A Faith for this World?: Sermon Preached on 16th February 2025 (Third Sunday before Lent)

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 12-20; Luke 6. 17-26

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Is your hope only for this world rather than what might be in the life to come? Is your faith in vain?

A painting depicting a scene by a body of water with a mountainous background. In the foreground, a large group of people, dressed in robes and head coverings, are gathered around a central figure who is seated on a rock. This central figure is also robed in white and appears to be teaching or speaking to the crowd. The people are seated on the ground, some standing, all attentively listening. The setting suggests a historical or biblical scene, with the atmosphere being calm and serene.

James Tissot, Jesus Teaches People by the Sea (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always feel a little uncomfortable as an inclusive, liberal-minded, sort of priest in putting Paul’s case as bluntly as that. I realise many people do support the Church for what it does in this world, and many folk are loyal churchpeople and seek to be faithful to Christ as He taught us to live in this world, while not really believing in “the magic bits”. The Beatitudes, which are today’s Gospel reading, are often presented as a manifesto of hope for the future of humanity—if we could only fully embrace them and the rest of Christ’s teachings, really fully embrace them, we could create heaven on earth. Or so some say.

All of you welcome here, just as you are. That’s an important principle for a parish church that seeks to be a centre of faith and hope for the whole community; also I’ve had enough people tell me over the years I’m not a real Christian for me to tell anybody else the same thing. For what it’s worth I think that, on balance, over time, Christianity is good for earthly societies and Jesus Christ’s teachings, on those occasions when we really do live them out fully, do create little pockets of heaven here on Earth.

But I’m going to tell you why I believe in “the magic bits” and why I agree with Paul that if our faith is only for this world then we are to be pitied.

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The Times Are Changing: Sermon Preached on 9th February 2025 (Fourth Sunday before Lent)

Posted on February 9, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 1-11; Luke 5. 1-11

“I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”

When I was young, I was far more self-conscious and afraid than I ever let on. Whenever I walked into a room, I assumed that everyone else there was competent and confident—and that I was a bluffer. I projected overconfidence to try to hide the fears that wracked me, fears I assumed nobody felt but me. A major life moment was when I realised nearly everyone has these fears, and that many people who are very confident on the surface are battling doubt underneath. Losing our illusions can be a very healthy thing.

We all say that nobody’s perfect. But we often assume that some other people are close to perfection, and because we know we aren’t, we can assume that we are terribly deficient. With age should come a certain wisdom that the things that we struggle with are usually just the same things that everybody else struggles with.

A painting of a bearded man dressed in traditional robes. He is wearing a blue tunic with a brown cloak over it. In his left hand, he holds a rectangular object with some red and white markings on it. The background is a textured, aged gold, giving the image an antique appearance. Some areas of the painting show signs of wear and damage, particularly on the left side where the paint has flaked off.

Andrei Rublev’s icon of St Paul dating to ca. 1410. Now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

When I was younger I also hated St Paul—or I thought I did. The truth is I didn’t really know him or his writings. Despite my best efforts to pay attention, I would find myself drifting off at church when the New Testament reading came from Paul. All those long sentences with too many clauses and too few full stops. The same would happen when I tried to read Paul at home. What I hated about Paul was that he was full of misogyny and homophobia, or so I was told by both the people who thought that was a good thing, and those who thought he was a bigot.

Another thing that happened as I got older was that I started to get were Paul was coming from. Perhaps not the most stylish writer, but so brilliant at reducing Christianity to its essence. One of his great gifts is to make no bones that he is far from perfect; that any favour God had for him was entirely undeserved. Sometimes, like in this morning’s Epistle, Paul makes too much of what a horrible rotter he had been when he persecuted the Church. After his conversion, even his best friends still found him to be a very difficult man. As a young man he was exactly the sort of person who projected too much overconfident certainty in his faith precisely to cover the fears that lay underneath, and in the process he became a bit of a horror, a violent religious fanatic seemingly devoid of conscience. Yet hidden from view, Paul’s conscience was clearly deeply troubled by his actions, and then God in all His Grace brought Paul out of the darkness of his overcertainty into the light of trusting in Christ alone rather than himself. Grace is a much used but little explained concept, but theologically it means the favour God has for us which we have done nothing to deserve.

In this morning’s epistle, Paul produces one of his great lines, “by the grace of God, I am what I am”. And so am I. And so are you.

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Never Mind the Bishops!: Sermon Preached on Candlemas (Sunday 2nd February 2025)

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Hebrews 2. 14-18; Luke 2. 22-40

“he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might … free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

“It’s rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

A man in a suit and tie is standing and holding a piece of paper, appearing to be speaking or reading in a formal setting, possibly a legislative or governmental assembly. Several other individuals, also dressed in formal attire, are seated around him, listening attentively. The setting suggests a serious and official environment.

Presentations come in many shapes and sizes; Geoffrey Howe resigns on 13 November 1990. Used under the Fair Use doctrine.

