grace

Of Dandelions and Oaks – Sermon Preached on 12th July 2026 (Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Romans 8.1–11; Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23

“Listen! A sower went out to sow…”

I thought I’d start today with a bit of science. Why does a mouse have dozens of babies, and an elephant just one? Some species, whether animals or plants, have a low number of offspring and put a lot of effort into raising them – we are one of these, so are elephants and gorillas, big animals like us, but so are parrots. Some species have lots of offspring, so cannot, of course, put the same amount of effort into raising any single one of them – rats famously breed like… well, rabbits.

A thickly painted oil landscape. A large yellow sun sits low on the horizon at the centre, its rays radiating outward across a yellow-green sky in short, dashed brushstrokes. Below the sun, a band of pale gold stubble or standing corn runs the width of the picture; a small blue farm building with a red roof stands at the far left, and dark trees mark the horizon at the right. The foreground is a broad ploughed field rendered in dense, choppy strokes of blue, violet, white, and orange, with a pale furrow curving through it. A peasant in a straw hat, olive jacket, and blue trousers strides across the field from the right, seed sack cradled against his body, his right arm swinging out as he casts. Three dark birds are scattered across the soil.
Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

A similar spectrum is seen in the world of plants – blow on a dandelion clock and many dozens of seeds will float on the breeze; oaks are very different, sometimes waiting for years to produce acorns, with each acorn loaded with enough reserves to survive decades of burial, drought, and being nibbled by squirrels – after all, the forest floor will still be there in fifty years’ time.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” writes St Paul to the Christians in Rome. There are many implications of the phrase “in Christ Jesus”. But one comes from remembering that Jesus is God, and God is Love – the Bible says so in those same three words. To be in Jesus Christ is to live in love. The Holy Spirit is love too – the love that flows between Father and Son, and a person in its own right, who ripples out from them through the whole universe, a universe whose beauty at every scale shows that it is loved.

We human beings are made in the image and likeness of our creator God; we reflect that image most clearly when we love. We are called both to receive God’s love as seed sown in us, and to sow seeds of that love in others.

God is constantly sowing seeds in our lives out of His love for us, usually without us really noticing. Some fall on the path, in the rocky ground, or amid the thorns. Sometimes our hearts are too hard for the seed to flourish; sometimes we’re too distracted by material things to respond; sometimes to respond to God’s love would mean doing unpopular or costly things, so we back off. We fear the condemnation of those around us, but the only condemnation we should truly fear is that of God, and when we respond to God’s love by sharing that love with others, then we are truly in Christ, and we need not, as St Paul reminds us, fear God’s condemnation. If you fear your harvest is thin, trust that the same God who sows in love also forgives and restores.

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Give Up Illusions… And Sweeties: Sermon Preached on 18th February 2026 (Ash Wednesday)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)

2 Peter 1.16–21 ; John 8. 1-11

A close-up of a person's forehead marked with a dark ash cross, a traditional symbol applied during Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar. The cross is clearly defined against the person's pale skin, with brown hair visible at the top and edges of the frame.

I don’t know about you, but I have a pile of books that I still haven’t read sitting on the little table next to my armchair in the living room. And I also, on the little table on the other side of the armchair, have another pile of books that I still haven’t read.

I suspect I’m not the only person here like that.

Still and all, when I was doing my weekly radio review column for the Church Times on Monday, I heard a doctor in Scotland being interviewed about his new book, which is about the mental health crisis, and how the way we categorise poor mental health might lead us to underestimate the resilience of the mind. It came out literally just last week and I wanted to be one of the first people to own a copy, so off I popped to Mr Amazon.

Will I have time to read it? Of course not! I just wanted it!

When do you know you have enough? Much of our lives are built on an unspoken illusion: that if we just had a little more, we would finally feel secure. No matter how much we have, most people always just seem to want just a little bit more. And the little bit more is always justifiable in its own terms: just a little bit more financial security for my retirement, just a slightly bigger car so I can help ferry the grandkids around, and that long haul flight would be so much easier in Premium Economy. One of my parishioners told me yesterday that I wasn’t well paid. When I think back to my memories of my maternal grandmother, who died when I was seven—I’m rich beyond her wildest dreams.

We’re all fantastically rich compared to most people who have ever lived. Even kings and emperors for most of human existence lived with a burden of disease and early death of loved ones that is hard to imagine from our standpoint.

