judgement

No Judgement, No Justice – Sermon Preached on 11th October 2026 (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Readings: Philippians 4.1–9; Matthew 22.1–14

“The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”

Today’s Gospel reading is all about judgement – severe judgement at the hands of a powerful king who is clearly meant to represent God the Father – and we don’t like it. We want Jesus to be the meek and mild gentle Jesus who cuddles lambs. Talk of divine judgement scares us. Probably we should indeed have a healthy respect for it, although if any of us is genuinely consumed by fear of it, we’ve either misunderstood Jesus Christ or perhaps misunderstood ourselves.

Close-up, shallow focus, of the lower sleeve of a white clerical alb. A gold-and-cream embroidered band in an interlaced Celtic-style knot pattern runs round the cuff. Below it, a dark navy shirt cuff and a relaxed, slightly curled hand are softly out of focus. The background is a warm, blurred amber.
Image by Alena Darmel on Pexels. Public domain.

We may not like to contemplate judgement, but without it there is no justice. A Christianity without judgement is one where Jimmy Savile and Joseph Stalin get away with it, perhaps after God tells them how very naughty they’ve been. That may be the action of a God who is good, but certainly not a God who is just.

So unwelcome is the idea of divine judgement – especially from this unbending and angry king – that the Internet is full of sermons on this Gospel reading ducking it entirely, saying things like the king isn’t really meant to be God, and Jesus is identifying Himself with the man without the wedding garment cast into the outer darkness. No way, José. That parable is about divine judgement. That should be obvious since Jesus is telling it to the chief priests and Pharisees, the top holy men of His world, in the Temple, which is their stronghold. It is just before the Passover festival in which they’ll plot and bribe one of Jesus’ closest friends to betray Him, and then they’ll have Him killed. They may not have worked out the details, but they know where they are heading. Here, He is warning these holy men that they are embarked on their own destruction, a terrible and violent destruction exacted by God but provoked by their own cruelty, arrogance, and stupidity. A few decades later, Jesus’ prophecy would be fulfilled when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

In fact, this is the third Sunday in a row to give us a parable Jesus told to the Jewish leadership in the Temple in Holy Week. Each warns of the loss of the kingdom, or of destruction..

So this isn’t about us, is it? We aren’t top holy men and we aren’t plotting to have Jesus killed. We’re just ordinary Christians, trying to follow Him faithfully even through our moments of stupidity and moral laziness and all the normal run of human failings. We aren’t perfect – but none of us is beating God’s servants or anything like that, or at least I hope we aren’t.

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Love Is Simple… And Hard  – Sermon Preached on 6 September 2026 (Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 13.8–14; Matthew 18.15–20

“if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Stanley Spencer, Separating Fighting Swans (ca. 1932-3)
Stanley Spencer, Separating Fighting Swans (ca. 1932-3) in the keeping of Leeds Museums and Galleries.

“…the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So writes St Paul in this morning’s epistle. Isn’t that lovely? Christianity is all about love and nothing more. I could stop preaching now, you could all go home deciding to be even more loving than you already are, because that’s what Christianity is about, and we could all live happily ever after.

But, wait, maybe it isn’t that simple. Jesus says, “if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Cut them off! Treat them like one of those thugs who abuse their position with the government to extort money from law-abiding people! That’s what Jesus says.

So, clearly, it isn’t just as simple as saying love one another and that’s it. How do we resolve St Paul’s commitment to love as the absolute standard of the law with Christ seeming to put hard limits on forgiveness when reasoned persuasion has failed?

One thing to bear in mind is that our Gospel reading is set towards the end of Jesus’ time of preaching and teaching in Galilee. He is about to make His final journey towards Jerusalem. He is starting to teach His followers things that will matter when He is no longer with them. Their lives have already been transformed by His work of preaching and healing, and they will later be transformed further by His Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

But they’re still people, with the normal run of human failings. People don’t always see eye to eye. They don’t always agree on what the most loving way to behave is. And then they all get tempted by greed, and laziness, and need for status, and taking others for granted; and they still have the frustrating moments of failing to live up to their principles that we’re all familiar with.

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The Pearl and the Furnace – Sermon Preached on 26th July 2026 (Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

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

Romans 8.26–39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.

“‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered ‘Yes.’

A woman stands bent over a large open trough or tub, her sleeves pushed back and her arms sunk into a mass of dough, working leaven through the meal. She wears long, plain robes gathered at the waist, her head covered, inclined toward her work. The setting is a spare domestic interior with a suggestion of a wall and floor behind her, and light falling from one side. The composition is close and shadowed, the figure filling most of the frame. Fine cross-hatching models the folds of cloth and the bulk of the dough.
Sir John Everett Millais, The Leaven (1864) in the Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, London.