Perhaps I am the first preacher ever to quote, in a sermon, this famous line from Sir Geoffrey Howe’s 1990 resignation speech as Deputy Prime Minister. Yet they were words that popped unbidden to mind as I returned from a fairly long and very pleasant leave, raring to get back into the fray, to find myself confronted with disastrous stories in the media about the Church of England, generated by our bishops: these are the people who are supposed to be our shepherds, our pastors. For it is rather like arriving at the crease, hoping to start a long and productive spell, only to find that my bat has indeed been broken.

What does that have to do with this morning’s Bible readings? Well, quite a lot as it turns out. One is the famous story of Jesus being presented by Mary and Joseph in the Temple, in fulfilment of Jewish religious law, as we would expect as today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation. The other reading is a passage from Hebrews which reflects on the implications of Jesus sharing our human nature in all its fullness. Both identify Jesus directly as the Christ, the Messiah, sent by God to deliver His people.

So it makes sense to have this pair of readings together on the same day, but they are to some extent in tension with one another. Our Gospel shows even Christ, God made human, binding Himself to the Law of Moses, and the religious system of the Temple at Jerusalem, in which sacrifices of animals played a major role. But the Letter to the Hebrews is all about making the case that the system of animal sacrifices has been ended by Christ, whose sacrifice of Himself on the Cross is enough for everyone, for all time. The Bible doesn’t give us simple answers. To read the Bible faithfully, we need to listen carefully when we find different parts of it in tension. It is always tempting to mine Scripture for simple answers; the trouble with that is that we then tend to find the answers we already wanted. If we honestly seek to puzzle our way to finding God’s will for us and for the world, it will be a job that we can barely make a start on in a lifetime.

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You Couldn’t Make It Up: Sermon Preached on 25th December 2024 (Christmas Day)

Posted on December 25, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20       

“Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.”

This image depicts a classical nativity scene, rich with religious symbolism and traditional iconography. In the foreground, a figure, likely representing the Virgin Mary, is kneeling in adoration. Surrounding her are several cherubic figures, possibly angels, gathered around a newborn child lying in a manger, symbolizing the birth of Jesus. Above the manger, a radiant halo signifies the divine nature of the child. To the right, an elderly man, likely Saint Joseph, stands holding a staff, observing the scene with a contemplative expression. Behind him, two figures dressed in vibrant red and green garments peek over his shoulder, adding a sense of community and witness to the event. In the background, a small hill rises, dotted with white flowers, leading to a rocky landscape where a winged figure, possibly an angel, hovers above, announcing the birth to shepherds or other figures in the distance. The overall color palette is dark and earthy, with subtle highlights that draw attention to the central figures, creating a sense of reverence and quiet celebration.

Nativity (c. 1515-20), Lucas Cranach the Elder; in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.

You couldn’t make it up, could you?

Let’s just say there was a young woman who was pregnant, and she was in the Brewery Inn, or The Raven, and she told everybody at the bar, “An angel appeared to me the other week, and he said I would get pregnant by being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Actually, I’m still a virgin.”

I think the reaction might be best encapsulated in a phrase much used where I come from: “Aye, yo-ho, love!”

You couldn’t make it up, could you?

A conceit developed in the 20th Century that people used to believe in concepts like the Virgin Birth because they were uneducated and superstitious; it was now time to abandon these silly religious ideas, the story went, because we were too clever and scientifically educated for mumbo-jumbo like that.

But people in the ancient world weren’t stupid. The Roman Empire, where these stories took place, was a sophisticated society, full of clever, well-educated, philosophers. It also had plenty of cynics who enjoyed picking apart supernatural stories as thoroughly as Derren Brown or Penn and Teller do today on their shows.

And even simple people knew where babies come from.

This wasn’t a story you’d invent if you wanted people to take you seriously. It’s not just that you couldn’t make it up, you wonder why anyone would make it up, in this way—unless it actually happened.

Now the shepherds were rough types. They weren’t respectable; they lived in the mountains for months on end, which meant they were never in a position to fulfil their religious or civic duties. They weren’t the sort of witnesses you’d want to have to call in your defence at a court case, with their rough accents and rough manners. You definitely wouldn’t invite them to a dinner party at your villa, because they stank of sheep. If you wanted to make up a story about a boy born to be king, you wouldn’t make shepherds the first witnesses to the birth, not if you wanted people to believe it. That would be even less the case if your story said this baby boy was actually God in human form—but we’ll come to that in a few minutes.

Now, they might not have been respectable, these shepherds, but they had seen it all up on those mountains. They weren’t naïve superstitious simpletons. They were tough, smart, people who knew how to deal – without any help at all – with a storm, an injured animal, or a marauding wolf. But when an angel of the Lord appeared to them “they were terrified”. This was something completely out of the experience even of tough guys who’d lived hard lives. These angels weren’t Disney figures—they made grown men, of the type who never like to show fear, quake with terror.

