the cross

Faith over Fame – Sermon Preached on 14th June 2026 (Third Sunday of Trinity)

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

Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

A woman reclines while having her makeup applied by two unseen stylists. One stylist applies lip colour with a brush, while another works on her hair. She has dark, glossy hair swept back, heavy eye makeup with dark liner and mascara, and full, glossy lips. She is wearing a black top with a sequinned neckline. The image is shot at a slight angle, with a blurred red object in the foreground.
Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.

Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.

How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.

If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.

So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.

In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.

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How to Win by Embracing Failure: Sermon Preached on 14th September 2025 (Holy Cross Day)

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

Philippians 2. 6-11, John 3. 3-17

“Christ… became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

A religious sculpture set within a stone archway, featuring a central wooden crucifix with a figure of Jesus Christ, flanked by two standing figures, likely the Virgin Mary and Saint John, all crafted in a stylized, weathered material. The scene is illuminated by soft lighting against a textured wall background.
The modernist rood in the Augustinerkirche, an Old Catholic parish church in Zürich. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

You lot are a bunch of failures! A load of hypocrites who often do things against your own principles, and fail to deliver what you say you’ll do. Fair weather Christians who cave in too easily when the going gets tough. More than that, I know that at least some of you are here in Church today for decidedly mixed motives.

Don’t think you can try to hoodwink me, because I know all those things to be the case. I know they’re true, because they’re true of me also. And if we read the Bible, we find all that was true of the apostles, of Peter and James and all that lot, and that’s before we even begin talking about St Paul. And that is one of the most important things about Christianity—it’s not, despite what the Good Friday hymn says, a religion that promises to make us good; it’s a religion that makes promises to people who often aren’t very good.

So let me wish you a happy Holy Cross day!—For that is why I started my sermon in the way I did. The Cross has become probably the most successful visual brand in history, and that’s why we often miss that it’s actually a symbol of human failure. God walked among us in the person of Jesus Christ, actual God, healing and teaching and refusing both power and violence, and we put Him to death in one of the most horrific ways possible. We put Him to death in part because He told the truth, and we often hate the truth. Cosy lies often seem more comforting that the sometimes harsh cleanser that is truth. But we’ll come back to that.

The Cross upends everything. That’s the point of it. The means symbol Christ’s defeat is actually the means of his victory, and the symbol of our failure is actually the means of our liberation. The major part of that liberation we will experience only in the world to come, which the Cross opens to us. But some of that liberation we experience in the here and now, in the freedom from needing to be perfect the Cross provides.

I mean, would you have been one of the few who stayed by Jesus’ side even on the Cross? Would you have been with John and that handful of women? I’ve actually met a few of people who thought they would have done – who really thought they’d have managed what Peter and James and Thomas couldn’t do – and all have been the most egotistical pillocks, lacking all self-awareness. The rest of us know better than that. It is at the Cross that our delusions must die—and strangely, it is precisely knowing that we would have failed then, just as we so often do in our day-to-day lives, that liberates us to accept the flawed real people we are, the real people that God loves as they are.

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One Cross for a Divided Church: Sermon Preached on 21st July 2024 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

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A classic rood screen, late Victorian, with Mary and St John both facing the nave along with Christ, St Mary to the left.

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

Ephesians 2. 11-22; Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

“Christ … that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross…came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.”

The Church should be like one big family. We all agree with that, don’t we? It sounds very sweet and wholesome—until we remember what our own families are actually like in practice, and until we remember how we ourselves sometimes behave within them. As we all know, members of families don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything and they can sometimes fall out and start rowing. Don’t get me wrong—families are great. I wouldn’t be without mine. But they aren’t perfect.

A high modernist rood screen. St Mary and St John are squat and disordered, Mary buried deep in a headscarf; both are facing the congregation. Christ, in contrast, is lithe and sinewy, his contorted facial features hidden in shadow.
The rood in the Old Catholic Augustinerkirche in Zürich. This was executed by local sculptor Franz Fischer during the church’s reordering of 1958-9. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

This morning’s epistle reading, from Ephesians, is written to a church that is clearly, like many families, struggling with divisions. There are two factions here—one Jewish, and very clear that followers of Jesus Christ should, like good Jews, be circumcised; the other faction come from Gentile backgrounds, and cannot see why circumcision should be required for those of true faith in Christ. In fact, although this has traditionally been thought of as a letter to the Church in the city of Ephesus, no specific city or congregation is named in the text, and it may have been a more general letter to churches at a time when the number of Christians from non-Jewish backgrounds was growing rapidly, and tensions were rising.

From our perspective, circumcision seems like an arcane reason for a church to be divided, but pause and think about it for a moment, and it soon becomes obvious that it is rooted in issues that still cause deep divisions today’s Church – one is identity; the other is whether Christians are called to engage with the world to transform it, or instead to maintain our purity as a people set apart from the world. These are precisely the reasons why we’ve ended up so divided over women’s ordination, or same-sex marriage. Most of us are also terribly sure that only our side of those debates really understands what Jesus Christ taught us.

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We Preach Christ Crucified: Sermon Preached on 3rd March 2024 (Third Sunday in Lent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

1 Corinthians 1. 18-25; John 2. 13-22

“For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.”

I wonder if any of you have heard of the Bethel Bible Church of Redding, California? With 11,000 members, it is one of America’s biggest churches, in a little city smaller than Bath. With a firm faith in the power of God to work miracles, the Church is perhaps most famous for the “glory cloud” that sometimes appears at its services. This takes the form of a fog of golden dust that falls gently from the roof of its huge auditorium. Some scoff at the idea that this could be a miracle—but I think that it’s a real miracle that people haul all those heavy bags of glitter to the top of a huge building. I do envy the pastor there in some ways—it must make it easier to get people to pay the parish share when you can make godly glitter rain from the roof every time finances are a bit tight.

Matthias Grünewald's gruesome 1515 Crucifixion. Christ, visibly covered in cuts and wounds, is surrounded by St John, Mary, and Mary Magdalene with looks of horror on their faces while the Roman Centurion looks on with something more like awe.
Matthias Grünewald, Crufixion (ca. 1515), now hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel

St Paul writes in today’s Epistle that, “Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.” Today’s world is not so different from St Paul’s. It’s easy to scoff at Bethel Bible Church’s glory cloud but the world still wants the Church to prove itself by signs, and in our materialistic age that means to demonstrate its value in practical terms; people are often a bit suspicious of it, so they also demand that the Church prove itselves in alignment with the received wisdom of our own times. The Church is defensive and tetchy, as declining organisms often are, so while it usually happy to broadcast its good works, like a secular charity would, it gets a bit tetchy when its wisdom doesn’t align with the currently received wisdom, like a secular politician would. The Church is also very vain about being wise, even though it often conducts its internal affairs in a very unwise way.

Now wisdom is a funny thing. Like “beauty” it is usually a good thing, sometimes a divine thing, but it also has a second edge to it, a negative one when people get so wrapped up in wisdom that they ignore what’s right in front of them.

In that light, we need to ask if Jesus was, in fact, wise? Today’s Gospel reading is the very first act of Jesus’ public ministry as St John records it. In it, he goes off to Jerusalem, where His Galilean accent will stand out like a sore thumb, waltzes into the Temple, the epicentre of not just religious authority but local Jewish political power, overturns the money-changers’ tables, then chases them out with a whip. And why did he do that? So he could fulfil an ancient prophecy that He was the Messiah. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound “wise” to me, but a bit nuts.

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