last judgement

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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Keep ‘Er Lit in the Face of Armageddon: A Reflection for Holy Week (Monday 30th March 2026)

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Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Reading—Matthew 25. 1-13   

A watercolour depicting ten female figures against a dark nocturnal landscape. On the left, five women stand composed and luminous in pale robes, holding lit oil lamps on chains; the central figure extends her arm firmly, pointing to the right in a gesture of dismissal. On the right, five women in darker clothing react with distress — one kneels with arms outstretched in supplication, another throws her hands upward in anguish, a third slumps toward the ground. Their lamps hang unlit. In the middle distance, a city with illuminated domes and spires is visible against the dark sky, suggesting the wedding feast now out of reach. Above, a floating angelic figure blows a long trumpet, heralding judgement. The overall palette is cool grey and silver, with the warm glow of the lit lamps providing the only warmth in the composition.
William Blake, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (ca. 1800). Owned by the Metropolitan Museum, New York; not currently on public display.

The story of the human race has been one where we gradually, but continually, amass more knowledge, more advanced technology – and more power. Even before writing was invented, we were already unique because of the wheel, the domestication of fire, the domestication of other species, and perhaps most of all speech. These things also made us uniquely deadly to other life forms. Our kingdom is very much of this world.

In recent generations, we’ve also potentially become lethal to ourselves. We’ve lived with the risk of nuclear war for 81 years now, and the wars unfolding in different parts of the world at the moment are frightening and violent events. Experiments in Genetic Modification of humans and other life forms are rapidly increasing in ambition and potential to do good, but also in risk of disaster. But it is Artificial Intelligence that is currently most in the public eye as a potential risk to our survival. One after another, some of the world’s top computer scientists – in many cases people instrumental to making Artificial Intelligence a reality – have either quit the field warning that it could lead to our extinction, or called for development to be slowed dramatically to allow adequate safety checks before AIs are made more powerful.

The logic of human relationships, however, is such that the two great empires of our time, China and the USA, must race as fast as they can to develop more powerful forms of Artificial Intelligence. This technology could be as transformative of human existence as the wheel, or fire, or speech, perhaps even more so. If one country blinks, it risks ceding the future to the other. Such are the constraints that govern how human kingdoms relate to one another.

The kingdom of God is different. It lives in its citizens often because of what they are and how they approach life as much as what they do, still less what they achieve. It doesn’t have a capital city or any fixed territory to defend.

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Jesus is Coming Back: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th November 2022 (The First Sunday of Advent)

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Readings – Romans 13: 11–14; Matthew 24: 36–44

“…the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

I want to start this morning with a question: Do you believe that Jesus is going to, you know, actually return and be your judge?

I know we say in the Creed every Sunday, that “I believe that He will come in glory to judge both the living and the dead”, but if you’re like me, you’ll be more than a little uncomfortable with the topic.

The famous late 15th Century doom painting at St Thomas’, Salisbury. © Gerry Lynch, 31 July 2016

Part of the reason for that is because there are Christians who spend entirely too much time not only thinking about the Second Coming, but also shouting about it. These people always seem to be bad, sad, or mad – or all three at the same time – full of angry judgementalism towards others while howling at the moon themselves. We rightly don’t want to be like them.

So well tell ourselves that Christianity isn’t like that, or at least our Christianity isn’t like that. We remind ourselves that the Bible also says in three plain words that “God is love” – in fact, had our epistle reading from Romans started one verse earlier, we would have heard St Paul state clearly that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” We tell ourselves that means something like “God is all-forgiving and all-accepting”. That allows us to leave the preaching about Jesus coming back to the headbangers and fundamentalists and get on with trying to be more like this all-forgiving, all-accepting God.

Yet avoiding guilt by association is only one reason why we don’t like talking about the Second Coming. Another part of it is, of course, that if all this stuff that Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel is true, then we’re going to be subject to judgement at His hands when He returns, and we’re worried about that. Now, the uncomfortable reality is that especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which is going to supply most of our Sunday Gospel readings from now until next November, Jesus talks about judgement a lot. In fact, He talks about carrying out the Last Judgement Himself, in the same section where he says the nice stuff about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Does that scare you?

Well, let’s unpack it a bit.

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