sermon Archives - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

True Light and Deep Darkness: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2024 (Midnight Mass)

25 December 202424 December 2024 by Gerry Lynch

The image captures a breathtaking night sky filled with countless stars, with the Milky Way galaxy prominently visible, stretching diagonally from the top right to the bottom left. The sky is a deep, rich blue, contrasting with the bright, sparkling stars. A faint, white streak of a shooting star or meteor is visible near the top right, adding a dynamic element to the scene. In the foreground, on the left side, stands a large, rugged boulder. This boulder has a rough texture, with visible cracks and crevices, and appears to be part of a natural landscape. The ground around the boulder is covered in grass, which appears slightly illuminated, possibly by moonlight or a distant light source. In the background, there are a few trees, their dark silhouettes adding depth and framing the scene. The trees are spaced out, suggesting an open field or meadow. The overall composition of the image evokes a sense of tranquility and the vastness of the universe, with the ancient rock contrasting against the eternal expanse of the cosmos.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“…the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

It’s a pity that it’s so cloudy tonight, because the night sky is magnificent at present, especially around midnight. The winter stars, held together by Orion and Sirius are all rising in the south-east about this time of night, with the brilliant white of Jupiter and jaunty red of Mars making a cameo appearance for this winter only.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Devizes four years ago was how dark the skies are in this part of Wiltshire, especially as one looks south towards Salisbury Plain, where there is very little artificial light to ruin the view.

A sad reality of the present is that only a small minority of people in the world now ever see the night stars in all their glory. Most people now live in cities, where thousands of streetlights waste much of their energy by leaking upwards, doing no good to anyone below but ruining the night sky.

The human race now has so much power that the light we waste is enough to obliterate the glories of nature.

The light that really dominates our lives in the 21^st Century, however, is that of flickering screens, the sickly blue glow that comes from our phones, tablets, and televisions, which impacts our system so profoundly that it even disturbs our sleep. Beyond that, these screens make us agitated about things that we can do little about and could probably quite easily ignore. The programmes on our TVs and apps on our phones are also intentionally designed to seize our attention, to distract us from anything that might encourage us to tune away from the channel, or close the app.

By possessing our attention these screens crowd out the space we might have to think, or just to allow our minds to slow down. I am as guilty of being distracted by all this as anyone; I am constantly flipping between tabs as I try to write my sermons.

None of this technology ever seems to make us better. We live in a society surrounded by all sorts of light we have generated ourselves. But our souls are as dark as they ever have been. In fact all this artificial light just seems to make that spiritual darkness more visible. We parade our anger and intolerance on social media apps and radio phone in shows.

Waiting Patiently: Sermon Preached on 11th December 2022 (The Third Sunday of Advent)

11 December 2022 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – James 5: 7–10; Matthew 11: 2–11

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”

The other day, I tried to order one of those little plastic ice scrapers for the car from Amazon, partly so that I could be sure of getting here to take this service this morning! Given the pre-Christmas rush, I couldn’t get one to arrive before the middle of next week.

“How dare they”, I fumed inwardly to myself, “I’m an Amazon Prime member specifically so I can get deliveries of almost anything I need overnight. Just because they’re busy, and just because half the factories in China have been shut for most of this year, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have nearly anything I need within 24 hours!”

A snowy scene as I left St Peter’s, Poulshot, after preaching this sermon.

Patience is a virtue: but not one I have ever been much possessed of! The structure of modern society doesn’t help, with its promise that it can satisfy any of our wants almost instantaneously. Yet fulfilling most needs more significant than an ice-scraper or a case of wine demands patience, and can’t be done with a few clicks on a website.

By the time John the Baptist came along, some strands of Jewish opinion were waiting with impatient fervour for a Messiah, a religious-political leader who they believed would remove the Roman occupiers and usher in a new political order of justice and righteousness in a godly independent state.

Now, Matthew’s Gospel identified Jesus as the Messiah in its very first sentence, and it does so again in this morning’s Gospel reading. But that is something intended for those, like us, reading the story much later: in the action of the story, even Jesus’ closest followers have not worked out his true identity by this point. When, shortly afterwards, Peter does work out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell anyone. The time was not yet ripe.

