original sin

The Man with the Plan: Sermon Preached on 21st December 2025 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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An aerial photograph captures a vast, rugged mountain landscape with multiple layers of jagged ridges extending into the distance. The foreground features sharp, barren peaks in shades of dark blue and gray, casting deep shadows in the valleys below. Successive ridges fade progressively into softer blues and purples due to atmospheric haze, creating a sense of immense depth and scale. The sky above is pale and hazy with a warm golden tint near the horizon, suggesting early morning or late afternoon light, accompanied by scattered thin clouds. The terrain appears arid and rocky, with no visible vegetation, rivers, or human structures, emphasizing the raw, untamed wilderness of a high-altitude mountain range. This panoramic view evokes the dramatic grandeur of remote canyons and sierras.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne; Holy Cross, Seend; and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Romans 1. 1-7; Matthew 1. 18-31

“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet…”

A painted mural on a white brick wall depicts a religious figure resembling Jesus Christ within a large, circular orange-red background resembling a halo or sun. The figure has long brown hair, a beard, and a serene expression, wearing a white robe with brown accents and a golden collar. On his chest is a glowing red Sacred Heart with flames and a cross. In his right hand, he holds the glowing heart outward, while his left hand cradles a blue and green globe representing Earth, showing the Americas. Below the circular portrait, a green rectangular banner with blue borders displays bold black capital letters reading "KEEP OUR WORLD CLEAN." The mural's style is folk-art inspired, with visible brushstrokes and slight wear on the wall surface.
“He’s Got the Whole Word in His Hands”, Willemstad, Curaçao © Gerry Lynch, 22 November 2007

♫♪“He’s got the whole world in is hands.”♪♫

It has been a very long time since I’ve started a sermon by singing from the pulpit. This song isn’t a Christmas song, but it is perfect for this last Sunday in Advent and the Bible readings set for us today—for both are saying that God has a long-term plan for the human race. Our Gospel reading says that strange story of Many conceiving by the Holy Spirit came about to fulfil what God said through the prophets; our other reading, from a letter St Paul wrote to the first generation of Christians in Rome, says that the good news of Jesus Christ had been foretold by the prophets long in advance.

So, this might give us a good chance to explore the long backstory of the first Christmas.

The Christian story starts at a mythical time, before history began, when human beings lived in harmony with one another, with nature, and with God. This was the Garden of Eden. Humans are identified right at the start of the Bible as being a very special part of creation – the last part to be created, made in the image and likeness of God, the summit of God’s handiwork. We were God’s apprentices, being trained to tend and keep the Earth, and made for eventual union with God. There were no rules in the garden – except for one. The only thing we were forbidden do was to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we were told that if we did, we would die. We ate the fruit, because we wanted knowledge that we had been warned was too hot for us to handle—we’ll come back to that idea later.

The Garden of Eden is, of course, a myth, but it expresses a truth too profound for dry facts—that as humans evolved, we became alienated from our true nature. We know from archaeology that even before humans had writing, we were already out of balance with the rest of life. We know that it was us who wiped out the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, long before we learned how to write, or work metals, or make wheels.

Once we had writing, around 5,000 years ago, history began. It had many glorious and beautiful episodes, but also had the constant presence of war and slavery. We were out of balance with God and with one another, and that is how we remain.

Yet the Bible tells that although we were often wilful, cruel, and self-defeating, and God sometimes got angry with us and chastised us as a result, He never abandoned us. Somehow, despite God giving us simple rules for living in harmony, and us often being full of good intentions to live according to them, we were never able to escape the darker side of our own nature.

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Why the Talking Snake Matters: Sermon Preached on Saturday 8th April 2023 (Easter Vigil)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Genesis 1.1 – 2.4; Genesis 3; Exodus 14.10-15.1; Ezekiel 37. 1-14; Romans 6. 3-11; Matthew 28. 1-10

Didn’t we have an awful lot of readings this evening? And weren’t a lot of them from odd bits of the Bible with unscientific stories like creation in six days, seas parting to open a walking path, and talking snakes? Wouldn’t we better just talking about God’s love and how God wants us to love others?