Have you understood all this? The yeast and the flour and the treasure in the field, and the pearl of great price? And the good fish and the bad fish – and the furnace of fire?

The disciples confidently told Jesus that, yes, they had. But at this stage of Matthew’s Gospel, when He is still teaching and healing in Galilee, there is much they don’t understand about Jesus Himself. The disciples are far from working out that Jesus is the Messiah, further still from realising that Jesus is not here to bring them a lifetime of comfort and worldly success, but to die for the sake of their eternities. So perhaps one of the things that we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel is how much the disciples have yet to understand about Christ, how much work the yeast has yet to do, how far the mustard seed has yet to grow. As with them, so also with us – or at least let us hope that God still has much spiritual growth to raise in us.

One point of parables is that people can never understand them in their entirety – they land differently with each of us, and each of us will read them differently at different points of our lives. Like the kingdom of heaven itself, when we try to grasp the parables too tightly, to turn them into definitive statements of policy that we can use to make ourselves into insiders and others into outsiders, then they disappear into meaninglessness.

Yet there are insiders and outsiders, says Christ. Which is which is for Him to judge, not us, but there are good and bad fish – and the bad fish will be thrown into a furnace of fire. I always like to sidestep the implications the implications of the bits of the Bible where people get put in the fire by talking about the refiner’s fire, the furnace that turns a cheap alloy into gold or silver. But what is left when you throw an unhealthy fish into a furnace, but perhaps a few charred bones? This set of parables isn’t just hard to understand, it finishes on a hard and judging note.

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Living Amid the Weeds – Sermon Preached on 19th July 2026 (Seventh Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 8.12–25; Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43

“The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No…’”

What happens when the people we are supposed to look up to fail? What happens when the people we would like to see as examples and patterns for our own lives turn out to be no better than the rest of us – and often much worse?

Oil painting of a riverside landscape with windswept trees under a cloudy sky. In the centre, a bare-chested man scatters seed from a basket on his hip as he walks across a harvested field. On the left, two labourers lie slumped and asleep against a tree trunk; on the right, another man lies asleep on the ground, his head resting on his arm. A river with a small boat and distant hills is visible in the background.
Domenico Fetti, The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (1620-21). Hangs in the Courtauld Institute, London.

As a society, we’re speedrunning that experiment. Trust in democratic institutions is crumbling. Only one in eight of us now trusts governments to put nation before party all or most of the time. There is a growing political gap in how much people say they trust judges, scientists, teachers, professors, and civil servants – for a large minority of the population, they are the political priesthood of the other side.

As for other sources of authority, they too have seen their credibility dissolve. The Royal Family? Let’s not dwell too long on Prince Andrew. The world of celebrities? Rife with abuse.

The Church, and its priests and bishops – [fx: LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT] – well, they certainly have their share of wrongdoers, with regard to sex and money, of course, but also in handling safeguarding disclosures and episodes of bullying.

Most people aren’t interested in the Church – and if what we were selling was the idea that we’re in a position to stand in judgement over others, then they’d be right. The Church will not be the judge of the world, only the Saviour to whom it points the human race, Jesus Christ. Those who call themselves Christians will be under His judgement as much as anyone else. Now, if we truly seek to make Christ the guiding light of our lives, we can hope to live better lives than we would otherwise, but we certainly aren’t perfect.

In this life, God allows the good and the bad to grow together. Often, the wicked flourish. Now, I’m sure most of us have chapters in our lives that we’re not proud of, and most of us know how they tend to start. We do something small that we know isn’t quite right, and we get away with it, and it doesn’t cause us that much worry – after all, other people are getting away with the same sort of thing and mostly they seem to be perfectly nice people most of the time. Then our moral compass starts to go awry, small steps lead to larger steps, and we find ourselves deep amid the weeds, living in a way that would once have caused us shame.

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The Sword and the Sparrow – Sermon Preached on 21st June 2026 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 6.1b – 11; Matthew 10.24 – 39

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus, in white robes with arm outstretched, addresses a group of twelve men gathered on a rocky hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The apostles stand or crouch in clusters, some leaning on staffs, their expressions attentive and apprehensive. A smaller group of onlookers watches from the lower left. The landscape behind is arid and hilly, with pale water visible in the middle distance under an overcast sky.
James Tissot, Ordaining of the Twelve Apostles (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Musuem.

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t have many of those cuddly quotes you see on social media with AI-generated graphics attached to them. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, says Jesus, and to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven. Fear God, for He can destroy both your body and your soul in Hell. Not the sort of stuff you see on Instagram next to a photo of some pink roses.

