new gnosticism

Our Mucky Humanity: Sermon Preached on 19th March 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Lent)

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An excerpt from El Greco's late 16th Century painting of Jesus healing a blind man. Jesus is sticking is mud covered fingers in a man's eyes as some Pharisees point disapprovingly and a dog sniffs at Jesus' belongings. The colours are bright although the architecture is anachronistic for 1st Century Palestine.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Ephesians 5. 8–14; John 9. 1–41

“…he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes…”

Some of you will have noticed that there was a rugby match between England and Ireland yesterday. For those who have not the slightest interest in sport, let me cut a long story short by saying that Ireland won comfortably. I tell you that not to gloat – although I’m sure that some of you will be cynical about my intentions! – but to provide context for this morning’s readings.

When I was schoolboy I wanted, for a brief time at least, to play rugby for Ireland. In my imagination, I would see myself in a green jersey on the pitch at a packed Lansdowne Road, on a mild March afternoon like yesterday’s, in the final weekend of  a Six Nations championship, crashing over the line for the winning try as the seconds ticked down in a Grand Slam decider. Hopefully, a Grand Slam decider against England! It has, however, been a long time since five-foot-five has been a sufficient stature for international rugby, and so those dreams had to remain unfulfilled. I must trust that God’s plans for me never involved international rugby, for otherwise he would have given me an extra centimetre… or twenty. Indeed, in His good sense God probably realised that I was never going to enjoy a life of getting up at half-five every morning to lift weights and down protein shakes. God made me to be me, not just in my soul and my mind, but also in my body, which He made specifically for me, with its stumpy little legs and fat backside.

The Healing of the Man Born Blind, painted by El Greco in 1567. It now hangs in the Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma, Italy.

Christians face the constant danger of reducing their faith to something otherworldly, overly spiritualised, and detached from physical reality. Yet one of the things that stands out in this morning’s long Gospel reading is the sheer physicality of its portrayal of Jesus. The passage rejoices in the messiness of human life and the human body – Jesus spits in public, indeed in front of his own followers, then rubs his spittle in the mud, makes a paste out of it, and rubs it in the blind man’s eyes.

Even more significantly, this comes immediately after Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus has therefore just identified Himself with “I am”, the Hebrew term for God, and said His life was of global importance. Then He gets His hands muddy with his own spit and washes a stranger with the product.

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Good Enough As We Are: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2022 (Midnight Mass)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9: 2, 6–7; John 1: 1-14     

“For a child has been born for us … authority rests upon his shoulders.” 

The international situation is darkening with a series of protracted and frightening wars, while domestically people are setting their hearts against God. Religiously-minded people see that abandonment of God as a direct cause of the obvious collapse in standards in public life, especially among political leaders. I am not referring to the present day, but to the time when our Old Testament reading was written by Isaiah, around two-thousand seven hundred years ago.

In the midst of this darkness, Isaiah wrote down a vision of a brighter future.  In it, a child is born who will have authority to lead people from darkness into light. He will establish peace and justice, and even be known as “Mighty God”.

Hundreds of years later, about the same distance in time as separates us from knights in armour and feudal lords, the vision still inspired many people to keep hope in difficult times. Some of them had been followers of a wandering preacher called Jesus, whose life was so extraordinary and so surrounded by miracles and the seemingly impossible that they reached the conclusion he was the Son of God. As they reflected on the sacred writings of the Jewish faith which they all devoutly held, this was one of the pieces they thought had foretold Jesus all along.

Our Gospel reading was also a product of those followers, as they wrote down their own reflections on what they had experienced through Jesus. Its first sentence is particularly famous – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Famous it might be, but it can be a little difficult to unpack. So let me try to explain. The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. But the Word was also apparently with God in the beginning. So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?

Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck (1436)

Now here’s another strange phrase from our Gospel reading – “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” You might have noticed that I knelt when I read that phrase. That’s because it expresses the thing that is so unique about the Christian faith – not only that there is a God, but also that God holds us human beings in such high esteem that He actually became one of us, took on human flesh Himself, to open the way to eternal life for us.

