the fall

The Madness of Mobs: Sermon Preached on 29nd March 2026 (Palm Sunday)

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

Philippians 2. 5-11; Matthew 21. 1-11

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’”

A screenshot from the BBC television programme Wogan. Two people are seated facing each other in a talk-show setting with a neutral beige studio backdrop. On the left, a woman with short, voluminous auburn hair wears a bright teal blazer over a patterned blue and purple dress. She is looking toward her interviewer with a composed expression. On the right, a man with dark, collar-length hair, seen from behind and in profile, wears a dark grey suit and has his hands clasped together as if mid-conversation. The BBC logo is visible in the upper left corner and the programme name "Wogan" appears in the upper right. The styling and set design are consistent with British television production of the mid-to-late 1980s.
Lindy Chamberlain on the BBC Wogan Show in 1991. © BBC; used under Fair Use doctrine

Does anyone remember a lady in Australia named Lindy Chamberlain? If you don’t remember the name, you may remember her story. While camping at Ayers Rock in 1980, her nine-week-old daughter disappeared while she and her husband were making the evening meal at a barbeque pit. Chamberlain said she had seen a dingo leaving their family tent when she returned to check after hearing her daughter crying. Although other campers who were there that evening believed her, few members of the Australian public gave this unlikely story any credibility. I mean, “A dingo stole my baby…”—sure, love, whatever you say. Whipped up by the media, Chamberlain became a national and even international hate figure, with the hate exacerbated by the fact that she was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and therefore seemed insufficiently grief-stricken by conventional norms.

Two years later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murdering her own daughter, and soon exhausted every possible means of appeal. Yet she only served three years before the prosecution case fell apart: by chance, nearly six years after her disappearance, her daughter’s cardigan was found in a remote area with many dingo lairs; the prosecution’s forensic evidence also turned out to be full of flaws. Chamberlain was released: the hate figure turned out to be an innocent woman.

Somewhat closer to home, both in time and space, is Christopher Jefferies, a cultured and rather eccentric retired public schoolmaster from Bristol. When his lodger Joanna Yeates was murdered in 2010, the press went feral, portraying him as a sinister oddball who was almost certainly guilty. Yet he was entirely innocent; after the true killer was convicted, Jefferies sued multiple newspapers and won.

The social media era has brought a new arena for people to form mobs in. Because of that, the Internet gets blamed for changing human behaviour for the worse – and maybe it has – but the tendency to form badly-behaved mobs isn’t new at all. It goes back to the dawn of humanity.

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The Man with the Plan: Sermon Preached on 21st December 2025 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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An aerial photograph captures a vast, rugged mountain landscape with multiple layers of jagged ridges extending into the distance. The foreground features sharp, barren peaks in shades of dark blue and gray, casting deep shadows in the valleys below. Successive ridges fade progressively into softer blues and purples due to atmospheric haze, creating a sense of immense depth and scale. The sky above is pale and hazy with a warm golden tint near the horizon, suggesting early morning or late afternoon light, accompanied by scattered thin clouds. The terrain appears arid and rocky, with no visible vegetation, rivers, or human structures, emphasizing the raw, untamed wilderness of a high-altitude mountain range. This panoramic view evokes the dramatic grandeur of remote canyons and sierras.

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

Romans 1. 1-7; Matthew 1. 18-31

“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet…”

A painted mural on a white brick wall depicts a religious figure resembling Jesus Christ within a large, circular orange-red background resembling a halo or sun. The figure has long brown hair, a beard, and a serene expression, wearing a white robe with brown accents and a golden collar. On his chest is a glowing red Sacred Heart with flames and a cross. In his right hand, he holds the glowing heart outward, while his left hand cradles a blue and green globe representing Earth, showing the Americas. Below the circular portrait, a green rectangular banner with blue borders displays bold black capital letters reading "KEEP OUR WORLD CLEAN." The mural's style is folk-art inspired, with visible brushstrokes and slight wear on the wall surface.
“He’s Got the Whole Word in His Hands”, Willemstad, Curaçao © Gerry Lynch, 22 November 2007

♫♪“He’s got the whole world in is hands.”♪♫

It has been a very long time since I’ve started a sermon by singing from the pulpit. This song isn’t a Christmas song, but it is perfect for this last Sunday in Advent and the Bible readings set for us today—for both are saying that God has a long-term plan for the human race. Our Gospel reading says that strange story of Many conceiving by the Holy Spirit came about to fulfil what God said through the prophets; our other reading, from a letter St Paul wrote to the first generation of Christians in Rome, says that the good news of Jesus Christ had been foretold by the prophets long in advance.