The messages that pass between John and Jesus here are interesting in that light. Firstly, John the Baptist, in prison at the hands of Herod Antipas, asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” So, despite the fact nothing could possibly be better news for John in those terrible circumstances than to hear that Jesus, the man he baptised in the Jordan, is the Messiah, he is prepared to wait if the time is not yet ripe for God to send it.

Another interesting thing is that Jesus doesn’t simply say that He is the Messiah. Instead, he asks John’s messengers to relay news of his miracles and says “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Jesus presents the evidence of what he is doing in the world, but respects John’s right to make up his own mind about his nature in good faith. Whether or not he accepts that Jesus is the Messiah, he will be blessed if he takes no offence Him.

There is a lot in this exchange that chimes with our experience of how God interacts with humanity in our world. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. Maybe it is possible, in the vastness of the universe, that some lengthy sequence of random events led to the existence not only of life, but intelligent, self-aware life, with a sense of morality.

Stumbling Blocks and Salt: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26 September 2021 (The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)

26 September 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – James 5.13–20; Mark 9.38–50

“Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

There is a striking and rather horrifying picture about our Christian past that occasionally does the rounds on the Internet. It is a photograph of two strangely shaped tombstones, located either side of a high wall. The tombstones are even higher, and from the top of each a hand stretches out to touch the other.

Grave in Roermond © memolands.com gallery — The touching hands between the tombs of Colonel van Gorcum and Lady van Aefferden in the Dutch city of Roermond. © memolands.com gallery and used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0.

The graves are located in the Dutch city of Roermond, and belong to Colonel van Gorcum, a Protestant cavalry officer, and his wife Lady van Aefferden, a Catholic minor noble. They were married in 1842, and after thirty-eight years of presumably happy marriage, the Colonel died and was buried in the Protestant part of the local cemetery, where the dead were divided from one another denominationally by a high wall. His wife therefore refused to be buried in the grand family plot, in the Catholic part of the cemetery, insisting that she would be buried on her own immediately across the wall from him. That is where she was laid to rest eight years later, in 1888, and their graves remain to this day a reminder of the capacity of love to triumph over bigotry.

Love conquers all – even tribalism and stupidity.

Christ presents a dire warning in today’s Gospel about those who place stumbling blocks in the way of faith. The horrid things done due to disagreements between Catholics and Protestants are a huge stumbling block to Christian faith for many, a major contributor to the decline of Christianity in this country and across Europe. Today we pay a heavy price for the sins for the past.

Of course, we’re not like that these days. We’re much more enlightened. Devizes is now absolutely normal in terms of today’s Christianity, certainly in this country, in that the social action of the Church, our commitment to supporting the needy, or the homeless, or people with addiction problems, is carried out absolutely ecumenically. Not only do Conservative Roman Catholics work hand in hand with staunchly Evangelical Protestants, but both work with people at the most theologically liberal end of the Quakers or Anglicans or Methodists, who might see themselves as following a Christian path towards a universal truth rather than understanding Christianity as even presenting a distinct truth at all. All of us seem to have taken on board Jesus’ command to the apostles today about the stranger healing in His name: “Do not stop him; for … whoever is not against us is for us.”

“Waiting”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 6 December 2020 (the 2nd Sunday of Advent)

6 December 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-10

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you

Madonna and Child in an Advent-tide Old St Paul’s, Edinbugh. 14 December 2018. © Gerry Lynch

At the start of the week, I had to order a few items from a major online retailer. I’ll not give it any free advertising by mentioning the name. Suffice to say it’s a firm called after a major river in South America known for, how shall I put it, being very efficient in tax matters. Among the items I procured is the new external mic for the parish’s tablet to improve the quality of our streaming, which I hope those of you watching at home are enjoying, as well as some cabling to improve the internet connection around the curate’s house.

I wanted the cabling to arrive before the Advent course started on Tuesday evening, and I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t seem to find any delivery options earlier than Wednesday, even though I was willing to spend a few quid extra to do so. It’s absolutely ridiculous, after all, that in the middle of a global pandemic, I can’t have all my consumer desires satisfied within 24 hours.

Or, maybe not.