This is hard stuff, about division and failure and judgement. It’s also about the sovereignty of God, His rule over the universe and His power to dispose of us as He sees fit; not only His power, but His right to do so. It is stuff that we often prefer not to think about. We want to stick with the idea that God is love and can forgive all, and there’s no need for anyone to suffer or struggle – in particular, we hope that there isn’t any need for me to suffer and struggle.

But we’ve had a week of headlines that ought to remind us that a world where there is no judgement is a world where there is no justice – from the monstrous abuse and murder of a baby by the people who adopted him, to warmongers perpetuating the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine at horrendous cost in human life. And if justice requires that God will judge the world, that means justice requires that God will judge each of us as individuals. So let’s turn back to the Gospel reading fully aware that we live in a world where all of us sometimes choose intentionally to do wrong things, and some people sometimes choose to do truly monstrous things.

Our Gospel reading is part of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve Apostles the first time He sent them out on their own to preach and heal in His name.

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Faith Can Be Hard Work: Sermon Preached on 10th May 2026 (Sixth Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 17.22–31, John 14.15–21

“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him…” 

A close-up photograph of an elderly woman wearing a white habit with blue stripes at the edges, and a small wooden cross on a cord around her neck. She has a deeply lined face and is smiling warmly at the camera. The background is dark, almost black.
Mother Teresa in Washington, 1995, © John Matthew Smith used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Mother Teresa was probably the world’s most famous Christian in the late 20th Century. The ‘Missionaries of Charity’ she founded sought to be an expression of God’s love for the whole human race, beginning by serving the sickest and poorest in the slums of Kolkata, a city where fewer than one in a hundred people are Christian. Initially she was little known outside India, but in 1969 the BBC sent Malcolm Muggeridge and a camera crew to make a documentary about her, and she became world famous. She attracted both admirers and detractors in abundance. Indeed, many people both admired her works and disagreed with some of her attitudes at the same time – I know that, because I was one of them. But there was no doubting her commitment to giving her life to serving people who many would prefer to ignore.

You might think that such works were inspired by an unshakable faith. So it might surprise you that Mother Teresa experienced a profound sense of God’s absence for half a century.

“Even deep down”, she wrote, “there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”

From 1948 until her death in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced this spiritual emptiness with only a five-week respite in 1958. Nonetheless, she pressed on with a life that could have been simpler and more comfortable, clinging to faith through habit and endurance even when her soul had run dry.

In our first reading today, St Paul tells his audience of clever intellectuals in Athens that God made us so we could seek Him, feeling our way towards finding Him; and even though we often experience ourselves as groping towards God like this, Paul says that he is never far from any of us.

There are times in my life when I feel far from God – but not many. Sometimes I’ve been angry with God and told Him so. There was a period when I asked Him to take my faith away from me because I was so disgusted with the Church. But rarely have I felt God to be absent. In the times when I don’t sense God’s presence, it is because I’m distracted and not paying attention – and once I start paying attention, He is there.

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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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True Power: A Reflection for Holy Week (Tuesday 31st March 2026)

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Given at Christ Church, Worton

Reading—John 19. 4-16

Two men stand facing each other in a stone interior. The figure on the left is seen almost entirely from behind: a heavyset man in a richly draped golden toga trimmed with red, his right arm extended with palm upturned in a gesture of dismissive question. His head is turned in profile, revealing a clean-shaven, well-fed face. He stands in full sunlight, which pools on the tiled floor around him. The figure on the right stands in shadow against a bare reddish-brown wall: a lean, dark-haired man with an unkempt beard, wearing a plain dark robe, his arms apparently bound behind him. He meets the other man's gaze directly. The contrast between the two figures — one luminous and dominant, one shadowed and still — is stark.
Nikolai Ge, What is Truth? (1890). Hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Do they ever get under your skin, the men and women who hold power in our world? Those who casually snigger and sneer and tell obvious lies as they make decisions that will condemn many thousands to their deaths, or devastate the livelihoods of many millions.

Such powers in the land have always existed, although we didn’t always see their faces and hear their voices every day.

Pontius Pilate was such a power in the land. As Roman governor of Judaea, he only had to click his fingers and some of the finest troops the world had ever seen would be sent into action to do his bidding. Over non-citizens, such as Jesus and the apostles, he had the power of life and death.  He wasn’t powerful because of any notable personal qualities of his, not as far as we can tell, but because of the Empire he represented.

