mercy

Descended from Dogs – Sermon Preached on 16th August 2026 (Eleventh Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 11.1–2a, 29–32; Matthew 15.21–28

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

A manuscript page with two lines of Arabic script above and three below a framed illumination. Within a red border, Christ stands at left in a magenta tunic and blue cloak, barefoot, with a dark beard and a gold cruciform halo, his right hand raised and extended forward, his left hand lowered. Behind him stand two men, the nearer one grey-bearded in an ochre robe, the second visible only as a head and shoulder. At right a woman kneels facing him, wearing a grey-lilac veil and cloak over an orange-red robe, both hands raised with palms turned upward. Between the two figures a small tan dog stands on green ground with its head lowered. The background shows a grey wall with two dark arched windows, a magenta building with an arched doorway at right, an open doorway at upper left, and a gold sky. Red punctuation dots are scattered through the Arabic text.
Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (ca. 1684). Part of an illuminated set of the Gospels in Arabic, produced in Egypt. Now belongs to the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.

“That pack of dogs!” It isn’t a very nice way of talking about a group of people.

The exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman makes us uncomfortable because it shows Jesus cutting across one of the sacred principles of our own time and culture: not being nasty to people because of their nationality or race – or at least not being caught out doing so in public. The Canaanite woman is at her wits’ end, needing help for her possessed daughter; Jesus tries to ignore her, then implies that her people are dogs. It doesn’t strike us as very Christlike.

Jesus was truly human as well as being truly God. All human beings have a culture and a background – and that always involves complicated relationships with people not like us.

The Jews and the Canaanites had been living intermingled with one another for over a thousand years by this point, and there was plenty of bad blood between them. When the Jews came into the Promised Land after Moses led them out of captivity in Egypt, the Canaanites were one of the groups of people already living there. The Jews claimed they were just returning to their ancestral homeland; the Canaanites thought that was poppycock. The Jews said the Canaanites had a nasty history of sacrificing their own children. By the time Jesus came along, “Canaanite” was no longer the term in daily use anyway – the politically correct nomenclature was “Syrophoenician”, which was used by Mark when telling the same story. So Matthew’s use of the archaic term hints that he’s reaching back into history for something.

There’s something else to keep in mind: what happened just before. Notice how this morning’s reading starts: “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” That leaves me curious as to where “that place” was.

It turns out that place was Gennesaret, by the Sea of Galilee, not much over twenty miles from where Jesus grew up, the area where He had started His public ministry of preaching and teaching, and a heartland of conservative Jews. What happened there was that as He was being mobbed by a crowd desperately seeking help, some Pharisees came up from Jerusalem – which was a hundred miles away – and started giving Jesus a hard time, telling Him He was breaking the Jewish religious traditions. Jesus in turn says the Pharisees are the ones promoting false teaching: in fact, they are blind guides, leading the people into a pit.

So Jesus has just had a spicy exchange with the self-appointed defenders of Jewish orthodoxy. For some reason, after that happens, He leaves the Sea of Galilee and goes to Tyre and Sidon, to what is now the coast of South Lebanon, away from the main Jewish centres of population and into the very heartland of the Canaanites.

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Would You Sacrifice Your Son? – Sermon Preached on 28th June 2026 (Fourth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Ovington and Holy Cross, Seend

Genesis 22. 1-18; Matthew 10. 40-42

“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest … and offer him … for a burnt offering…”

A large square oil painting dominated by expansive fields of blue, yellow, red, and green. In the lower centre-right, an elderly bearded man in red and brown robes kneels and looks upward, his right hand raised and gripping a knife. Beneath him, a younger man lies prostrate on the ground, clothed in yellow, his face turned outward toward the viewer. A large blue winged angel descends diagonally from the upper centre of the composition, one arm extended downward toward the knife. To the upper left, a green tree stands before a pale blue background, with two small crouching figures sheltering at its base. In the upper right, rendered in darker, earthier tones, a crowd of figures surrounds a crucifixion scene, with a cross visible at its centre. The background throughout is loosely worked in swirling washes of white, yellow, pink, and blue. A signature appears in the lower left corner.
Marc Chagall, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1960-6), hangs in the National Marc Chagall Gallery, Nice.