We have become a culture that has had our capacity to wait eroded by consumer industries that know we’ll spend more with them if they can satisfy our needs instantly. I’m not enough of a hypocrite to stand up here in the pulpit and pretend to you that I don’t love it, either. It is, however, only part of the story. For all of us life involves much waiting, not least when we are very young or very old, and for the most vulnerable among us life is largely a matter of waiting. We usually find ourselves waiting because we are in a situation where we are either dependent on others, or else dependent on circumstance and therefore in a situation where only God can help. Right at this moment, the whole world is in waiting in hopeful agony for the vaccines that seem set to deliver us from the nightmare that has been the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty.

To be human, in this world of matter, space, and time, is to wait. One of the gifts of this season of Advent is that it hallows and allows us to bring before God the waiting that punctuates our lives. After all, the Church has been waiting since the day of Ascension, waiting for the return of the Lord.

Our epistle this morning is from the Second Letter of Peter, which is very much a product of waiting – indeed a text which was written at a time when the waiting had become almost too much to bear. Despite its name, it was almost certainly not written by St Peter; as early as the 3^rd Century, Origen regarded its true authorship as a matter of doubt, as did Eusebius who wrote some decades letter. Now, as I am not a scriptural literalist, I don’t think doubts about the letter’s authorship necessarily reduce its value to us. Firstly, I take seriously that all Scripture is God-breathed and written for our instruction, and that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit in the process by which it decided conclusively on the canon of Scripture. But that does not mean reading the Bible as if it were instructions for a piece of flat-pack furniture. Scripture teaches us as much as anything else through the blind spots and misunderstandings of the people who wrote it, for we are human beings just like them, prone to the same mistakes, and especially prone to co-opting God for our own agendas.

“Like A Thief in the Night”: Sermon Preached for St John’s Devizes Digital Worship on Sunday 15 November 2020 (the 2nd Sunday Before Advent) by Gerry Lynch

6 December 202015 November 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night=

© Used under fair use -The image is used for identification in the context of critical commentary of the work.

Before I sat down to plan my sermon for this morning, I thought I would want to say something optimistic and cheerful at a time when we were locked down for a second time, and locked out of our church for a second time. Then I looked at the readings for the day and found I had to preach on texts about the Second Coming, and about a worthless slave being thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Oh dear, I thought to myself.

So I had a wee pray about it and I realised that I didn’t want to be cheerful and optimistic at all. I wanted to be hopeful in this new lockdown, which is something quite different. Hope is not optimism; it does not depend on taking a positive spin on the facts; nor is hope good cheer, for hope is the most powerful tool we have for carrying us through the times when we are at our bleakest. Real hope doesn’t come from talking about posies and fluffy bunny rabbits. One of the things that most often renews our hope is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well. Real hope must be capable of enduring the worst that the world and humankind can throw at it, for the worst will inevitably be thrown at it at some point. Hope outlasts optimism and good cheer, global depressions and planetary pandemics; along with faith and love it will endure unto eternity. Hope will survive the end of the world.

We associate the Second Coming with the end of the world. We hear and read a lot about the end of the world a lot at the moment, or at least the end of the world we knew on New Year’s Day 2020. At moments we must all have lapsed into depression that this new abnormal will never end, that we will never again share the peace in church, that we’ll never again have a large group of friends round for a drink, that we’ll never lose the terror that we’ll wake up one morning not being able to smell the coffee, with a high temperature and a dry persistent cough. We lock down full of fear as the November days grow rapidly shorter and darker, and fear that the world has indeed ended, and we’re in a sort of hell. Then we learn the news about the vaccine trial and we wonder if we dare hope that there will again come a time when we sing hymns together and find ourselves chatting to a stranger in a pub who becomes a new friend and hug our loved ones without fear.

This morning’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, however, does not write about the end of the world, but the coming of the day of the Lord. This passage is often associated in the popular Christian imagination with the end times thanks to some very shaky theology from as recently as the 19^th Century. Later there was a 1970s American film called A Thief in The Night, a second rate B-movie with a bit of Jesus thrown in, which was very influential in fundamentalist Protestant circles. In it, a lady wakes up to find that her husband and millions of other real Christians have been taken to heaven, leaving her and other fake Christians behind with the unbelievers under the jackboot of an oppressive world government run by the UN which wants to force her to have the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and damn her for all eternity! All of this got a high budget, Internet-era, makeover with the Left Behind series of books and films which were, if anything, even worse: a living reminder that while good taste can’t be bought, bad taste can.