You didn’t set yourself against the Romans lightly. They were extremely competent and effective, but also ruthless and unafraid of brutality. Their power rested on a reputation that left no doubt they would inflict terror on their enemies, and inflict it capably. That’s why the Jewish leaders started plotting against Jesus in the first place – they were worried that such a charismatic preacher and teacher would attract the wrong sort of attention from the Romans and provoke a bloody reprisal, especially a figure who was developing a name for acts of mysterious power.

Yet Jesus had no ambition for power, rejected violence, and committed no crime. That clearly unsettles Pilate. Clearly he isn’t afraid of a bit of brutality, but such manifest injustice seems a bit much for him. Still, a man of the world has to do what he has to do.

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The Glory to be Revealed: Sermon Preached on 23nd July 2023 (7th Sunday After Trinity)

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A field of poppies, surrounded by lush green grass, catching rich evening light, near Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8: 12–25; Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43

“I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

On Friday evening, I was out walking near North Wilts Golf Course, when I stumbled across a field full of poppies in rich evening light. I wandered along the field margin entranced by magical scenes, like the single sunflower, presumably the result of a stray seed, adding a dash of yellow to the reds and greens. Overhead, the larks sang.

A lone sunflower amid a field of poppies, near Bishops Cannings in Wiltshire.
21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

At times, I was quite overwhelmed by beauty. I found myself thinking of the struggles I’d had in life – the very unlikely and occasionally painful path that led me to being a country parson in Wiltshire, which I could never have planned for myself and which nobody could have predicted. I thanked God volubly, moved almost to tears with joy.

Of course, life isn’t always like this. To turn on the news is to be confronted with catastrophes, from a heatwave in southern Europe that seems to intimate environmental disaster to a war in Ukraine that seems to be locked into a deadly stalemate in the trenches.

Still harder to bear than these terrifying but systemic problems is our own suffering and the suffering of those we love. I was reading an article in The Tablet yesterday by the Oxford-based Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe. Timothy is to my mind the best popular theologian in Britain today, capable of explaining difficult concepts in understandable language to ordinary Christians. He revealed that, last year, he had survived a terrifying and risky 36-hour operation for jaw cancer. Although initially it seemed to have been a complete success, recently his consultants had picked up signs of fresh pre-cancerous cells in his jaw. The random operation of fate can sometimes be terribly cruel.

If all there were to the world were the stories of humanity’s struggles to survive and struggles with one another, the world would be a grim place. Yet we see signs everywhere, like the beauty of a field of poppies, that our existence is much greater and more magnificent than the hardest parts of life would indicate.

Some poppies on top of a hill, surrounded by lush green grass, looking down to a flat plain below with a long stand of deciduous trees in the distance.
21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

For example, if I am capable of being overwhelmed by the beauty of a field of poppies on a gorgeous summer evening, it begs the question why human beings have a sense of beauty. It isn’t necessary for evolutionary purposes: we can survive and produce the next generation of humans without it. In a similar vein, why do we have the capacity to feel awe? Why does love seem to be the single most transformative aspect of human existence?

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Reflection on ‘Judgement’ for Holy Week; Monday 3 April 2023

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A medieval church, St Mary's in Potterne, brilliantly lit in golden colour by bright evening sun.

Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Matthew 25. 31-40

Do we want to live in a universe where Jimmy Saville got away with it?

A medieval church, St Mary's in Potterne, brilliantly lit in golden colour by bright evening sun. Some tombstones are in the churchyard, also brilliantly lit, and a few primroses are just visible
I walked over the fields on a gorgeous spring evening to this wonderful church and then gave a reflection on judgement, damnation, and one of the vilest characters ever to disgrace British public life… © Gerry Lynch, 3 April 2023.

I found myself asking this as I prepared the readings for tonight’s service. Many of us will know the famous parable of the sheep and the goats that our bible reading tonight came from. It was rather too long for this short service, so I left out the bit about what happens to the goats. I left out the bit that may be the most important for us to hear, because I didn’t want to frighten or upset anyone.

The idea of God as divine judge is frightening and upsetting. Maybe, however, that’s no bad thing. It’s a pity that Jimmy Saville wasn’t a bit more afraid of being judged by God.

The Church has in recent decades downplayed the idea of divine judgement. It wanted to be positive, to celebrate the best in humanity; it often said that judgement really wasn’t what Jesus Christ, Love incarnate, was about. People weren’t fooled. They knew this was a rewrite of what Christianity had always said. You can’t escape for too long that the Biblical record is pretty clear that Jesus did talk a lot about judgement. Worse yet, nobody seemed much interested in this rewrite, which is probably part of the story of why the churches slowly emptied. If we don’t need redeeming from our sins, then why do we need a saviour?

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