That’s why I think it does us so much good to give a few things up for Lent. When I think back to the Ash Wednesdays of my primary school days, Lent was all about what you gave up. I don’t think any of my childhood attempts to give up sweets and crisps lasted more than about 48 hours. Yet although even these little child’s gestures were beyond my capacity, they started being considered as insufficiently sophisticated as we got older.

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Popes, Kings, and Tax Collectors: Sermon Preached on 26th October 2025 (Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.

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

2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18. 9–14

“The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people…’”

Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.
King Charles and Pope Leo in the Sistine Chapel, 23 October 2025 © Vatican Media

The Pope and the Queen played an outsized role in the graffiti I saw as a boy. Their titles usually appeared in a three-letter acronym only differentiated by its last letter. The first letter was ‘F’, and did indeed stand for the F-word you’re wondering if the Rector is actually going to use in the pulpit. The second letter was ‘T’, simply for “the”. And the last letter was either ‘P’ or ‘Q’. It was, in a strange way, quite useful to have ‘FTP’ or ‘FTQ’ written on a wall, as if you were somewhere unfamiliar, it gave you an instant visual clue as to what sort of place you were in, and therefore whether you could tell the truth about who you were and where you came from, or whether you had to tell a few little white lies.

The Pope of Rome and the King or Queen of England were our respective bogeymen. You might not have had anything much against them personally, you may even have sort of liked what you saw of them on the TV, but you knew if you were rude about them, you were taking a pop at a sacred symbol of the other side, and you were also warning anybody on your own side who might go soft what was expected of them.

Of course, it’s easy from the security of rural England to roll your eyes at all that and say, ‘Well what do you expect from Northern Ireland?’ But for four hundred years, this division wasn’t just in Northern Ireland, but across Europe and later across the world. One side said there was no salvation outside their Church, while the other loved phrases like: “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities”.

One of the mainstays of British national identity was, into the early 20th Century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Almost forgotten now, it was full of grizzly stories of godly Protestants being burned at the sake and disembowelled, usually accompanied by lurid ink drawings that, in the days before horror movies, were probably part of its appeal. The Catholic minority in England had their equivalent stories of saints being crushed to death, or quartered while alive, and Irish Catholics not only had similar stories but outright dispossession in their own country to draw on.

The saddest part is, all the stories were true, in all their cruelty. Tyburn really happened, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre really happened. But people tended to remember the stories of when they were victims, and often chose not remember the stories where they were making the victims. Christians proclaim that Christ, who rejected violence and revenge and conquest and power, is the victim sacrificed for the sins of the world—and then, too often, go out and make more victims in His name. When do that, we nail Christ to the Cross all over again.

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Be Like This Dirty Foreigner: Sermon Preached on 12th October 2025 (Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity)

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A painting featuring a group of figures dressed in elaborate, tattered white robes with raised hands, holding staffs adorned with bells and vines. They appear to be in motion, reaching out toward a single figure on the right, also in white robes, standing with arms outstretched against a grayish background. The scene has a mystical and dynamic feel.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

2 Timothy 2. 8-15; Luke 17. 11-19

“He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.”

Whom do you hate?

A painting depicting a group of people in colorful, tattered clothing kneeling and reaching out with raised hands on a grassy hill. In the background, a figure in a white robe stands alone, with a soft, glowing sky above. A few shadowy figures are visible further back on the hill. The scene conveys a sense of reverence and awe.
Gebhard Fugel, Ten Lepers Call Out to Jesus (1920), hangs in the Diocesan Museum of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, in Freising.

Do you hate Muslims?

Do you hate… Tories?

Do you hate Black people? Do you hate posh people? Do you hate Nigel Farage? Do you, well, want to make clear you’re not anti-Semitic, of course, but actually you hate the Israelis? Or do you hate sanctimonious lefty-liberals who have self-righteousness like other people have bad breath?

We all have a little bit of hatred for somebody or other tucked away in us somewhere. None of us is all-kind and all-loving all the time. We all form in-groups and out-groups—that’s just part of human nature. We can’t possibly know everything we need to know to make a judgement as to whether to trust somebody we’ve just met, so we all look for shortcuts to help us form a view of them. Although our higher aspirations rightly make us try to suppress these instincts, it’s not always easy to navigate the world without them, and they aren’t easy to control.