A tempera and gold painting on a copper base by William Blake of a radiant Eve being tempted by a golden, magnificently coiling, snake. Blake drew his inspiration for this scene from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament and from John Milton's epic poem 'Paradise Lost' (1667). Blake often experimented with painting techniques, and here the surface has flaked badly because of the poor adhesion between a glue-based paint and the copper support he used.
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). Hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t agree. These readings form the main arc of the Christian story – how we are related to God, and why Jesus had to come into the world: that’s why we have them tonight. They aren’t a science textbook and God never intended them to be when He inspired them to be written.

Science may explain our biological evolution but it does not explain our moral evolution. One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how did we change from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense, the ability to tell right from wrong? Where does the sense of right and wrong come from? That question provokes another, related, one – why do we human beings so often do things that we know to be wrong? For we seem to be doomed to constantly damage not only other human beings, but other life-forms, however well-meaning our intentions might be.

One of the saddest realities of human existence is that, as we spread across the world, mass extinctions of the native wildlife followed us in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived. That is true on every continent and island; ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire, we’ve been wiping other creatures out. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture.

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Worship is Worth It: Sermon Preached on 29th January 2023 (Fourth Sunday after The Epiphany)

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Preached at Evensong in St Mary the Virgin, Bishop’s Cannings

Genesis 28.10-22; Philemon 1–16

“…this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house.”

Philemon is not a text that preachers tend to thank the lectionary for throwing their way. Nonetheless I think it has quite a bit of interest to say to us here this evening, especially when paired with our Old Testament reading from Genesis, one of the most famous passages from that book, Jacob’s Ladder. Evensong often gives us the chance to engage with parts of the Bible that are rarely read in the Sunday morning lectionary. Tonight it certainly has.

White angels climbing up and down a ladder, representing a famous vision of Jacob in Genesis 28. A red sunset hovers overhead and a dark town is in the background. This is a painting by Mark Chagall from 1973.
Chagall, Jacob’s Ladder (1973).

There is often debate in the Church about whether the Church’s primary job is to help the needy or to worship almighty God. We often hear a similar debate about evangelism, where some argue it should be de-prioritised or even avoided entirely for the sake of helping the poor. In his letter to Philemon, St Paul sees all these things as being intimately connected with one another and mutually reinforcing one another. He prays for Philemon that “the communication of thy faith may become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus”. It is when we take time to recognise the good that Jesus Christ does in us and through us, and to thank Him for that in prayer, that we become effective in sharing our faith.

Philemon is a difficult document because in it Paul discusses Onesimus, a runaway slave, with Philemon, who is his owner. Any thought of doing anything other than condemning slavery makes us outraged, and rightly so. The sad reality, however, is nearly every human society, on every continent, began practising slavery as soon the development of agriculture made it practical. What more demonstration of the reality of original sin do we need?

Indeed, while our first instinct when reading this letter is to stand in pious judgement over St Paul and the Roman Imperial society that produced him, we might consider that for all their faults, the Romans never came close to threatening the planet’s capacity to support human life, something we’ve done remarkably quickly through nothing more sophisticated than burning a bit of coal and oil. We are very quick to judge those of the past perhaps precisely because we know that us people of the present are, for all our wealth and technological power, just as flawed as our ancestors.

So, I think part of what this difficult letter has to teach us that there is no perfect social or political order and that there never will be — we must live our lives as Christians and seek to do good and follow Christ in a world that will always have dark aspects. We can, of course, work to change the political system and the laws we live under. Christianity supplied most of those who led the worldwide abolition of slavery in the century before last and we thank God for them. But we won’t always succeed in our attempts to make the world a better place; in fact sometimes we won’t even be pushing for the right things. Attempts to create utopia, to actually build heaven on earth, have usually led to hellish outcomes; the first society to reintroduce forms of slavery after having previously abolished the practice was the Soviet Union, which claimed to be a staging-post towards the perfect system of governing the world.

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