northern Ireland to Germany – in the early years to West Germany – via Belgium and the Netherlands to spend the summer with a German family. I remember the infrastructure on the Dutch-German border being dismantled in the early 1990s; most traffic was waved through before that, although a differently coloured passport could occasionally attract attention from a bored border guard. But on the Antwerp to Eindhoven motorway, even in the 1980s, I can only ever remember a few trucks being parked up in service areas waiting for a customs inspection. Otherwise there was nobody around to check passports and not even a little booth to house them. I had to Google when was the last time private citizens last faced checks on the Dutch-Belgian border; it turns out to be 1947!

Those of us who have believed in the vision of a united Europe and saw it start to blossom in our lifetimes are watching our dream dying. There are plenty of shrilly self-deluding voices screaming that it has been betrayed by populists and jingoists and paid shills for Putin. The harsh reality, however, is that it is dying because it hasn’t survived contact with reality; and more specifically, it hasn’t survived contact with Europe’s reality of the 2020s being very different from what anyone imagined in 1992, let alone 1947.

We could summarise the history of the European Union over the last 35 years in a rock lyric: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the Moon.”

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War and the Devil: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 6th March 2022 (The First Sunday in Lent)

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Readings – Romans 10:8–13; Luke 4: 1–13

“Jesus … was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” 

One of my favourite films is a movie made eleven years ago named Margin Call. It is a fictionalised version of 24 hours in the life of a big New York merchant bank at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

In the small hours of the morning, two well-tailored bankers assimilate the possibility of the world economy collapsing thanks, in part, to their extreme investment risks. At one point, the younger one turns to the older and says, “This is bizarre. It’s like a dream.”

“Oh, I don’t know”, comes the reply, “Seems like we may have just woken up.”

The world of these men and women collapses in the space of a day, to their shock and horror. As the movie progresses, however, it becomes apparent that they knew all along that they were following a path that was unsustainable, but one that was making them all rich. They were lying to the rest of us, of course, but mostly they were lying to themselves. Part of the movie’s power comes from the way it depicts how the system rapidly seduces the young graduate trainees into believing that this world of greed and lies is normal, even good.

Subsequently disgraced – Kevin Spacey in Margin Call (2011).

Ironically, the wise old trader in that exchange was Kevin Spacey – soon afterwards disgraced, and deservedly so, for using his artistic genius as bait to exploit young men who dreamed of being stars.

Both the movie and the real-life story of its star are metaphors for the world of the last thirty years, which indulged itself in the myth that humanity was starting to escape the restrictions of its nature, and that freedom and prosperity for all could be best ensured by each of us pursuing our desires and demands to the maximum extent.

We need to face facts: we are never far away from the wilderness, where the Devil lurks.

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Crumbling Empires and Eternal Bliss: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 21st November 2021 (Christ the King)

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Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.

Readings – Revelation 1:4b-8; Mark 10:17–31

 “My Kingdom is not from of this world.” 

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

Some of you know, and some of you don’t, that I am a very keen radio ham, and a particular enthusiast for Morse code, which is still in use by hobbyists around the world on a daily basis. My love affair with radio started when I was an eight year old boy, on discovering that the radio cassette player my parents had given me as a Christmas present had a switch marked “Short Wave”. At first, tuning the dial on this strange waveband was unpropitious, as the adults had all assured me would be the case, revealing only strange bleeps and noises and a few stations in languages I didn’t even recognise.

Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.
Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv’s Paton Bridge, 11 August 2017, © Gerry Lynch.

Within a few hours, however, I had discovered programmes in immaculate English from Sweden, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and things developed from there over the following weeks and months. To a child always fascinated by maps and already at that tender age becoming interested in politics, that cassette player became like a magic carpet to distant lands, so much more remote in those pre-Internet days of the 1980s.

One of the most ubiquitous stations, and certainly the most bizarre, was Radio Tirana, which dominated large parts of the Short Wave spectrum with its creepy and unforgettable theme tune, introducing broadcasts that promoted Albania’s official state ideology in every language from Armenian to Zulu. It seemed to despise equally both what it described as American Imperialists and Soviet Socialist Imperialists, but its real ire was reserved for the oul’ enemy – the imperialists of Yugoslavia.

The undoubted king of the dial, however, was Radio Moscow, which in English alone had not only a North American service, and a World Service aimed mainly at audiences in Africa and South Asia, but for an hour at 8 o’clock every evening the wonderful Britain and Ireland Service. It was presented by gentlemen who were very well-spoken indeed, sounding like they had been educated at Marlborough and Cambridge – because they probably had been. They presented the failures of the Soviet Union as being the inevitable flaws of a system that was still merely Socialist, and that these would ultimately disappear as a perfect political system, a genuine Communism, inevitably emerged.

I discovered all this at Christmas 1985. Within a few years, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even the mighty Soviet Union all vanished from our maps. Empires rise and fall. They always have done and always will do, and they are always profoundly flawed entities.

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