“Rebuild my Church”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 4 October 2020 (the 17th Sunday After Trinity) by Gerry Lynch

6 December 20204 October 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Church of St Damian, Assisi. Photo credit Berthold Werner.

It is a time of troubles. Plagues, accelerated by the rapid growth in intercontinental trade, spread across the world with dizzying speed. The economic gap between rich and poor is yawning, and many of the young have given up on the ability of the existing order to usher in a just society and are seeking a completely fresh start, consigning the old ways to the dustbin of history with as much aggression as needed. The West and the Islamic world are at loggerheads, with Western powers embroiled in multiple bloody conflicts in the Middle East, which started so long ago that nobody much remembers how or why they started. I am not, of course, talking about the present day but about the first years of the 13^th Century, a time when the older townsfolk of Devizes will still have remembered the Church of St John the Baptist being built. There is truly nothing new under the Sun.

In that tumultuous time, a rich young party animal called Francis, whose feast we commemorate today, was having a life crisis. Set to inherit a family fortune, he had spent his youth hanging out with the troubadours, the wandering bands of minstrels who travelled around during the High Middle Ages making music, singing with them in his beautiful voice and partying with them. An attempt to settle down a little by turning his hand to soldiering had resulted in Francis spending a year as a prisoner of war. After that, his former life of drinking and dancing no longer had any appeal. He wandered the countryside of his native central Italy, half-starved and dressed in rags, begging God to show him a more meaningful way of life. One day, Francis stumbled across a church dedicated to Saint Damian, no older than the then relatively new St John’s, but already falling into disrepair. Amid the crumbling stones, he had a vision of an Icon of Christ Crucified that hung in the church speaking to him. “Rebuild my Church”, it said.

He took up the task with enthusiasm, starting with the physical rebuilding of that Church of St Damian, and going on to work for a spiritual renovation of the whole Christian world. Some of his schemes were perhaps a little overambitious: he once travelled to Cairo, reckoning that if he could only convert the Sultan to Christianity then he could end the wars connected to the Crusades. You will not be surprised to learn that he wasn’t successful.

But that isn’t the point – the point is that he gave things a go. Following Christ isn’t about following a series of step-by-step orders like the instructions for setting up a new mobile phone. As we know, that doesn’t guarantee success anyway. Richard Holloway once described the Christian journey as being less like marching to a heavenly military band and more like joining God in a jazz jam session, listening to the music God is playing and seeking to chime our own personal riffs with His. Christian obedience is about co-operating with God and recognising our own immense value to Him. God is not a cosmic sergeant-major waiting to scream at us angrily if we miss a beat. If God doesn’t pick up on the tune we’re playing, we can always get back into the beat in the next bar. New life can begin at any time. Following Christ is about trying to sense where the Holy Spirit is leading, trying different ideas, accepting that God will not pick up on some of them, because it’s only in a world of chance and risk and serendipity that other little tunes we toot can blossom into symphonies that are more magnificent than anything we could have imagined.

Chapel Address at Evensong, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, 4 November 2019

6 December 20204 November 2019 by Gerry Lynch

Chapel Address at Evensong, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, 4 November 2019
Gerry Lynch

“When you talk to God, it’s called prayer. When God talks to you, it’s called insanity.”

That bon mot came to mind as I pondered today’s readings from the first chapters of Daniel and Revelation, two of the most misunderstood and misused books of the Bible, yet also among the most transcendent.

Prophecy has always been a tricky topic in the Church – St Paul admonished the Corinthian Church about it. The soldiers who beat up the blindfolded Jesus demanded he guess which of them had struck him. They were confusing prophecy and fortune-telling. It is still a common mistake, and made as much within the Church, or at last at its fringes, as it is outside it. The YouTube fanatics who drop random texts from Revelation to confidently predict the arrival of doomsday next Wednesday have done tremendous damage to the Church.