If God is merciful, why do men sacrifice their children to their gods? Today’s pairing of readings, seemingly so awkward and contradictory, is linked by the common theme of God’s mercy, and asks us how we should share God’s mercy with those around us.

The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is at once gripping and repulsive. The temptation is, as always with the more difficult Old Testament texts, to distance it from our own modern condition, because we would never do anything as crazy or barbaric as sacrificing our children for God, would we?

The conventional way to read the story of Abraham is that his faith is being put to the test, and that’s what the text itself pushes us towards. At the end of this passage, the angel of the Lord says explicitly that because of Abraham’s iron faith, God’s promise to him so long ago that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars has been confirmed.

But here’s the thing – the story was clearly strange and fearful also for people of its own time, as much as for us. Although Abraham is acting on a commandment of God, there is something furtive about his behaviour. At no point on their three-day trudge to the place of sacrifice does Abraham explain to his two young servants what is happening, and when they arrive, he leaves them behind, plainly lying to them about what he is about to do with Isaac.

He also lies directly to the boy about what is about to happen – when Isaac innocently asks where the sacrificial lamb is, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide one. But that’s not what Abraham thinks is about to happen – Abraham thinks he’s about to kill his own son, and won’t tell him the truth.

So there is a shadow of dissembling resting over this story. Abraham may have passed a test of faith set by God, but it’s as if he knows there’s something shameful about the way he’s done it. Shouldn’t Abraham have asked if God would really have demanded he embark on a course of action that he had to lie about to those closest to him? Was there a better way to be faithful? Surely, we should always ask hard questions if someone is asking us to sacrifice our children.

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Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

A detail from Veronese's The Feast in the House of Levi. At the centre of a long banquet table draped in white, Christ sits in a rose-pink robe with a faint halo, his long hair falling to his shoulders, reaching toward a dish. He is surrounded by guests in richly coloured Renaissance dress: bearded older men in red, blue and orange, a young red-haired man leaning in at his right, and a servant in yellow raising a glass behind. Two large spaniels sit on the chequered marble floor in the foreground, with pale classical architecture and open sky behind.
An excerpt from Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573), hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

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Popes, Kings, and Tax Collectors: Sermon Preached on 26th October 2025 (Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.

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

2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18. 9–14

“The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people…’”

Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.
King Charles and Pope Leo in the Sistine Chapel, 23 October 2025 © Vatican Media

The Pope and the Queen played an outsized role in the graffiti I saw as a boy. Their titles usually appeared in a three-letter acronym only differentiated by its last letter. The first letter was ‘F’, and did indeed stand for the F-word you’re wondering if the Rector is actually going to use in the pulpit. The second letter was ‘T’, simply for “the”. And the last letter was either ‘P’ or ‘Q’. It was, in a strange way, quite useful to have ‘FTP’ or ‘FTQ’ written on a wall, as if you were somewhere unfamiliar, it gave you an instant visual clue as to what sort of place you were in, and therefore whether you could tell the truth about who you were and where you came from, or whether you had to tell a few little white lies.

The Pope of Rome and the King or Queen of England were our respective bogeymen. You might not have had anything much against them personally, you may even have sort of liked what you saw of them on the TV, but you knew if you were rude about them, you were taking a pop at a sacred symbol of the other side, and you were also warning anybody on your own side who might go soft what was expected of them.

Of course, it’s easy from the security of rural England to roll your eyes at all that and say, ‘Well what do you expect from Northern Ireland?’ But for four hundred years, this division wasn’t just in Northern Ireland, but across Europe and later across the world. One side said there was no salvation outside their Church, while the other loved phrases like: “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities”.

