gospels

God, Khrushchev, and St Luke – Sermon Preached on 18th October 2026 (St Luke’s, Day)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Timothy 4. 5-17, Luke 10.1-9

“Only Luke is with me.”

The biography of Nikita Khrushchev by the American academic William Taubman is a doorstop of a book. I mean that literally. It’s so big and heavy I sometimes use it to hold my interior doors open whenever I air the house. It’s 900 pages and runs to well over a quarter of a million words. It’s a very good biography – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in fact – and it’s an enjoyable read, but I’ve only ever managed to dip in and out of it, despite owning it for many years.

Book cover of “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era” by William Taubman. A sepia-toned photograph fills the cover, showing an older, balding man in a dark suit, white shirt and striped tie. His mouth is open as if mid-speech, and his clenched fist is raised in the foreground. Behind him, a blurred dark shape appears to be a hammer-and-sickle emblem. The author’s name is in white capital letters across the top, and a red band at the bottom carries the title in large white letters, with the subtitle beneath it in smaller capitals.
A banging read – William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003). 

Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, has been the subject of nine significant biographies in English, at least another three in Russian, two in French, and one in German. So you might assume that he must have been a very important figure but I think it’s still too early for history to have come to a mature judgement of that. He led the Soviet Union during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall, so I think he will be of interest to historians and enthusiastic ordinary people for centuries to come – in the way that Metternich, or Montezuma, or Charles II still are. But he was a man who was made and ultimately deposed by the winds of history, not one who changed their direction. Will people still call themselves followers of Khrushchev in two thousand years? Or be reading any of his speeches? My dears, they don’t even do so sixty years after he lost power.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, has only four biographies, and three of them use a lot of the same material – together they have far fewer words than William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. We know them as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that’s how they have been known since ancient times, although none of them actually identifies its author in its text. We owe the people who wrote these works nearly everything we know about Jesus Christ and His life, and excerpts from their biographies are read in our church every Sunday, and will be in literally millions of churches around the world this very day. Well over three thousand languages have had at least one of the Gospels translated into them.

Today we celebrate St Luke’s Day. So, what do we know about St Luke? Not very much. St Paul mentions a Luke, “the beloved physician”, in his Letter to the Colossians, and the Church has long believed he wrote both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which are really two halves of one work. He was probably a gentile, perhaps from Antioch, the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He stayed with Paul to the end, as we heard in our first reading. But across his two volumes, which together constitute the largest contribution by any single writer to the New Testament, he never once tells us his name.

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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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Descended from David: Sermon Preached on 18th December 2022 (The Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25     

“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David…’”

The Fourth Sunday of Advent can be a difficult moment in the church’s calendar for a preacher. The outside world is already at the height of its Christmas party season, yet in the Church we are commanded to wait for a few days yet, to remain a little longer in that state of longing that defines much of our lives as Christians, that of waiting for a new and better world to emerge. We try our best to be patient, to avoid jumping the gun by celebrating the Christ-child coming into the world before Christmas Day, but St John’s is already full of Christmas trees and we’ve all probably been to a few Christmas parties.

The Christmas concerts and nativity plays we attend tend to jumble up elements from the different accounts of Christ’s origins. As Advent also begins the cycle of Gospel readings for each year, I thought this odd moment in the Church’s year might give us an opportunity to look specifically at Matthew’s account of Christ’s origins and what they might mean for us, because most of our Sunday Gospel readings through until next November will come from Matthew, including this morning’s Gospel.

The accounts of Jesus’ origins are very different between the four Gospels. Mark, the action gospel, doesn’t worry at all about Jesus’ origins – he starts by establishing John the Baptist as the messenger prophesied by Isaiah… and then simply gets on with the action, with the first scene being Jesus’ baptism at the start of his public ministry. John starts with the wonderful prose-poem proclaiming Jesus’ supernatural origins at the beginning of the universe, which we will hear as the Midnight Gospel next week, before also getting straight into the action of Jesus’ public ministry without worrying about his earthly origins. Luke is the source of most of the stories familiar from nativity plays – the shepherds, the angels, the manger, and all that. Its account of Jesus’ birth is also told from the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth, giving an unusual prominence to the voices of women for a work of ancient literature. Matthew give us the Wise Men and King Herod, and the terrible massacre of the babies of Bethlehem, all too believable as we look at the worst despots of our own world.

Yet especially in the light of Luke’s account, we can find today’s reading from Matthew about Jesus’ origins a little disappointing. The story of Mary’s pregnancy is told entirely from the perspective of Joseph. Given our own cultural context, we almost certainly find ourselves taking a sharp breath when we hear that Joseph “planned to dismiss her quietly”.

Also jarring is how obviously important it is to Matthew that Jesus is a descendant of King David, the greatest of Israel’s rulers. Both Jesus and Joseph had already been established as descendants of David in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel; in today’s reading, the angel who convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, addresses him as “son of David”. King David is a key element in the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel, yet we often neglect it in how we understand Jesus Christ today.

King David with his harp on the tower of Christ Church, Shaw. © Gerry Lynch, 24 June 2017

Partly, I think, that is because in our culture, most of us consider someone’s ancestry as being of little importance in telling us about the sort of person they are. Thank the Lord, this is now considered rather politically incorrect. But it also marks us out as being different from most cultures historically, and so we can miss why it was important to Matthew and his readers that Jesus was a descendant of David, and what they would have taken from that about His character and mission on Earth. I think it remains important for us too that Christ was descended from David, and given that David Evans’ Bible study group is looking at King David at the moment, it might be interesting for us to think about why.

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