theodicy

Where Did It All Go Wrong?: Sermon Preached on 22nd February 2026 (First Sunday of Lent)

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

Romans 5. 12–19; Matthew 4. 1–11

“…just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.”

A dramatic oil painting depicting the biblical scene of the Temptation of Christ. In the foreground, a solemn figure in flowing pale robes sits with downcast eyes and a weary, resolute expression, his long brown hair and beard framing a gaunt face marked by deep shadows beneath the eyes. Behind him, a sinister hooded figure draped entirely in black leans in close, one hand gripping the seated figure's shoulder in a possessive, intimate gesture, whispering with a sly, menacing expression partially obscured by the dark cowl. The background features a turbulent sky of deep amber and burnt orange tones, suggesting a desolate wilderness. A dark bird, likely a crow, flies in the distant right. The painting's photorealistic style and chiaroscuro lighting create an intense atmosphere of psychological tension between spiritual steadfastness and evil persuasion.
The Temptation of Christ,©Eric Armusik (2017). In a private collection.

Where did it all go wrong?

Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The 2020s have been a bumpy decade. The horrors of the 7 October attacks were followed by the horrors of the Israeli assault on Gaza, where the 75,000 dead include 18,000 children. These terrible figures are still much smaller than the number of those killed in Sudan’s largely ignored civil war, or in Burma’s entirely ignored civil war, or the terrible war fought in Northern Ethiopia between 2020 and 2022, which you probably haven’t even heard of and which looks in serious danger of flaring up again.

The story of the human race is glory interspersed with horror. Capable of great feats of technology, and art, and most profoundly of all of great self-sacrificing love, it nonetheless seems to be our lot to descend from time to time into the pit. On the grandest of scales, the golden ages of nations and civilisation are followed by spells of decline and even ruinous destruction. Meanwhile, in our own lives we find that time and again we fail to live up to the high ideals which we wish to live by. Time and again, we do selfish and stupid and self-destructive things in ways that often leave us horrified and mystified afterwards. Worst of all, it seems to be upon those we love most deeply that we are capable of inflicting the most grievous wounds. No matter how hard we try to live truly good lives, some force seems to drag us down into the worst version of ourselves.

Where did it all go wrong?

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Without the Freedom to Do Evil There Is No Love: Sermon Preached on 2nd November 2024 (Fourth Sunday Before Advent)

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Some silhouetted figures, many bent forward as if walking into a ferocious figures, walk forward from left-to-right against a background of flames.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Deuteronomy 6. 1-9; Mark 12. 28-34

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

We all know that Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. We hear this at every Communion service, towards the beginning, when we bring our sins before God to ask for them to be forgiven. But I wonder how many of us have ever asked ourselves whether Jesus was the first person to say this, or if it came from somewhere else.

Against a background of bright yellows and oranges, a heavily muscled Moses wearing a kings grounds leaps up to grab the tablets of the Ten Commandments which are being handed down from the shekinah in the sky.
Marc Chagall, Moses Receving the Ten Commandments (1966)

Our first reading this morning reveals that, in fact, Jesus was quoting from the Hebrew Bible – what we call the Old Testament – and more than that, from the first five books of it, also known as the Law of Moses. The first great commandment, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength comes from the book of Deuteronomy, as we just heard. Does anyone know where Jesus’ second great commandment, to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from? It comes from the Book of Leviticus. It would be fair to say that while few of us have spent much time reading Leviticus, we know enough to think it isn’t our favourite book of the Bible—because most of us associate it putting people to death! Where is the love there, you might wonder! So most of us would, I think, be very surprised to find the command to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from Leviticus.

We need to remember that these were complex pieces of writing, through which God was working his purposes out over many generations, through the failings of human beings and respectful of their free will. These ancient documents have passages that strike us as being horrific. Yet they also contain these ringing declarations of love as the foundation of all true morality.

The encounter between Jesus and the Scribe, when he declared these the two greatest commandments, was part of a sequence of argumentative encounters that Jesus had in the Temple, in Jerusalem, in Holy Week. At first, as one reads the story afresh, one finds oneself wondering if this is a trap. Despite that, there is no doubt and no evasion in Jesus’ answer – to love God and our neighbour as ourselves are the two greatest commandments. All of God’s laws find their summit in the law of love, as stated by Jesus Christ who was God made human or, to put it another way, love personified.

Love isn’t an easy, cosy, thing however. We all know from our own lives that to love can be risky and costly. If we truly love God then we will try to love all of His creatures, without reservation, as much as we love ourselves; including those whom we find difficult to like—and even our enemies. How hard it is to live this out! I certainly don’t manage it very often.

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Eat Me!: Sermon Preached on 25th August 2024 (Thirteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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The hands of a priest saying Mass, near a paten with a wafer host, with a chalice and purificator on one side and a Mass book on a stand on the other.

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

Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-69   

“…whoever eats me will live because of me”

Let’s imagine that one Sunday, after church, over coffee and cake, that I told you… to eat me. Would you think I’d gone a bit nuts? You probably wouldn’t be entirely sure what I was getting at, but let’s be honest, you wouldn’t think I meant something entirely wholesome if I, you know, told you to eat me.

What if I went on to tell you to drink my blood? Tell the truth, you wouldn’t just find that weird, but completely disgusting. You might even send an e-mail to the bishop’s office when you got home from church, asking him to have strong words with the clearly wayward Rector of the Wellsprings Benefice.

So, I have a fair bit of sympathy for the disciples when they start complaining to Jesus about the strange and difficult teaching He’s asking them to accept in today’s Gospel reading. I mean, ‘I am the living bread come down from heaven, and whoever eats me will live forever’—it’s really bizarre stuff isn’t it? We tend to accept the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood because the Church has been teaching it for 2,000 years; and we’re all familiar with the idea from childhood; and we also acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, so we’re prepared to accept things being said by Jesus that wouldn’t accept from anyone else. But don’t let that obscure how strange these ideas are.

An oil painting of St Peter, with a beard, wearing a tunic, clasping his hands, looking upwards with a pleading look on his face.
St Peter Penitent (1639), by Guercino. Hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

And to the disciples in those early days, Jesus was just a teacher from Nazareth. A very clever teacher who seemed even to be able to perform miracles. But just a teacher. Once you heard Him asking you to drink His blood, you might even start wondering whether His power to work miracles came from God or from, you know, the other direction. It’s no wonder that a lot of His followers walked away from Him at this point.

Christianity is weird. It’s a profoundly strange faith. It isn’t about common sense—not the common sense of the 21st Century West, but also not the common sense of anyone at the time of Christ: not of pious Jews nor clever Greeks nor imperious Romans. At the heart of Christ’s teachings, are things that turn our conventional view of the world upside down. At its core of it is the concept that God gives us what we don’t deserve, because in fact we aren’t good enough to deserve anything; what God gives us, He gives us freely out of His love. And because we could never be good enough to pass any purity test, God closed the gap that humanity’s sin opened between us and Him Hithrough giving up Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, on the Cross.

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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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