flawed humanity

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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The Chickenhawk and the Oddball: Sermon Preached on Sunday 29th June 2025 (Feast of SS Peter and Paul)

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Preached in the Green Gardens, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 12.1-11; Matthew 16.13-19

The image depicts a detailed black-and-white relief sculpture featuring two male figures dressed in flowing robes, each with a halo around their head, indicating their saintly status. The figure on the left holds a large key with intricate designs, while the figure on the right holds a book in one hand and a sword in the other. Above them, a winged angel with a halo holds a crown, symbolizing divine authority or martyrdom. The background includes a textured wall and a tiled floor, adding depth to the composition.
The chickenhawk and the oddball.

Peter and Paul! We know these two names go together, but we tend to forget they were real people. Our image of them is, when we think about them at all, is like the image on the front of your order of service— two-dimensional men from a vanished era with stern faces and beards that would put a Hoxton hipster to shame. If we’re a bit less religious we tend to dismiss them as irrelevant, and if we’re a bit more religious we can turn them into plasterboard saints, beyond critique and therefore not really human at all.

But the Peter and Paul the Bible writes of are very real people, with strong personalities, and some real faults. Both of them could be quite hot headed for starters! Beyond that, they were very different.

Paul could be difficult to deal with. He seems to have been quite socially awkward and a little bit obsessive—maybe, to use the modern phrase, quite far out on the spectrum. Even his best friends found Paul hard to take sometimes. Yet this awkward, annoying, obsessive nature was possibly also why Paul had so much determination, stickability, and raw courage.

Peter was very different. He was a natural leader of men, and a man’s man . It’s easy to imagine the young Peter sitting in a tavern in a port on the Sea of Galilee holding court, surrounded by his hired men. He was no sophisticated thinker, but Peter could be as sharp as a tack—this morning’s Gospel reading shows him being the first person to work out that Jesus was more than just a wandering teacher and healer. But although he liked to talk big and lead from the front, when the chips were down he wasn’t always so good at following through—at least not at first, but we’ll come back to that.

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David Could be A Bad ‘Un: Sermon Preached on 28th July 2024 (Ninth Sunday After Trinity)

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A painting in rococo style; a beautiful if rather snooty-looking, Bathsheba, bare-breasted, is having her hair combed, surrounded by a retinue of ladies-in-waiting.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Christ Church, Bulkington

2 Samuel 11. 1-15; John 6. 1-21

“David wrote a letter… ‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’”

Our first reading today is a bit of a shocker! But that’s only part why I opted to have the Old Testament reading rather than the Epistle at this service. This reading doesn’t just have a plotline that would put Emmerdale to shame, but it speaks to two important questions about our faith. Firstly, what sort of people does God use to do His will in the world? Secondly, what is the Bible for?

A coloured lithograph in Naïve Art style by the painter Marc Chagall; it depicts King David standing upright, wearing a crown, and holding a harp, serenading Bathsheba sitting on an expensive-looking chair. They are sat outside, in what seems to be a garden, under a sunny sky.
Marc Chagall, David with Bathsheba (1980).

We’ll come to those in a moment, but let’s be clear that the soap opera plot was definitely one of the reasons why I chose this reading. It’s so memorable that I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard it. I can still remember that it was a particularly beautiful summer morning. I know it was relatively soon after I had started attending St George’s, the church in Belfast which did so much to form me spiritually. Now, because the readings in church run on a three-year cycle, it has to be an exact multiple of three years ago on the nearest Sunday. It was 27th July 1997, in other words twenty-seven years and a day ago, and the day before my twentieth birthday, a time when faith was really coming alive for me.

Now, this isn’t a particularly pleasant reading, but it grabbed my attention forcefully, as I’m sure it did yours. It stoked my already building interest in the Bible. Teenage males are often particularly gripped by the grizzlier bits of the Bible, and I heard it on my very last day as a teenager.

Most people think Christianity is all about being terribly worthy and a little beige, and is therefore something for worthy, rather beige, perhaps rather dull people. The truth is that God works through real human beings; there are a few saints and a few monsters around, but most of us are a mix of light and dark.

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Wresting With Fragments: Sermon Preached on 6th August 2023 (9th Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Genesis 32.22-31; Matthew 14.13-21          

“And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”

The vision of God whom Jacob encounters by the ford at Jabbok is different from the one depicted in some other Old Testament writings, where it is impossible to see the face of God and live; here, Jacob smells God’s breath and lays hands on His sweaty body.

An image of Margot Robbie playing Barbie is crudely superimposed on Gustav Doré's 1854 painting, Jacob Wrestles with the Angel.
Barbie meets Wrestling Jacob, courtesy of Gustav Doré’s 1854 painting.

Wrestling with God is an experience familiar to most of us. One thing that jumps out at us from this story is that God doesn’t mind having a good wrestle with Jacob – in fact, it is God who seeks Jacob out and begins the bout with him. God is not some sort of divine Kim Jong-Un; we aren’t called to live in terror of some cosmic tyrant who will punish us in fury if we ask difficult questions. Instead we are called to be God’s friends – deeply beloved friends. And friends are allowed to wrestle with one another, to challenge one another with their different perspectives. Like Jacob, we are called to smell God’s breath and lay hands on His body, to wrestle with Him being honest about what we think and feel, about Him and the world.

God doesn’t demand that Jacob submit and acknowledge defeat. God has no need to end this bout by dominating Jacob to prove His superiority. Nor does Jacob run away, as presumably he could have done—but instead remains engaged in an exhausting contest right through the night. What God asks of us is not fearful obedience; nor even a childlike dependency; but instead the sort of deep and loving friendship that can cope with a healthy degree of struggle. Our strongest human friendships are ones that can survive wrestling with one another, indeed our deepest friendships are often those that actively thrive on difference and debate. God should be our most deeply loved friend of all, with whom we can wrestle as we change and grow throughout our lives.

All of our lives contain enough experiences of day-to-day suffering, whether our own or that of others we encounter, to make any sane person wrestle with the gap between a world created by a God of love and goodness, and the suffering and pain that we all suffer and witness afflicting our loved ones. As St Theresa of Avila once prayed, “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” That’s before we start thinking about the state of the world, or the unresolvable tragedy of the human condition.

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