The Belfast of my boyhood was thick with these chancers. There was even a BBC children’s TV drama of the early 1980s, set in Belfast, about one of these street corner Jeremiahs, entitled The End of the World Man. Of course the title character was nothing but a hypocrite, setting himself up in self-righteous judgement while using his political connections to facilitate a corrupt land deal to destroy a patch of urban wilderness much loved by our televisual child heroes. If you want to lampoon the Church, these self-proclaimed prophets are an easy way to do it. And they are terribly unbiblical. The end will come like a thief in the night; it is not ours to know when and how it will come; Jesus says this very directly in St Matthew’s Gospel.

Sermon Preached at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, 3 November 2019

6 December 20203 November 2019 by Gerry Lynch

Sermon Preached at Sung Mass at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, 3 November 2019 (All Saints’ Day transferred) Gerry Lynch

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. (Revelation 7:9)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

That was a great hymn we started with this morning, wasn’t it, For All The Saints? And there’s more to come later. All the same, the hymn that I’ve always found most appropriate for this season of All Saintstide isn’t in the hymnbook used in this church, the New English Hymnal. At the moment, the New English Hymnal is being revised and I hope they might make space for my favourite All Saintstide hymn in the revision. Can you guess what it is? You’ll all know it. It’s the one that goes:

♪ Oh, when the saints! ♫
♫ Oh, when the saints! ♪
♪ Oh, when the saints come marching in! ♫
♫ I want to be in that number, when the saints come marching in! ♪
[Yes, I did break into song from the pulpit… and even had a wee dance.]

Now, the reason for that – that performance – from the trainee preacher from vicar school was to ask you all a question: do you want to be in that number when the saints come marching in? Do you think you have it in you to become a saint? Is saintliness something that we should aspire to? Or does sainthood instead represent an impossibly high standard, and the attempt to achieve it leave us doomed to failure at best, and at worst arrogantly claiming to be far better than we could possibly be, smugly looking down on the rest of humanity from a pedestal so high that it gives everyone else a clear view of our many and obvious faults?

Sermon at Christ the King, Johannesburg, 8 September 2019

9 October 202010 September 2019 by Gerry Lynch

Sermon Preached at Christ the King Anglican Church, Mondeor, Johannesburg (Diocese of Christ the King) on Sunday 8 September 2019 (Twelfth Sunday After Trinity)

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”. (Lk 6.26)

May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes even the most Bible-based of Christians encounter a passage of Scripture that offends much of what they take as given about the Christian faith. Often it is a saying of Jesus Christ Himself. When that happens, there are two natural reactions: one is to try to minimise the importance of that passage; the other is to try and rationalise away the obvious meaning of the words, to somehow force them to fit a more conventional understanding.

This morning’s Gospel reading contains just such a phrase, and I ask you to avoid either of those temptations, and to allow for the possibility that Jesus Christ will have known exactly how disturbing and uncomfortable these words will have been. They will have been disturbing to the devoted and strong families of both the Jewish and Roman Imperial cultures of his day. Beyond that local context, this passage is offensive and disturbing to people across the vast chasms that separate us from the world that Jesus Christ walked, for these words strike at the heart of the closest human relationships that are most treasured by people in every place and time. God can only have inspired these words as Holy Scripture knowing them to be offensive.

In early 21^st Century Christianity, family values have come to be seen as being at the very heart of the faith. I do not for a moment wish to decry strong family values. Those of you who live in homes shaped by them are truly blessed – give thanks to God for your fortune and pray that he will guide you so that this will continue. But there is a strong warning here that we must not make an idol of our families and, indeed, that we must not make an idol of any of our preconceptions of what living as a Christian means. None of us can ever perfectly and completely understand the message of the Christian Gospel – that perfect knowledge belongs to God alone. We Christians are not perfect, and there is a great temptation to pick out the parts of Scripture that are comfortable for ourselves. It is a natural temptation to pretend that we already at least very close to what God wants us to be. Instead, cherish these difficult parts of Scripture, and allow God to provoke you out of your comfort zone, driving you forwards to become ever more like the people he has made you to become.