holy spirit Archives - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

Dream the Impossible – Sermon Preached on 24th May 2026 (Pentecost)

11 August 202624 May 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Acts 2.1-21; John 20.19-23

“…your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…”

An old friend of mine back in Belfast, who died some years ago, had a girlfriend in the 1950s, when he was young. She was his first serious love, until she dumped him – for an Englishman! – a schoolmaster, who taught overseas in schools for British expatriates. She soon married the schoolmaster and accompanied him to his next job, in Lisbon.

Despite being jilted, my friend remained good platonic friends with his ex, and they corresponded for some years. To keep her in touch with her home town, my pal sent her copies of the Belfast Telegraph. Portugal had by then been under the grip of an authoritarian dictatorship for a quarter of a century, the Estado Novo of António Salazar. While it avoided the worst aspects of fascism and certainly couldn’t be compared with Nazism, it was hostile to free expression, and its secret police, experts in the use of psychological torture, suppressed anything and anyone that smacked of liberalism, socialism, or secularism.

Now, the 1950s Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the Ulster Unionist establishment, wasn’t exactly a well of liberalism, socialism, secularism, or any other form of racy radicalism. Still, my friend’s ex-girlfriend would receive her copies of the Belfast Telegraph with many holes cut in them, stories Salazar’s secret police would rather the Portuguese didn’t know about.

By the 1970s, Portugal was caught up in a quartet of bloody end-of-empire wars in Africa and its main export was its people, yet the Estado Novo continued, seemingly secure, just like Franco in next-door Spain. Then one April night in 1974, a group of army officers, fed up with sending young men die in unwinnable and cruel wars, launched a coup. The radio told people to stay at home, but instead they came out onto the streets to celebrate with the soldiers, pushing carnations into the barrels of their guns. The Estado Novo fell without a shot. Portugal then had a bumpy spell of brawls and even riots between socialists and conservatives, but eventually left-leaning and right-leaning parties found enough common ground to manage a transition to a free democracy, and eventually to prosperity. And nobody saw it coming – not the experts and not anyone else.

We never really know what is around the corner. I could have told a similar story about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Less positively, we could all share recollections of the way that coronavirus crept into our news bulletins and then crashed into our lives in the first months of 2020. But there are always plenty of people telling us to worry about the ways our lives and the state of the world might change for the worse. We sometimes forget that things do often get better, in dramatic ways that nobody predicted, often when things seem to be at their darkest.

Pentecost is the feast of things getting better in dramatic and unforeseen ways. Pentecost is a story about two things – about the Church, and about God.

Love, Truth and Fire: Sermon Preached on 19th May 2024 (Pentecost)

19 May 2024 by Gerry Lynch

An architect's design for the side interior wall of a church, containing many apses, statues, and a gallery.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

Pentecost is the Feast of the Holy Spirit. So, let me talk a little this morning about the nature of the Holy Spirit, because it is one of the truly distinctive things about Christianity. We share our faith in a loving, fatherly creator with Muslims and Jews, and indeed many traditional religions around the world. This seems to be something that human beings grasp quite instinctively.

Greek icon style painting of six saints, five of them with beards, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. — Descent of the Holy Spirit (fragment) by Duccio, 1308-11.

The idea of the Son, Jesus Christ, God made human, has some very profound and perhaps intellectually difficult implications, but is something human and therefore not beyond us.

In contrast, there is something fundamentally otherworldly and inhuman about the Holy Spirit. Because there is no obvious human comparator for what the Holy Spirit is, we must attempt to shed some light on its nature by analogy. Here’s the odd thing—we need to remember that this very otherworldly, very inhuman, being is God, and as we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the Holy Spirit in all its strangeness and unbiddability is also something that we are made in the image and likeness of. Deep within us, often beyond the horizon of our senses, is part of our nature that is as uncontrollable and difficult to comprehend as the Holy Spirit.

So with all that in mind, let’s explore some of the things we do know about the Holy Spirit.

Firstly, the Holy Spirit is love, and therefore God is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows mutually between the Father and the Son, Love as a person in its own right. Love, therefore has a character, and a will, all of its own.

Of Vines and Eunuchs: Sermon Preached on 28st April 2024 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

28 April 2024 by Gerry Lynch

A cross section of an icon of Christ the True Vine, surrounded by the apostles as branches, by 16th Century Cretan artist Angelos Akotantos

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 8: 28-40; John 15: 1-11

“I am the vine – you are the branches.”