For the Jews of Jesus’ time and place, the people they hated were the Samaritans. Their religion was very similar to that of the Jews, but that just made the ways in which it was slightly different even more upsetting. Unlike the Jews, the Samaritans hadn’t been sent into exile by the Babylonians, but had always lived in the Holy Land— so as far as the Samaritans were concerned, they were the true descendants of Moses and David, while the Jews were the people whose religion had been corrupted by funny foreign ideas.

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Can We Really Do Likewise?: Sermon Preached on 13th July 2025 (Fourth Sunday After Trinity)

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A vibrant painting depicting a figure with a beard, dressed in a green robe with diamond-patterned shoulders, holding a sleeping or resting man with dark hair. The figure's large, white, wing-like arms or cloak envelop the woman, set against a background of earthy greens and browns, suggesting a protective or comforting scene.

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

Colossians 1. 1-14; Luke 10. 25-37

“Go and do likewise.”

A vibrant painting featuring two figures riding a horse along a path. One figure, dressed in a yellow robe and blue pants, carries another figure on their back, who wears a red headscarf. The background includes swirling, textured landscapes with trees, a river, and a figure standing near a wooden cart, rendered in the distinctive brushstroke style of Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, near Arnhem.

Does the name Olive Cooke mean anything to you? Ten years ago, Olive, who was ninety-two years old, was found dead in the Avon Gorge in Bristol. This generous lady, still tireless in charity work into her nineties, had given so much money to charity that she was constantly plagued by begging letters, receiving up to 3,000 a year. Some of the charities she gave money to passed her details on to other charities, and she eventually became so distressed by the tragic stories they sent her, and her inability to do more to help than the huge amount she was already doing, that she took her own life.

The Good Samaritan is one of the most famous of Jesus’ parables and it still resonates with people even in our post-Christian culture. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, it allows us to thumb our nose at hypocrites. We all hate hypocrites. In particular, it allows non-religious people to thumb their nose at Christians for being hypocrites, with Jesus’ approval (or so it seems). That allows them to keep doing what they want to do, which is to ignore what Jesus actually taught. But the second reason this parable resonates is because, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold, we all know that we do pass by on the other side, far too often. It’s true that we all hate hypocrites; but we also all are hypocrites, at least in some situations.

But hold on, we don’t want to end up like Olive Cooke, driven to despair by our inability to fix everybody’s problems. So let’s ask ourselves if Jesus was doing something more with this story than just telling people off for not always practising what they preach.

For there are different ways of exploring this parable, all of them tell us something interesting. One is to note is that the Samaritans were the traditional enemy of the Jews in Palestine. The Samaritans agree with the Jews about many religious matters, but also disagree with them about some very important things[1]—so they’re the classic example of the enemy similar and familiar enough to be truly hated. Therefore, I’ve often heard sermons on the Good Samaritan that read it as a warning against prejudice generally and religious bigotry in particular. That isn’t wrong. It’s an important part of the message of the parable, but I want us to explore it from a different angle today.

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Lizards for Lunch! (Fifth Sunday of Easter: 18th May 2025)

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A large iguana with a speckled grey and green body and prominent dorsal spines rests on a rock in a natural setting. The background features green foliage, a cactus with spines, and a blurred blue sky, suggesting a tropical or desert environment.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Acts 11. 1-18; John 13. 31-35

“But I said, ‘Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.’”

Do you like eating lizards? Will you go home from church and enjoy tucking into an iguana steak for your Sunday lunch? Or will you perhaps, to accompany a salad in this warm weather, rustle up a quick chameleon quiche?

A small lizard with a brown and green body, featuring an orange throat patch, is perched on a white stone surface in sunlight. The lizard casts a shadow, and the background is blurred, showing earthy tones of soil or rocks.
Your Lunch? © Gerry Lynch, 30 November 2006, Curaçao.

I’m guessing that most of you aren’t actually that into lizard meat. Therefore if I told you that not eating lizards was an essential criterion of getting into heaven, you wouldn’t exactly lose sleep about it.

That’s one of the problems with rules. It’s easy to keep rules that we would never in any circumstances want to break. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about rules we have no intentions of breaking being enforced on others, especially people we don’t like—even as we try to wriggle out of the rules we don’t enjoy following ourselves.

Of course we need rules. How many of us, if we’re being honest, would pay our taxes on full and on time every year if we didn’t know that HMRC would fine us otherwise? How many more deaths were there on the road when drink driving laws were laxer and less rigidly enforced?

