myth of progress

Prayer, Persistence, and Peace: Sermon Preached on 27th July 2025 (Sixth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 11. 1-13

“…everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds…” `

A painting depicting a central figure in a white robe standing on a hill with arms raised, addressing a group of people seated around him. The background features a cityscape with ancient buildings and a golden sky, suggesting a sunset or sunrise. The people, dressed in robes and headscarves, appear to be listening attentively, with some raising their hands. The scene is set on a grassy hill with a distant view of mountains and a walled city.
James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always enjoy Matthew Syed’s programme on Radio 4 called Sideways, which often gives quirky, unusual, perspectives on quirky, interesting issues. It is currently running a three-part mini-series on ‘Chasing Peace’. Exploring different approaches to peace-making and peace-building, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions about human nature, and whether we are hard-wired for war.

I listened to the dedicated peacemakers he interviewed, some of whom had taken enormous risks with their personal safety in very dangerous environments to end conflicts, and I was full of admiration. Some interviewees also said things like that to prevent war we needed to train people to be more emotionally literate, I found myself muttering, “Good luck with that!”

Over this last decade or so, many of the things we’d previously taken for granted about the direction of humanity have broken down, and the idea of progress which animated us for so long has stalled. We seem a long way, for example, from the days when people really believed that the United Nations might ultimately bring an end to war.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from these years of gathering crisis is that too many of those dreams of progress thought they could change human nature, or flew entirely in the face of it. At their worst, especially in the darkest days of the Communist world, it was precisely the possibility of building a perfect society in the future that allowed people to justify to themselves their barbaric behaviour in the present.

Indeed, if we look at the world through the lens of Faith, then we know this world can never be made perfect, and that none of us can ever be all that good for all that long, or otherwise Jesus would not have needed to die on the Cross.

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I Do What I Hate: Sermon Preached on 9th July 2023 (5th Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 7: 15–25a; Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

I wonder how familiar you are with quantum computing?

I ask, because the last interesting episode of my recent trip to North America happened on the bus out to Montreal airport to catch my flight to Heathrow. There was conversation between a man in his fifties from the United States, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities, who was asking him all sorts of intelligent questions.

It’s much more difficult to make quantum computers to work in practice than the digital computers we’re familiar with, the man explained, but experimental prototypes work increasingly well, and it’s possible that we’re within a few years of them becoming practical. There are many wonderful things they might make much easier, like finding new vaccines. He said, however, that the first thing that will happen is that every encryption scheme in the world will become obsolete overnight. Encryption means the codes that are used to keep your debit card payments secure, your e-mails private, and the suchlike. Even the encryption used by the world’s militaries and secret services will become worthless, he explained, possibly not too far in the future. The first thing that quantum computers will do, apparently, is to force all of these vital pieces of code to be rewritten using quantum computers.

The young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”

Nowadays we’re no longer talking about swords, but things like cluster munitions. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of what how terrible long conventional wars between well-equipped large countries are. We’d almost forgotten.

Necessity, as the old saying goes, is the mother of invention, and countries fighting for their survival have needs that are acute. So war drives technological advancement. The last big international war finished with the invention of nuclear weapons. For the first time, human beings had the power to destroy ourselves entirely. In the 17 months since Russia invaded Ukraine, there has already been a revolution in some military technologies, such as the use of drones.

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Dare We Risk it All?: Sermon Preached on Sunday 25th June 2023 (The Birth of John the Baptist, Patronal Festival)

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The painting depicts a Bible story from Luke 1:5-80, in which Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, are too old to have children. One day the angel Gabriel appears to tell Zacharias that he and Elizabeth will have a son named John. Zacharias is literally dumbfounded and loses his ability to speak.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Acts 13.14b-26; Luke 1.57-66, 80

“What then will this child become?”

That’s what the neighbours asked when confronted by the strange circumstances of the birth of St John the Baptist. His father, Zechariah, had been struck dumb by God for refusing to believe he had fathered a child at his advanced age. Then he and his wife, Elizabeth, broke all custom by giving their son a name, John, not already used in their family. Immediately after that break with custom, Zechariah’s speech was suddenly restored. Elizabeth and Zechariah were delighted with their bonny boy whose name means ‘God is gracious’, but the neighbours found these weird experiences frightening.

“What will this child become?”, they asked, in their fear.

The painting depicts a Bible story from Luke 1:5-80, in which Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, are too old to have children. One day the angel Gabriel appears to tell Zacharias that he and Elizabeth will have a son named John. Zacharias is literally dumbfounded and loses his ability to speak.
The Birth of St John the Baptist by Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1635), now in the Prado Museum, Madrid.

He became a great man, a man who changed history, but not one who enjoyed success in his life by conventional standards. He lived a wild life, eating insects and wild honey, and dressing in animal hides. Yet more than a thousand years after his death the Norman conquerors who had recently set up a castle thousands of miles away in Devizes named their church after him, and almost a thousand years after that, we meet in the same church and commemorate John as our patron saint today.

Although he was later celebrated by conquerors, John was far from a conqueror during his life. Instead, he came to the attention of the authorities as someone who refused to collude in their lies, was imprisoned, and later brutally executed. The régime that put him to death remained in power. On the surface, he achieved nothing in his life.

We can’t reduce Christianity to a formula for a successful life by the conventional standards of the world. Worldly success may be a blessing that God grants us; but equally, to live a godly life may require us to renounce comfort and instead live a life of deprivation and physical risk. Not just in Christianity: a deep ambivalence about worldly success was also present in the Jewish thoughtworld which remains part of our scriptural inheritance.

That’s clear when we listen to this morning’s first reading, from Acts. This is part of St Paul’s speech at the synagogue in Antioch. Here, Paul locates John the Baptist in the long sweep of Jewish history. So, he says that God “made the people great” – isn’t that a phrase to conjure with in our time – God “made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt.” So, God made the Hebrew people great when they were living as slaves in a foreign land ruled over by often despotic pharaohs. Isn’t that a strange idea – whatever it means to be great here, it isn’t greatness in the eyes of the world.

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Christianity is Strange (Easter Day 2023)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne, 9th April 2023

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8

Christianity is a very strange faith – if it were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Take Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. At first, she doesn’t recognise her close friend, whom she last saw just two days before; in fact, she thinks this stranger must be the graveyard’s gardener. It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognises that the impossible has happened; that the man whom she had watched being put to death is in fact alive. Yet there is something odd about his physical nature – He asks her not to cling to Him.

A "noli mi tangere" icon, 16th Century Crete.
An icon from 16th Century Crete of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Christ in the Garden on the first Easter morning.

In our reading from Acts, another of the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, Peter, has been asked to visit a senior Roman solider who has had a mysterious vision of angels. Peter recounts his own encounters with Christ after the Resurrection. In these encounters, too, Jesus’ physical characteristics are very odd – He is sometimes not recognised until He speaks or acts in a particular way; He sometimes appears in the middle of locked rooms. Yet He also eats and drinks with His disciples, apparently normally; they can embrace Him and even poke their fingers in His crucifixion wounds.

Jesus has clearly not been simply brought back to life, miraculously healed, but instead has become somehow different than He was. Nor is He a ghost or an apparition – He has a definite, tangible, physicality. The new life of the Resurrection is clearly something different from the mundane life of mortal human beings.

Of course, this could all be a story made up by people who couldn’t cope with the death of their hero.

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