religious persecution

Popes, Kings, and Tax Collectors: Sermon Preached on 26th October 2025 (Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18. 9–14

“The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people…’”

Pope Leo XIV, dressed in white papal robes with a red and gold embroidered chasuble, walks down the ornate tiled aisle of the Sistine Chapel alongside King Charles III, who wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, black tie, and white pocket square. A cleric in black robes with magenta accents follows closely behind them, holding a book, while Queen Camilla, in a black dress and veiled hat, and other attendees are visible in the background. Rows of empty red upholstered chairs with gold frames line both sides of the aisle, and the chapel's renowned ceiling and walls, painted with Michelangelo's frescoes including scenes from The Last Judgment and biblical figures, loom above.
King Charles and Pope Leo in the Sistine Chapel, 23 October 2025 © Vatican Media

The Pope and the Queen played an outsized role in the graffiti I saw as a boy. Their titles usually appeared in a three-letter acronym only differentiated by its last letter. The first letter was ‘F’, and did indeed stand for the F-word you’re wondering if the Rector is actually going to use in the pulpit. The second letter was ‘T’, simply for “the”. And the last letter was either ‘P’ or ‘Q’. It was, in a strange way, quite useful to have ‘FTP’ or ‘FTQ’ written on a wall, as if you were somewhere unfamiliar, it gave you an instant visual clue as to what sort of place you were in, and therefore whether you could tell the truth about who you were and where you came from, or whether you had to tell a few little white lies.

The Pope of Rome and the King or Queen of England were our respective bogeymen. You might not have had anything much against them personally, you may even have sort of liked what you saw of them on the TV, but you knew if you were rude about them, you were taking a pop at a sacred symbol of the other side, and you were also warning anybody on your own side who might go soft what was expected of them.

Of course, it’s easy from the security of rural England to roll your eyes at all that and say, ‘Well what do you expect from Northern Ireland?’ But for four hundred years, this division wasn’t just in Northern Ireland, but across Europe and later across the world. One side said there was no salvation outside their Church, while the other loved phrases like: “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities”.

One of the mainstays of British national identity was, into the early 20th Century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Almost forgotten now, it was full of grizzly stories of godly Protestants being burned at the sake and disembowelled, usually accompanied by lurid ink drawings that, in the days before horror movies, were probably part of its appeal. The Catholic minority in England had their equivalent stories of saints being crushed to death, or quartered while alive, and Irish Catholics not only had similar stories but outright dispossession in their own country to draw on.

The saddest part is, all the stories were true, in all their cruelty. Tyburn really happened, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre really happened. But people tended to remember the stories of when they were victims, and often chose not remember the stories where they were making the victims. Christians proclaim that Christ, who rejected violence and revenge and conquest and power, is the victim sacrificed for the sins of the world—and then, too often, go out and make more victims in His name. When do that, we nail Christ to the Cross all over again.

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Modern Medes and Parthians (Pentecost, 8 June 2025)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17

“how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…”

A fresco painting featuring a religious scene with a group of figures seated around a table, each with a halo, suggesting they are saints or holy figures. Above them is an ornate architectural structure with arches and a blue sky background, adorned with a dove encircled by a halo, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The painting includes intricate decorative borders and shows some signs of wear and fading.
Giotto, Pentecost (1290-9). In the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi, Italy.

Hearing today’s reading about the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites reminded me of a Pentecost a few years ago in a Church in Belfast. I heard this passage read with a strong and distinctive accent—not mine, but an accent that as distinctive in Belfast as it would be in Wiltshire. It turned out this accent came from the land of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites—some of whom heard the apostles preach in their own languages at the first Pentecost. The lands that were once Parthia, Media, and Elam have been part of Iran for over a millennium, and the lesson was read by a member of what is by now a large Iranian community in Belfast, many of them converts to Christianity.

When the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, there were only around 170,000 Christians in the country, mostly from the ancient Assyrian and Armenian communities. While they were given a protected minority status by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government – as long as they kept their heads down – severe repression was unleashed against the small number of converts from Muslim backgrounds and the churches they belonged to. The Anglican priest in the city of Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was murdered at his desk within eight days of the Revolution. The repression has come in waves since. Right now, a mother of two young children and convert to Christianity named Aida Najaflou has been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for four months facing trumped-up charges of “acting against national security”.

We would expect a Church facing such persecution to be in terminal decline. Yet, while tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iran into exile, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.

If you told the average person in the UK that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran had converted from Islam to Christianity, they’d probably refuse to believe you. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.

Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for religious freedom for people of all faiths, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying just over a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.

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The Impossible Becomes Real: Sermon Preached on 30th July 2023 (8th Sunday After Trinity)

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The national flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Preached at St Matthew’s, Rowde (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – 1 Kings 6. 1–11, 23–38; Acts 12. 1–17      

“[Rhoda] ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, ‘Thou art mad.’”

Our New Testament reading this evening is one of the most familiar stories from the earliest years of the Church. Peter has been imprisoned during a bout of persecution in Jerusalem, and faces being executed just as like James, the brother of John, had been shortly before. In the dead of night, he finds his chains suddenly falling off and an angel leading him into freedom. At first, Peter doesn’t believe the incident himself. He assumes it must be a dream.

Next to a sleeping guard in plate mail, St Peter, wearing a blue top and looking surprised, looks up at a glowing angel flying above him in a glow of clouds. This is the painting The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, by Baltasar Beschey, painted in 1769. It now hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.
Baltasar Beschey. The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, (1769). Hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.

Peter’s fellow Christians in Jerusalem, who have been fervently praying for him, also refuse to believe this miracle at first. They told Rhoda, the domestic servant who came to the gate when Peter first knocked, that she must be mad. Interestingly, as with the Resurrection, the first witness of this emergence into new life is a woman of low social status. God continually upends our expectations—not only of who is important and trustworthy, but of what is possible at all.

This miraculous experience does not make the persecution of the Jerusalem Church vanish. Indeed, persecution remained a dominant them of the Church’s life in its first centuries.

It is all a long way from the scene at Solomon’s Temple in our Old Testament reading. Sometimes the Church has been able to follow in the footsteps of Solomon, building great places of worship to the glory of God; at other times, it has had to meet in secret and in hiding. Both extremes can be found in the world today.

Leading up to the year 2000, the Vatican established a commission to examine those who had died for their faith in recent generations; it concluded that there had been twice as many Christian martyrs in the 20th Century as in the previous nineteen combined. Our own Westminster Abbey had ten statues of martyrs carved above its west door in the 1990s, representing Christians of every continent and many denominations who died for their faith in the 20th Century, from Martin Luther King to Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia.

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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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Sexual and Religious Freedoms: the First Casualties of Russian Crimea?

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The excellent Forum 18 organisation, which supports freedom of religious belief and disbelief in Europe and Asia, reports a recent wave of harrasment of and raids on premises owned by Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses in what is now Russian-controlled Crimea. Officials claim they are merely searching for ‘extremist’ literature and the region’s Prime Minister has … Read more