So, this might give us a good chance to explore the long backstory of the first Christmas.

The Christian story starts at a mythical time, before history began, when human beings lived in harmony with one another, with nature, and with God. This was the Garden of Eden. Humans are identified right at the start of the Bible as being a very special part of creation – the last part to be created, made in the image and likeness of God, the summit of God’s handiwork. We were God’s apprentices, being trained to tend and keep the Earth, and made for eventual union with God. There were no rules in the garden – except for one. The only thing we were forbidden do was to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we were told that if we did, we would die. We ate the fruit, because we wanted knowledge that we had been warned was too hot for us to handle—we’ll come back to that idea later.

The Garden of Eden is, of course, a myth, but it expresses a truth too profound for dry facts—that as humans evolved, we became alienated from our true nature. We know from archaeology that even before humans had writing, we were already out of balance with the rest of life. We know that it was us who wiped out the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, long before we learned how to write, or work metals, or make wheels.

Once we had writing, around 5,000 years ago, history began. It had many glorious and beautiful episodes, but also had the constant presence of war and slavery. We were out of balance with God and with one another, and that is how we remain.

Yet the Bible tells that although we were often wilful, cruel, and self-defeating, and God sometimes got angry with us and chastised us as a result, He never abandoned us. Somehow, despite God giving us simple rules for living in harmony, and us often being full of good intentions to live according to them, we were never able to escape the darker side of our own nature.

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Answers in Genesis?

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This article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of the St John with St Mary, Devizes Parish Magazine.

Recently, the Rector put me onto a conversation on YouTube between Tom Holland, the popular historian, and Paul Kingsnorth, the environmentalist and former Newbury Bypass protestor who converted to Christianity two years ago. Kingsnorth was raised in Buckinghamshire without any particular faith, while Holland grew up attending a village church in South Wiltshire with his devoutly Anglican mother, and recently returned to churchgoing after a gap of decades. 

A 1916 American pen drawing of the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve.
John H. Coates, Eve, and the Serpent, in the Garden, of Eden; REAL PEN WORK (1916). Kept in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.

One exchange between them struck me powerfully. Both aged in their fifties, they recalled growing up with a sense that the Church was telling stories about God that nobody much believed in anymore — including the Church itself. The Church was attempting to tell a different story, a “post-Enlightenment myth” presenting itself primarily as a doer of good works and intended to appeal to the sensibilities of a rationalist age. The net result, in a memorable phrase by Holland, was “simultaneously rebarbative and dull”. 

Kingsnorth felt the Churches had produced a “version [of Christianity] designed to appeal to the masses, that didn’t really appeal to anyone.” In contrast, as he became overwhelmed by the scale of the environmental crisis and the possibility that humans had already permanently damaged the planet’s capacity to sustain them, it was some of the more visionary and mystical parts of the Bible that began drawing him, to his own initial reluctance, towards Christianity. Firstly, the visions of the end times in the Revelation seemed frighteningly plausible to him, but then he found himself particularly drawn to the creation myths in Genesis. 

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Why the Talking Snake Matters: Sermon Preached on Saturday 8th April 2023 (Easter Vigil)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Genesis 1.1 – 2.4; Genesis 3; Exodus 14.10-15.1; Ezekiel 37. 1-14; Romans 6. 3-11; Matthew 28. 1-10

Didn’t we have an awful lot of readings this evening? And weren’t a lot of them from odd bits of the Bible with unscientific stories like creation in six days, seas parting to open a walking path, and talking snakes? Wouldn’t we better just talking about God’s love and how God wants us to love others?

A tempera and gold painting on a copper base by William Blake of a radiant Eve being tempted by a golden, magnificently coiling, snake. Blake drew his inspiration for this scene from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament and from John Milton's epic poem 'Paradise Lost' (1667). Blake often experimented with painting techniques, and here the surface has flaked badly because of the poor adhesion between a glue-based paint and the copper support he used.
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). Hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t agree. These readings form the main arc of the Christian story – how we are related to God, and why Jesus had to come into the world: that’s why we have them tonight. They aren’t a science textbook and God never intended them to be when He inspired them to be written.

Science may explain our biological evolution but it does not explain our moral evolution. One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how did we change from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense, the ability to tell right from wrong? Where does the sense of right and wrong come from? That question provokes another, related, one – why do we human beings so often do things that we know to be wrong? For we seem to be doomed to constantly damage not only other human beings, but other life-forms, however well-meaning our intentions might be.

One of the saddest realities of human existence is that, as we spread across the world, mass extinctions of the native wildlife followed us in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived. That is true on every continent and island; ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire, we’ve been wiping other creatures out. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture.

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