religion and politics

Tyrants and a King: Sermon Preached on 24th November 2024 (Christ the King)

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Bernardo Luini, Christ Crowned With Thorns (ca. 1522). Now hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

John 18. 33-38; Revelation 1. 4-8

“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight…”

Portraits of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin

I’m currently reading a book called Stalin’s War by an American historian called Sean McMeekin. It’s grippingly written, but also a fairly contrarian take on the Second World War, so it has been rather controversial. This week, I found myself engrossed in his account of the build-up to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler and Stalin were big men, with grandiose ambitions to impose their hellish visions of utopia on Earth. These icons of tyranny, and the terrible, grand-scale, war between them will, I suspect, continue to fascinate people for long centuries after the Second World War has otherwise been forgotten. But for all that these men casually disposed of the lives of millions, Hitler’s empire collapsed barely four years after that invasion, while it is now more than a generation ago since the Union that Stalin led collapsed. They were big men, and terrible men, but nothing now remains of what they tried to create.

Pontius Pilate was also a big man. He was the governor of a province of the Roman Empire – admittedly, not a very large or wealthy one, but he was a power in the land. He was a man who was used to pronouncing judgement, especially on those ranked well below him, such as the strange holy men from the fringes of the Jewish religion who occasionally stirred up emotions in Jerusalem.

As it turns out, when the particular wandering preacher in today’s Gospel claimed, in a very strange phrase, that He was the ruler of a kingdom that was not of this world, He was telling the truth. He was indeed a king, a far greater king than either Pilate or the Jewish authorities could have imagined. He was king of the universe, God Himself, made incarnate as a human being. In handing Himself over to be condemned, Jesus Christ, God made human, judges every nation and every era, including our own, and their pretentions to justice and truth.

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Loving One’s Enemies: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26th December 2021 (St Stephen’s Day)

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Readings – Acts 7: 51–60 , Matthew 10: 17–22

Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’

Some of you will have heard the news that Archbishop Desmond Tutu died earlier this morning at the age of 90. Most of us would agree that Desmond was the greatest saint produced by Anglicanism in our lifetimes. It is appropriate that he died on the feast of Stephen, because both declared Christ’s teachings of non-retaliation most powerfully in their lives.

Non-retaliation isn’t the passive acceptance of being persecuted or discriminated against. Instead that it accepts that injustice can never be undone on its own terms. We know that there is both darkness and light in each of us. We know that once we say that the end justifies any means, then the line between victim and victimiser starts to become dangerously blurred.

But both Saint Stephen and Desmond Tutu went beyond merely refusing to be silenced in the face of oppression, and in doing so, lived out one of the most challenging and most rewarding of Christ’s teachings. Let me explain. Many of Christ’s moral teachings were the same as those of other great teachers and philosophers of the ancient world. Some form of the golden rule, to do to others as you would have them do unto you, is seen in the teachings of Buddha, and Zoroaster, and Greek philosophy.

An image of the painting entitled The Stoning of Stephen (ca. 1603-4) by Adam Elsheimer. Now in the Scottish National Gallery.
The Stoning of Stephen (ca. 1603-4) by Adam Elsheimer. Now in the Scottish National Gallery.

There is one teaching of Christ that was absolutely unique, however. It is the most revolutionary of Christ’s teachings and the one which is hardest to follow; I certainly don’t manage to put it into practice very often. That is his command to love our enemies. Remember, that the command is not, absolutely not, as the lives of both Stephen and Desmond show us, to acquiesce in the evil that our enemies do to us – but to love them, to love them enough to recognise their humanity. To love them enough to recognise that we may be the only agents God has to rescue them from the darkness that consumes them. To love our enemies is to understand that our response to their persecution may be what brings out the image of God that is stamped in each of them and enables them to turn from evil.

It is a wonderful teaching. Let me reiterate, I’m not pretending it’s easy to live out in practice. But Desmond Tutu’s life and Stephen’s show us that in the saints of the church, we have examples to follow of how to respond to persecution not in its own terms, but in refusing the twin dangers of both acquiescence and of hate.

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