But no set of rules can match the complexity of real life. After every major sporting event, we see fans of one team complaining about bad refereeing decisions that everyone else thinks were fair. I believe Man City fans were upset at the referee after they lost the FA Cup Final yesterday. A football match is a lot simpler than life. Every set of rules can be interpreted in different ways. They all also contain plenty of loopholes. We are all inclined to interpret the rules to suit ourselves, and see what we want to see. In that light, it should be no surprise that we all know people who are very firm about sticking to the rules and making sure other people do too, but are also unkind and selfish, perhaps even cruel.

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The Times Are Changing: Sermon Preached on 9th February 2025 (Fourth Sunday before Lent)

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A vast desert landscape at sunset with a range of rugged, layered mesas and buttes casting long shadows. The sky is a gradient of blue to orange, with scattered clouds illuminated by the setting sun. Sparse vegetation and a few leafless trees are visible in the foreground, highlighting the arid environment.

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

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 1-11; Luke 5. 1-11

“I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”

When I was young, I was far more self-conscious and afraid than I ever let on. Whenever I walked into a room, I assumed that everyone else there was competent and confident—and that I was a bluffer. I projected overconfidence to try to hide the fears that wracked me, fears I assumed nobody felt but me. A major life moment was when I realised nearly everyone has these fears, and that many people who are very confident on the surface are battling doubt underneath. Losing our illusions can be a very healthy thing.

We all say that nobody’s perfect. But we often assume that some other people are close to perfection, and because we know we aren’t, we can assume that we are terribly deficient. With age should come a certain wisdom that the things that we struggle with are usually just the same things that everybody else struggles with.

A painting of a bearded man dressed in traditional robes. He is wearing a blue tunic with a brown cloak over it. In his left hand, he holds a rectangular object with some red and white markings on it. The background is a textured, aged gold, giving the image an antique appearance. Some areas of the painting show signs of wear and damage, particularly on the left side where the paint has flaked off.
Andrei Rublev’s icon of St Paul dating to ca. 1410. Now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

When I was younger I also hated St Paul—or I thought I did. The truth is I didn’t really know him or his writings. Despite my best efforts to pay attention, I would find myself drifting off at church when the New Testament reading came from Paul. All those long sentences with too many clauses and too few full stops. The same would happen when I tried to read Paul at home. What I hated about Paul was that he was full of misogyny and homophobia, or so I was told by both the people who thought that was a good thing, and those who thought he was a bigot.

Another thing that happened as I got older was that I started to get were Paul was coming from. Perhaps not the most stylish writer, but so brilliant at reducing Christianity to its essence. One of his great gifts is to make no bones that he is far from perfect; that any favour God had for him was entirely undeserved. Sometimes, like in this morning’s Epistle, Paul makes too much of what a horrible rotter he had been when he persecuted the Church. After his conversion, even his best friends still found him to be a very difficult man. As a young man he was exactly the sort of person who projected too much overconfident certainty in his faith precisely to cover the fears that lay underneath, and in the process he became a bit of a horror, a violent religious fanatic seemingly devoid of conscience. Yet hidden from view, Paul’s conscience was clearly deeply troubled by his actions, and then God in all His Grace brought Paul out of the darkness of his overcertainty into the light of trusting in Christ alone rather than himself. Grace is a much used but little explained concept, but theologically it means the favour God has for us which we have done nothing to deserve.

In this morning’s epistle, Paul produces one of his great lines, “by the grace of God, I am what I am”. And so am I. And so are you.

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You Brood of Vipers!: Sermon Preached on 15th December 2024 (Third Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 4. 4-7; Luke 3. 7-18

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

A scantily dressed man with a translucent shine around his head raises his right hand in the air as a group of women, men, and children gather round him with grim, sometimes excited, expressions of their faces.
Saint John the Baptist Preaching by Luca Giordano (1695). Hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Are you a viper? Have you, in the course of this year, exhibited any snake-like characteristics? You don’t have to answer that question out loud. But if the answer is yes, then you’re in the right place: because you need to repent, and church should be a place of repentance.

There is some contrast, isn’t there, between our two readings this morning. The crowds flock out through the Jerusalem Desert to be baptised by St John the Baptist, and he does the exact opposite of what a good PR man would tell someone to do today if they found themselves an accidental celebrity. The smart thing to do if you want to maximise your return on your fifteen minutes of fame is to make your biggest fans feel valued and loved in return for their loyalty—not to call them a den of snakes, and warn them that, “Even now, the axe is lying at the root of the trees”.

