nature

Waiting Patiently for Harvest: Sermon Preached on 16th June 2024 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

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The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.

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

Readings – 2 Corinthians 5. 6-10, 14-17; Mark 4. 26-34

“The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”

The image depicts a vast, undulating farmland under a clear sky during golden hour. Rows of crops stretch across the landscape, their textures highlighted by warm sunlight. In the distance, gentle hills complete this serene rural scene.
Tan Hill from Allington, 10 June 2024 © Gerry Lynch

On Monday evening shortly after eight, I popped into Devizes to buy a few things at Lidl, and was captivated by the quality of the late evening light; the amount of rain we’ve had this Spring has made the air unusually clear when the Sun does shine, and the greens of the landscape are especially vibrant at the moment. Luckily, I had taken my camera with me and, being at that side of Devizes already, set off along the road that goes through Horton and on into the heart of the Vale of Pewsey. There is a particularly attractive prospect on the north side of the road just before entering the hamlet of Allington from the Devizes side. Wheat fields, clambering up the foot-slopes and catching the late evening sun beautifully at this time of year, are overlooked by the ridge of hills crowned by Tan Hill, the second highest point in Wiltshire; which always looks to me like a sleeping dragon, the green of its scales being caught by the fire of the setting sun.

It is especially interesting to look at the individual stalks of wheat at the moment – the head and the stalk are certainly there, but we are still some weeks away from it being ripe enough to harvest.

We take plant growth for granted – yet it is a miracle. A wheat seed averages only around 6 millimetres in length, or a quarter of an inch, yet it can turn into a plant that is taller than we are. We bury the seed in the ground and God gives the growth. Mustard seeds are even smaller, only one or two millimetres in diameter. Around 1,500 could fit along the edge of the altar, literally millions of them piled on top of it. How does a mustard seed turn into a mighty tree so big that birds can nest in it? It seems impossible to believe that they are the same organism. Yet they are.

Animals, including humans, also grow from tiny simple seeds and tiny simple eggs into complex adult forms. Some creatures even change forms at different points in their lives – caterpillars turn into to butterflies; tadpoles turn into frogs and toads.

It seems strange to assume that growth, and indeed, transformation, can only take place in our physical bodies. Surely it can also take place in our souls.

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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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Harvesting the Bread of Life: Sermon Preached in St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 25th September 2022 (Harvest Festival)

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“I am the bread of life. Who ever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Readings – Philippians 4: 4–9; John 6: 25–35.

On Thursday, I attended one of the Creationtide talks we are hosting in St Mary’s, this one by Damian Haasjes of the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. It was a very good talk, but I was amazed at the lengths its funders forced the Trust to go to assemble a hard economic and public heath case that spending time in nature is good for people, especially more vulnerable people. I would have thought it was obvious, because enmeshing ourselves in the web of life so transparently lifts the spirit and heals the soul. Our present Western culture often seems obsessed with the price of everything while being happy to be ignorant of the value of anything. The most transcendent, spiritual, and mystical parts of our lives are expected to justify themselves in pounds, pence, and additional Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years.

Please keep that in mind as we explore this morning’s Gospel reading, containing a phrase familiar to many of you, “I am the bread of life”.

Sunset with crepuscular rays shining behind some low hills t Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch
The obvious beauty of nature: sunset at Oare, Wiltshire, on 29 September 2022 © Gerry Lynch

It helps us understand this incident better if we know its place in the chain of events in St John’s Gospel. Firstly, it comes the day after John’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and indeed the crowd from the day before seems to have followed Jesus despite His attempts to slip away to somewhere quiet.

Many of these people, therefore, have only the day before benefited directly from Jesus working perhaps His most high profile and spectacular miracle, feeding thousands of them with just a few baskets of bread. More than that, they have benefited from a miracle that identifies Jesus as the true successor of Moses – because it directly parallels the way God fed the Hebrews fleeing Egypt under Moses’ leadership with Manna from heaven.

But despite having swallowed His miraculous bread, the crowd doesn’t want to swallow Jesus’ difficult teaching about the bread of life. They want another mega-miracle to feast their eyes on, and shortly after this morning’s passage, when he doesn’t give them one, the crowd turns on Jesus, and He starts to lose followers.

I think there is something profound and easily missed here about our insatiable appetites. One miracle, even if it’s, you know, pretty spectacular, is not enough to convince the crowd of Jesus’ nature. Accepting that we have enough is difficult for us. That lies at the root of our present ecological crisis.

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Switch Off and #TouchGrass

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There is a pear tree next to the back door of the curate’s house. It has been a joy over the last two weeks noticing it change – from having bare branches, to the first green buds, and finally watching the flowers develop and form fully into a riot of subtle whitish greens and pinks.

Pear blossom in my back garden, 12 April 2022. © Gerry Lynch

Last year I didn’t notice it until it was in full blossom. Perhaps I was distracted by the return to church and some minimal amount of socialising in April 2021. At this time of year change happens quickly, but at first subtly. If one does not pay close attention, one is confronted by it suddenly, especially if life is very busy.

Modern life can feel like it has been designed to disconnect us from the natural world. One of the things I noticed in my first week in Devizes was how dark and detailed the night skies were from my back garden, even in late June, with a fine view of the Milky Way. As a city boy who had been interested in stargazing since childhood, this was a surprise treat.  

Even after all these years, I can remember quite distinctly what the northern skies looked like from my parents’ back yard in the mid-1980s. By this period, in a city centre location, the skies were already considerably affected by light pollution. Yet things have degraded further to the point that I estimate that about three-quarters of the stars then visible in Belfast with the naked eye no longer are.

The Milky Way near Shaftesbury in Dorset, 12 August 2016 © Gerry Lynch

Even in Devizes, the night sky is only a pale shadow of what our ancestors’ took for granted. The summertime Milky Way, for example, should be full of structure and complexity – while it is impressively ghostly here, detail is no longer visible from Devizes. Many more stars would have been visible than are today in this country, even in remote countryside; against the dark countryside, the night sky felt bright. I have experienced this, even in recent years, in Dorset where the councils turn many street lights off in the early hours.

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