One of the mainstays of British national identity was, into the early 20th Century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Almost forgotten now, it was full of grizzly stories of godly Protestants being burned at the sake and disembowelled, usually accompanied by lurid ink drawings that, in the days before horror movies, were probably part of its appeal. The Catholic minority in England had their equivalent stories of saints being crushed to death, or quartered while alive, and Irish Catholics not only had similar stories but outright dispossession in their own country to draw on.

The saddest part is, all the stories were true, in all their cruelty. Tyburn really happened, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre really happened. But people tended to remember the stories of when they were victims, and often chose not remember the stories where they were making the victims. Christians proclaim that Christ, who rejected violence and revenge and conquest and power, is the victim sacrificed for the sins of the world—and then, too often, go out and make more victims in His name. When do that, we nail Christ to the Cross all over again.

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Mercy Transcends Justice: Sermon Preached on 5th March 2025 (Ash Wednesday)

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A black-and-white photograph of a rural landscape featuring a wide, open field with a dirt path running through it. The field is bordered by a line of bare, leafless trees and dense shrubs, with rolling hills visible in the background under a cloudy sky. The scene evokes a quiet, wintry or early spring countryside setting.

Preached at St Mary’s Potterne

Joel 2. 1-2, 12-17; John 8. 1-11

“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Ash Wednesday—a day when we think about our sinfulness. Is that depressing?

This painting depicts a religious scene set on a rocky mountaintop, featuring Jesus Christ in a blue robe with a red inner garment, standing on a peak and pointing towards a dark, winged figure representing Satan. Jesus has a golden halo around his head, symbolizing his divinity. Two other figures, likely angels, dressed in flowing robes, stand behind him, observing the scene. The background includes a golden sky and a detailed, colorful cityscape with fortified walls, towers, and domed buildings, painted in pastel shades of pink, green, and blue, extending across the hills. The overall style is reminiscent of medieval or Renaissance religious art, with a focus on spiritual symbolism and dramatic contrast between the figures.
The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain by Duccio (1308-11), originally part of an altarpiece in Siena Cathedral, now part of the Frick Collection, New York.

Well, I think it’s only depressing if we forget that thinking about our sinfulness is also an opportunity to think about God’s mercy. There’s a phrase I often use, that expresses one of the central truths of the Christian faith—God came to save us in the person of Jesus Christ not because we are good, but because He is love. We don’t save ourselves by being just about good enough to reach a pass mark for heaven set by a cosmic headmaster—instead God saves us out of His mercy.

I don’t think there’s enough mercy in the world. Mercy is easy to misrepresent as something soft-headed. One of the problems with the culture of our times, which is driven by what happens online, is that it usually lacks mercy. I think there are two main reasons for that. One is that most of us don’t realise when we type angrily behind our screens that there is a real person at the other end of the Internet receiving that anger. But this lack of mercy is also because on the Internet we’re always looking over our shoulders to see if what we’re doing is sensible and socially acceptable. Social media is a great X-ray machine into human psychology and it shows us that mercy is often seen as weak on transgressors and, in times of conflict, that exercising mercy is seen as letting the side down. This hostility to actually showing mercy is as prevalent among those who like to think of their attitudes as embodying kindness and concern for the marginalised as much as it is among the rest of us.

But that is to misunderstand mercy. When we show mercy, we don’t have to pretend that wrong has not been done to us. We show mercy when we choose not to take up the redress or vindication that would quite rightly be ours.

Perhaps in recent times, the Church has focused too narrowly on the idea of justice. Now, justice is a wonderful thing and I would hardly argue against it. But few of us would want to be on the receiving end of an entirely fair share of God’s justice for the worst things we’ve done in our lives. And there are other great aspects of human character, besides justice, to which Christians are called to live out. We all need mercy sometimes. If justice isn’t tempered by mercy, it can be a cold and even cruel thing.

Mercy transcends justice. When we are merciful we touch God’s nature.

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