iran

Grace and Revenge: Sermon Preached on 3rd May 2026 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Acts 7. 55-60; John 14. 1-14

“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” 

On a long flight this week, I watched an extraordinary film from Iran, called It Was Just an Accident. A veteran director named Jafar Panahi, who has been imprisoned for previous films, shot it on location in Iran without official permission. The story follows a former political prisoner working as a mechanic. One day, a customer brings in a car to be fixed, and the hero recognises him by his peg leg: it’s his old torturer.

A medieval fresco painted on a vaulted ceiling depicting the stoning of Saint Stephen. Four figures in colourful clothing — greens, yellows, ochres, and blues — are shown in dynamic, striding poses with arms raised, hurling stones. Clusters of rounded stones are scattered across the ground. At the bottom centre, a partially visible prostrate figure represents Stephen, shown in blue garments beneath his attackers. The painting style is characteristically medieval, with flat, linear forms and expressive gestural energy. Decorative red scrollwork and foliate motifs fill the upper background. The plasterwork shows extensive craquelure, indicating great age. A section of a whitewashed pillar or arch is visible at the lower right. The overall palette is warm and earthy, with pigments that retain considerable vibrancy despite evident wear.
Early 16th Century depiction of the stoning of Stephen, St Lawrence’s Church, Lohja, Finland. © Gerry Lynch, 23 July 2017.

He tracks the secret policeman down, kidnaps him, and takes him out into the desert ready to kill him, but can’t bring himself to do so because he isn’t entirely sure of his identity. Then follows a bizarre drive around Tehran, where the hero collects other former political prisoners to see if any can be entirely sure that the man who is now drugged in the back of his van was indeed their torturer. A very black comedy, the film succeeds partly because it refuses either to sanitise or to dehumanise the villain, who is a ruthless killer but also a loving husband and tender father. The heroes, in turn, must battle to preserve their humanity in the way their torturer has failed to guard his, as they face a choice between grace and revenge.

St Stephen faced a choice between grace and revenge. Just before today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, he had been dragged up before a religious court on trumped-up charges and defended himself in a sweeping speech which concluded by warning his hearers that they are the latest in a long line of Jerusalem Jews to resist the Holy Spirit, persecute God’s prophets, and fail to keep the Law they claim to revere.

This sends the crowd into a violent rage against Stephen, but as they are about to mob him, he sees a vision of Heaven opened, and “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”. Now, Christ is usually depicted as being seated at the right hand of the Father, so this is normally interpreted as standing as an advocate for Stephen, and maybe also standing to receive him.

Perhaps it was this vision of Christ’s presence with him that allowed Stephen to do what he did next: taken out and brutally lynched, his last words are, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” This is the standard of forgiveness by which we are called to live as Christians.It isn’t easy.I certainly don’t manage to live up to it all the time. But it is how God teaches us to act. Such forgiveness is what God is like.

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Modern Medes and Parthians (Pentecost, 8 June 2025)

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

Readings – Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17

“how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…”

A fresco painting featuring a religious scene with a group of figures seated around a table, each with a halo, suggesting they are saints or holy figures. Above them is an ornate architectural structure with arches and a blue sky background, adorned with a dove encircled by a halo, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The painting includes intricate decorative borders and shows some signs of wear and fading.
Giotto, Pentecost (1290-9). In the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi, Italy.

Hearing today’s reading about the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites reminded me of a Pentecost a few years ago in a Church in Belfast. I heard this passage read with a strong and distinctive accent—not mine, but an accent that as distinctive in Belfast as it would be in Wiltshire. It turned out this accent came from the land of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites—some of whom heard the apostles preach in their own languages at the first Pentecost. The lands that were once Parthia, Media, and Elam have been part of Iran for over a millennium, and the lesson was read by a member of what is by now a large Iranian community in Belfast, many of them converts to Christianity.

When the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, there were only around 170,000 Christians in the country, mostly from the ancient Assyrian and Armenian communities. While they were given a protected minority status by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government – as long as they kept their heads down – severe repression was unleashed against the small number of converts from Muslim backgrounds and the churches they belonged to. The Anglican priest in the city of Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was murdered at his desk within eight days of the Revolution. The repression has come in waves since. Right now, a mother of two young children and convert to Christianity named Aida Najaflou has been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for four months facing trumped-up charges of “acting against national security”.

We would expect a Church facing such persecution to be in terminal decline. Yet, while tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iran into exile, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.

If you told the average person in the UK that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran had converted from Islam to Christianity, they’d probably refuse to believe you. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.

Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for religious freedom for people of all faiths, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying just over a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.

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The Impossible Becomes Real: Sermon Preached on 30th July 2023 (8th Sunday After Trinity)

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The national flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Preached at St Matthew’s, Rowde (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – 1 Kings 6. 1–11, 23–38; Acts 12. 1–17      

“[Rhoda] ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, ‘Thou art mad.’”

Our New Testament reading this evening is one of the most familiar stories from the earliest years of the Church. Peter has been imprisoned during a bout of persecution in Jerusalem, and faces being executed just as like James, the brother of John, had been shortly before. In the dead of night, he finds his chains suddenly falling off and an angel leading him into freedom. At first, Peter doesn’t believe the incident himself. He assumes it must be a dream.

Next to a sleeping guard in plate mail, St Peter, wearing a blue top and looking surprised, looks up at a glowing angel flying above him in a glow of clouds. This is the painting The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, by Baltasar Beschey, painted in 1769. It now hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.
Baltasar Beschey. The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, (1769). Hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.

Peter’s fellow Christians in Jerusalem, who have been fervently praying for him, also refuse to believe this miracle at first. They told Rhoda, the domestic servant who came to the gate when Peter first knocked, that she must be mad. Interestingly, as with the Resurrection, the first witness of this emergence into new life is a woman of low social status. God continually upends our expectations—not only of who is important and trustworthy, but of what is possible at all.

This miraculous experience does not make the persecution of the Jerusalem Church vanish. Indeed, persecution remained a dominant them of the Church’s life in its first centuries.

It is all a long way from the scene at Solomon’s Temple in our Old Testament reading. Sometimes the Church has been able to follow in the footsteps of Solomon, building great places of worship to the glory of God; at other times, it has had to meet in secret and in hiding. Both extremes can be found in the world today.

Leading up to the year 2000, the Vatican established a commission to examine those who had died for their faith in recent generations; it concluded that there had been twice as many Christian martyrs in the 20th Century as in the previous nineteen combined. Our own Westminster Abbey had ten statues of martyrs carved above its west door in the 1990s, representing Christians of every continent and many denominations who died for their faith in the 20th Century, from Martin Luther King to Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia.

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