suffering

The Glory to be Revealed: Sermon Preached on 23nd July 2023 (7th Sunday After Trinity)

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A field of poppies, surrounded by lush green grass, catching rich evening light, near Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8: 12–25; Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43

“I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

On Friday evening, I was out walking near North Wilts Golf Course, when I stumbled across a field full of poppies in rich evening light. I wandered along the field margin entranced by magical scenes, like the single sunflower, presumably the result of a stray seed, adding a dash of yellow to the reds and greens. Overhead, the larks sang.

A lone sunflower amid a field of poppies, near Bishops Cannings in Wiltshire.
21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

At times, I was quite overwhelmed by beauty. I found myself thinking of the struggles I’d had in life – the very unlikely and occasionally painful path that led me to being a country parson in Wiltshire, which I could never have planned for myself and which nobody could have predicted. I thanked God volubly, moved almost to tears with joy.

Of course, life isn’t always like this. To turn on the news is to be confronted with catastrophes, from a heatwave in southern Europe that seems to intimate environmental disaster to a war in Ukraine that seems to be locked into a deadly stalemate in the trenches.

Still harder to bear than these terrifying but systemic problems is our own suffering and the suffering of those we love. I was reading an article in The Tablet yesterday by the Oxford-based Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe. Timothy is to my mind the best popular theologian in Britain today, capable of explaining difficult concepts in understandable language to ordinary Christians. He revealed that, last year, he had survived a terrifying and risky 36-hour operation for jaw cancer. Although initially it seemed to have been a complete success, recently his consultants had picked up signs of fresh pre-cancerous cells in his jaw. The random operation of fate can sometimes be terribly cruel.

If all there were to the world were the stories of humanity’s struggles to survive and struggles with one another, the world would be a grim place. Yet we see signs everywhere, like the beauty of a field of poppies, that our existence is much greater and more magnificent than the hardest parts of life would indicate.

Some poppies on top of a hill, surrounded by lush green grass, looking down to a flat plain below with a long stand of deciduous trees in the distance.
21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

For example, if I am capable of being overwhelmed by the beauty of a field of poppies on a gorgeous summer evening, it begs the question why human beings have a sense of beauty. It isn’t necessary for evolutionary purposes: we can survive and produce the next generation of humans without it. In a similar vein, why do we have the capacity to feel awe? Why does love seem to be the single most transformative aspect of human existence?

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When We Are Angry At God: Sermon Preached on 12th February 2023 (Second Sunday before Lent)

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Romans 8. 18–25; Matthew 6. 25–34

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

“…the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Can any of us imagine anything more terrifying than an earthquake? In Turkey and Syria last week millions of lives were devastated in the space of a few minutes in the middle of the night. The images on our screens overwhelm us even from this distance; we can scarcely imagine the feelings of those on the ground, sleeping in tents or in their cars amid the rubble.

When I was in my twenties, I took three holidays travelling on my own in southern Turkey, around some of the regions worst affected by this week’s earthquake. Cities mentioned in news reports this week – Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman – aren’t abstract places to me. They’re where I met the Arab workmen on the bus who didn’t speak Turkish, let alone English, but shared their peaches with me. They’re where I met the police officer on the first morning of Ramadan who invited me to break the fast in his home with his family that evening. They’re where, a few days later, I found the pub on the upper floors of an office building that was still open in Ramadan, and got drunk late into the night with left-wing political activists while we taught each other Irish and Kurdish folk songs.

It is a part of the world with its troubles, like many places, and also an incredibly hospitable one, rich in music and architecture and human kindness. Its people did nothing to deserve the hell visited on them last week.

Two men and a woman walk past a building flattened in the 6 February 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Turkey. Dust from rubble clearly hangs in the air.
Earthquake damage in Hatay, Turkey. Credit – Hilmi Hacaloğlu.

Earthquakes aren’t caused by human beings. The slipping of tectonic plates is simply the way the world works. Their randomness and violence can leave us angry at God. Perhaps all the more when we hear Jesus telling us in this morning’s Gospel reading to look at how pretty God made the lilies of the field and so trust that He will make sure we will have all we need. But sometimes God doesn’t send people what they need to eat and drink or wear. Many thousands of people over the next few weeks, especially in Syria, some of them devout Christians, are going to die from hunger and cold. Let’s be honest about that. A faith that is incapable of being honest about the reality of human existence is a faith that is scarcely worth having.

Stephen Fry, who is a rather crusading atheist, was once asked in an interview about what he would say to God if he found out after he died that there was in fact an afterlife. He responded with honest anger “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?’” If the best answer Christians can give to that, or to the dead children under the rubble in Turkey and Syria, is that if only everybody lived as Jesus taught us, then the world would be wonderful, then we deserve to be rejected by the world. If promises of material security – that often seem to be broken – were all there were to the Christian faith, then the world would be right to reject it.     

That isn’t the whole story, however. St Paul reminds us in this morning’s epistle that we do not hope for things we see, but what cannot be seen. Our hope as Christians doesn’t lie entirely in this world, but also in what lies beyond it. St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle that the agonies of today are the labour pains that herald the coming glory, which we wait for along with the whole of creation.

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