St Paul, in contrast, tells those reading his letter in the far off city of Philippi, “Do not worry about anything” for, “The Lord is near.” Rejoice therefore, he tells them, be full of peace and open gentleness.

Let me tease out this contrast between our two letters by repeating the question I started with: are you a viper?

If so, it’s time to repent.

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Sin and Grace: Sermon Preached on 17th March 2024 (Passion Sunday)

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Preached at St Michael and All Angels’, Urchfont (at the Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Exodus 7. 8-24; Romans 5. 12-21

“…where sin abounded, grace did much more abound…”

When we hear the strange story of Moses and Aaron confronting the Pharaoh, with sticks that turn into snakes and rivers turning into blood, its remoteness to our own world can make us dismiss its enduring relevance and power. For not only is the story set more than three thousand years ago, but it is told with a powerful dose of magical realism.

A lithograph in Marc Chagall's classic brightly coloured, abstract, modernist style of Moses and Aaron appearing before Pharaoh on his throne surrounded by courtiers.
Marc Chagall’s Moses and Aaron with Pharaoh, from his 1966 portfolio “The Story of Exodus”—a time when this story resonated powerfully with the secular public, especially thanks to the African-American civil rights movement.

Look beyond the unfamiliar setting, however, and it could be a story from 2024. A persecuted minority protests to the authorities, and when that fails, they turn first to a demonstration of people power, and then an escalating campaign of civil disobedience, leading to non-violent direct action and then intentional property damage.

Pharaoh is also like many a hard-hearted ruler in today’s world, unable to read the signs of the times and all too quick to renege on promises of reform. He overestimates his own strength and underestimates the damage his opponents can cause him. In tonight’s reading, the campaign of the Hebrew people against Pharaoh’s persecution is still in its earliest phases. Everything will get much worse—but it will end in liberation for the good guys.

It would be nice if we could say that they all lived happily ever after. But the problem with stories like this is that yesterday’s freedom fighters almost inevitably turn into tomorrow’s oppressors. When they arrived in the Promised Land, the descendants of Moses and Aaron weren’t too worried about the rights and freedoms of the people already there.

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Fear the Devil: Sermon Preached on 25th June 2023 (3rd Sunday After Trinity)

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Al Pacino playing the Devil in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate. He is smiling towards the camera, Keanu Reeves, his "son" is standing with his back to the camera. They are in a New York subway car.

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 6.1b-11; Matthew 10.24-39

“fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Do you think about hell and the Devil much?

Al Pacino playing the Devil in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate. He is smiling towards the camera, Keanu Reeves, his "son" is standing with his back to the camera. They are in a New York subway car.
The Devil as the coolest dude in town… Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997).

I thought that would be a good way to start a sermon on a glorious summer evening in an adorable little village like Bulkington!

We can scoff at talk of the Devil as ridiculous and primitive nonsense, and I have no doubt that some of you here tonight do. I did for a long time. We can even find ourselves glamorising the Devil – you know, the cool bloke who lets you drink and tells you dirty jokes, instead of making you sit on a cloud playing a harp forever like God (that boring old fart!) Yet whatever we think about an actual personification of evil in the form of the Devil, none of us can escape the reality of evil, obvious every time we hear a news bulletin.

If we believe that we have a soul, then we also need to consider seriously the possibility that it might be damaged or corrupted by evil. More than this, if we take the Gospels seriously as a record of what Jesus taught, then we need to embrace the reality that Jesus taught his followers about the Devil: among other places, in this evening’s Gospel reading. Satan is a recurring theme throughout the New Testament, where we are presented with a picture of Christians in a running battle with forces of evil that, without the grace of God, would be beyond our powers to resist or break.

The Devil is real, taunting us over the battlefields of Ukraine and our indifference to hungry children in a world of plenty. The Devil taunts us over every Saturday night stabbing, over every carefully nursed family feud, and every intentionally bitter dispute over the custody of the children. The Devil taunts us when we scream at the TV that we wish someone would shoot one of our least favourite politicians and when we lash out at the people who love us most because they’re the people we know we can hurt without fearing retaliation.

Most people in this country, unlike Jesus Christ, think the Devil is a silly fictional character that, at best, distracts us from dealing with the world’s real problems. That suits Satan fine; if we think he doesn’t exist it makes it so much easier to worm his way into people’s souls.

A cheerful picture, eh?                                     

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