Just as it is today, the Holy Land of Biblical times was great winegrowing country. The terminology of winegrowing is a frequent part of Jesus’ parables and teaching, and indeed large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the grapevine was often a metaphor for the Jewish people.

The eunuch, very African in appearance, dressed in opulent appearance, and accompanied by a dog, bends down to be blessed by St Philip. Five retainers, one holding the Scriptures watch from the eunuch's horse and carriage. — The Baptism Of The Eunuch (1626), by Rembrandt. Hangs in the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.

The language of the vine and the branches in the Gospel reading is so rich, that it is easy to ignore our reading from Acts this morning – and nobody wants to preach about eunuchs in case children in the congregation ask awkward questions. But Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch is tremendously important to the revolution in thought that clearly affected the apostles in the years after the Resurrection. This shift in mindset is all about who could be considered one of God’s chosen people. Acts records it as being clearly directed by the Holy Spirit.

The “Ethiopian” is, of course, a foreigner from a long way away; in fact, he’s described as a court official of the Candace, who was the ruler of the great city of Meroë, located in the present day Sudan. He was probably much darker-skinned than the people in the Holy Land, but that will have mattered much less in the Ancient world, which was much less race-obsessed than we are.

Although we often hear that to be a Jew, you have to be born a Jew, this isn’t actually the case. People from Gentile backgrounds can and did convert to Judaism in Biblical times, and they do so today. As this Ethiopian “had come to Jerusalem to worship”, he was clearly interested in the God of the Jews. The thing that ensured that he could never convert to Judaism wasn’t that he was a foreigner, but that he was a eunuch. That prohibition dated back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Ethiopian was reading from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah when Philip approached him, and shortly after the section quoted here, it contained a brief reference to a future time when God would give eunuchs something “better than sons and daughters… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”. (The reference to things being cut off is, almost certainly in this context, meant to be funny.) Yet writings from contemporary Jewish writers made it clear that prejudice against eunuchs was still very much alive in Judaism at the time of the apostles and that Isaiah’s prophecy was yet to be fulfilled.

So something revolutionary happens when the Ethiopian says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me being baptised.” The apostles by this stage have no sense of themselves as being anything other than Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. When Philip baptises the Ethiopian, it is a powerful sign that the followers of Jesus Christwill come not just from the Jewish people but from a myriad of ethnicities and nationalities, and will come even from people who had been forbidden from becoming Jews because of their state in life. This isn’t, for the apostles, a rejection of Judaism, but a clear fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.

Jubilee and the Holy Spirit: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th June 2022 (Pentecost)

11 September 20224 June 2022 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Acts 2: 1–21; Romans 8: 14–17; John 14: 8–17, 25–27.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”.

Seventy years and a few months ago, a young woman was on an exotic holiday with her husband in Kenya. She was staying in the Treetops Hotel, which was literally a very fancy and well-serviced treehouse, watching the big game animals play on the savannah below, when she heard the news that, half a world away, her father had died.

The death of a parent, as many of us know, is a wrenching moment in life, when one’s own personal world is knocked off its axis. What was different for this young woman was that she not only had to grieve as any child does a parent, but she also had instantly to become a Head of State, for this was the moment when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI.

Among the many tremendous changes that have taken place over the seven decades since, perhaps the most profound has been that in the status of women. The world of 1952 was still a man’s world. Women in positions of power were rare: Elizabeth’s first cabinet had not a single female minister. It was essentially unheard of for a young woman – and Elizabeth was only twenty-five – to be in any position of authority in society except with respect to children.

It took remarkable strength of character to thrive in that context – and she did thrive, through staggering changes. Her reign began as head of an Empire that stretched from Malaya to Jamaica, and continues into the age of Brexit. China was an impoverished global backwater seventy years ago, while the now-disappeared Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers. The Queen has seen two female Prime Ministers come and go, something unimaginable when she took office. Her reign began when homosexuality was against the law yet eventually saw marriage opened to couples of the same sex. In 1952, the Pill had not been developed, Elvis Presley and John Lennon had not been heard of, human beings had yet to set foot in Space, and the world’s few computers occupied vast sheds of tape reels and valves.