And it’s not just the fact that God became a human being that is amazing, but how He did it, the sort of human being He became. For there couldn’t be more of a contrast between Jesus’ supernatural beginnings and his earthly beginnings. Jesus was with the creator of the universe when it all started, and indeed was Himself the creator of the universe, grand concepts that seem to be full of paradox and which aren’t really understandable in human language. At the same time, Jesus became one of us in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to Him in poverty in a stable, as physically weak as any other baby, and absolutely vulnerable and dependent like any other baby. The maker of the universe and the baby in the stall are one and the same: both are the baby who was prophesied by Isaiah all those centuries before.

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Your Beautiful Bodies: Sermon Preached at George’s, Belfast, Sunday 2nd January 2022 (2nd Sunday of Christmas)

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Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial

Readings – John 1: 10–18, Ephesians 1: 3–14

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

One of my favourite activities when off work in the dark depths of midwinter is to go onto YouTube to watch television advertisements from commercial breaks of decades long past. I have a particular fondness for 1970s adverts for pipe tobacco; they really get across how much society has changed in the last half a century or so. Not so much because they showed men smoking their pipes on the telly, but because of how plain and sometimes even ugly the men in them were. Bald men in late middle-age, often a little tubby, sometimes with wrinkly foreheads or even unmanageable hair. In adverts for DIY superstores, these plain middle-aged men inevitably had plain middle-aged wives that they sat with in the ordinary kitchens of ordinary homes.

Watch a TV advertising break today and it is a different story. Everyone is beautiful; everyone has perfect hair and perfect teeth; nearly everyone is young. Where young people aren’t really appropriate for advertising the product in question – if it’s for a funeral plan, let’s say, or incontinence medicine – the few elderly people allowed to appear in advertising look like they’re just about to pop out for a 10 mile walk, just to wind down from the skiing holiday they’ve just jetted home from.

Wrinkle-headed man smoking a pipe in a 1970s TV commercial
The beautiful people used to advertise to us in the ’70s.

Half a century ago, advertising executives thought we were most likely to purchase a product if we associated it with people we identified with, with people who were like we were ourselves. Now the theory is that we are more likely to buy products associated with the sort of people we aspire to becoming, or at least have idle fantasies about becoming, in the hope that some of their success will rub off on us in a sort of high-tech cargo cult.

It sounds like a minor change, but it goes to the heart of some of the most damaging social trends of today’s world. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves, negatively, with people who are prettier, richer, and more successful than we are – or who seem to be prettier, richer, and more successful than we are.

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Celebrating Our Bodies: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Friday 24th December 2021 (Midnight Mass)

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Readings – Hebrews 4: 1–4 , John 1: 1–14

The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

For some of you here tonight, that will be a familiar expression heard in Church a hundred times and regularly read in your Bibles. For others, it will undoubtedly a very weird collection of words that makes no sense whatsoever. Yet this phrase sets out the most important thing about the Christmas story; it’s why Christmas became the biggest holiday of our calendar, and why it remained so over many centuries. So let me unpack it a little.

After celebrating my first Midnight Mass as a priest at Holy Cross, Seend, 25 December 2021

The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. Our Gospel reading a moment ago said many strange things, and another of them was this: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?

Now this “Word”, as St John’s Gospel calls it, became flesh and dwelt among us. In the form of a tiny baby in the womb. Not the son of a King, but the son of a carpenter, who married his mother when she was already pregnant, dragged far from home by the cold bureaucratic order of a distant ruler occupying their country. That the maker of the universe should become one of us is odd enough; stranger still that He should do it as an ordinary man, in a backwater town, without even a proper roof over His head.

We human beings are made in the image of God, not only in our souls, but in our bodies, because Jesus Christ is God, the Word who was already there when the Big Bang went bang. Our bodies are beautiful gifts of God. Our bodies are both unique to ourselves and something we share with everyone else who has ever lived and will ever live. Our bodies have limitations – we are not supermen – but those limitations are not flaws, but design features.

Yet we live at a time when many of us seem to be profoundly alienated from our bodies. We see this most clearly in the epidemics of eating disorders and self-cutting which have become so widespread, especially among adolescent girls and young women.

Technology is part of the explanation for this, although only part of it. Instagram and Facebook hit us with page after page of beautiful people living perfect lives, with all their teeth perfect and not a hair out of place. It’s almost always fake – a pose held for a few seconds, assisted by plastic surgery and a digital photo filter – but it makes us think we are inadequate. Yet you are made to be the way you are, to have the body and face you were given by God.

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