martyrs

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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The Baptist’s Wounds: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, 11 July 2021 (The Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6: 14–29                                 

“‘He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.”

In the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head on a platter is one of the most grizzly images in the Gospels. It remains shocking not least because so many Christians have died throughout the ages for telling powerful rulers truths that they don’t want to hear. When you next go to Salisbury, look at the rows of statues which adorn the West Front of the Cathedral – there is a helpful Wikipedia article which has information on each one of the one hundred and ninety-six of them – and note how many of them were martyred for their faith.

The last few decades have added to the numbers of those martyred for speaking truth to power. I think of St Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot dead by members of a far-right militia as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in 1980; or Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Polish priest hunted down four years later by secret policemen of the then Communist regime in his country. In our own Anglican tradition Janani Luwum, the Archbishop of Uganda, was martyred in 1977 by Idi Amin for protesting that dictator’s murderous rule. Few people seem to know of the seven brave Anglican monks of the Melanesian Brotherhood, murdered in 2003 by a warlord in the Solomon Islands as they tried to mediate during a period of interethnic fighting. So, let me remember by name from this pulpit Nathaniel Sado, Robin Lindsay, Francis Tofi, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu, and Ini Paratabatu. 

Nor have these martyrs all been clergy and religious. Brave laypeople have also given their lives for refusing to collude in the lies of repressive régimes, like Steve Biko, the practising Anglican and founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, beaten to death by the police of the apartheid state.

David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch
David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch

Indeed, it was in South Africa that I definitively got to know a prophet: David Russell, who was Bishop of Grahamstown from 1987 until 2004. David radiated the peace of Christ and was very good to me at a difficult time. He could have had a much easier life than the one he led. South Africa-born, he came to England to train for the priesthood and studied to postgraduate level at Oxford. As such an able man, he could have become a Prince Bishop of the Church of England, and campaigned against the repressive government of his homeland from a powerful pulpit. Even in South Africa, he could have ministered in a White suburban parish, and challenged the government from there. That wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable, but it would have been a lot easier than what he chose to do. Instead, he rejected the arrant heresy that a priest must be of the same race as the people he or she serves by ministering in illegal shantytowns on the Cape Flats, home to people banned from living in the second city of their own country simply because of the colour of their skin. This led to several years of house arrest, an actual spell of imprisonment, and being constantly spied upon by the security services. It also led him to meet his wife, to become a highly respected bishop important in his country’s transition to democracy, and in the fullness of time to become an officially honoured national hero. While some prophets face death, David lived to find a sort of Resurrection in his later years.

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