Now, you might decide you can believe Jesus was a good man, perhaps even the greatest human being ever to live, and also that our society should be formed around his teachings—but you can’t believe stories about angels and multitudes of heavenly hosts, let alone virgin births. I’m not going to try to change your mind, not this morning anyway, but just remember this: this story wasn’t spun to sound as plausible as possible to convince as many people as it could; it wasn’t even written to make the people in it look good.

Similarly with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth. This wasn’t a society where young men and women from good families put on the accents and mannerisms of the lower classes so they could pretend to be more cool than they actually were. It’s only very recently that humble origins became so valued that people started to fake them. In the ancient world, a great king definitely needed to come from the right sort of family; and if an actual deity was being born in human form—and those stories were definitely part of ancient mythology—they needed at least to have a royal parent on one side and ideally an actual god or goddess on the other. Achilles, Aeneas, Helen, and Hercules? All those lads and lasses had divine parentage.

None of them were born in a stable to a carpenter Dad after a shotgun marriage. If you were going to make up a story about a god in human form, you definitely weren’t going to have him the son of poverty-stricken craftsman.

Think of it in modern, marketing, terms. We all know it helps to have the right endorsements if you want people to buy your product. Sportspeople are very useful for that sort of thing today, as they seem to have been in the ancient world also. These days, you also want to get some music and acting celebrities to back your product, and maybe a few of the type of social media influencers who are famous mostly for being famous.

Luke having Jesus born in the way He was, to the people He was, first witnessed by… shepherds, is the ancient world’s equivalent getting your TikTok and Instagram endorsements done by a bloke who temped for a while as the office junior where you used to work and who has a website about his hobby of collecting snails.

You wouldn’t make it up. You couldn’t make it up.

Our first reading came from St Paul’s letter to a younger man called Titus, written towards the end of his life. When Paul had been a young man, he’d been a very successful religious entrepreneur — definitely the sort who’d have active TikTok and YouTube channels if he were around today. He was a clever lad who knew his holy books back-to-front, was known to high priests by name, and was capable of summoning mobs through his gifts with words and his connections. Yet he’d given it all up because of a strange encounter he’d had on the road to Damascus, when a flash of light and a strange disembodied voice convinced him to follow the risen Jesus, whose followers he had recently been encouraging his mobs to attack.

You’d say the bit about the blinding light and disembodied voice was a likely story, except for this. It didn’t do Paul any practical good. For the next twenty-five or thirty years, following Jesus brought Paul repeated imprisonments, kickings by mobs who ran him out of town—I mean, he’d lived through it all. Soon after writing this letter, following Jesus would see Paul executed in public. Yet he wasn’t resentful or bitter about all this; he didn’t regret following Jesus Christ or complain that he wished he’d lived his life differently. He was full of joy, encouraging his younger friend to live a self-controlled and upright life while he waited patiently for Jesus Christ to return in glory.

If it was all made up, surely they would have got something more out of it?—riches, fame, something positive? Successful modern invented religions like Scientology usually make money for their leaders; Christ’s early followers got gaolings and beatings even though they were trying to live lives of absolute respectability.

Here’s where it all comes together for me—two thousand years later we still gather to hear these familiar stories of the Christ-child in the stable, and the shepherds and the angels. Even when we dismiss it as the ancient equivalent of a Disney story, even when we strip all the hard bits out of it “because Christmas is for the kids” and reduce it to a Disney story, something draws us back to hear it, time after time. It’s almost as if it touches something in the depths of us, at the very ground of our being. It’s as if it’s a story that tells us things about the human nature and the nature of reality that we know to be true by instinct rather than intellect.

It’s almost as if there might be something in it after all. The fine details might be a bit ropey, and vary a little from one Gospel to the other, but it’s as if these things actually happened, more or less in the manner we heard this morning. Because you couldn’t make it up, and you wouldn’t make it up like this.

And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.

Top image – Cranach, Anbetung Christi (1545); now hangs in a private collection.

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

Posted on December 24, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

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.”         

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.

The dark skies of Wiltshire,13 August 2024 © Gerry Lynch

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 21st 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.

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Duty: Sermon Preached on 22nd December 2024 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Hebrews 10. 5-10; Luke 1. 39-45

“See, God, I have come to do your will…”

The painting depicts an intimate scene of two women in a dimly lit room. The woman on the right, dressed in a blue garment with a white scarf, stands with her hands raised in a gesture that could suggest surprise or conversation. She faces another woman on the left, who is partially obscured by shadow and an archway, wearing a dark cloak and holding something in her hand. The table between them is set with a bowl of oranges, bread, and a small cup, suggesting a domestic setting. The interplay of light and shadow creates a warm, almost ethereal atmosphere, highlighting the emotional connection between the figures. The overall mood is one of quiet interaction, perhaps of sharing or contemplation.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Visitation (1910), hangs in the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.

I never expect a bumper congregation on the Sunday before Christmas [it was a pleasant surprise to have an above-average congregation at both services I took!]. I always presume it will be composed largely of people who see going to church every Sunday as their duty. That’s OK, because I see going to church every Sunday as my duty too, and I did so long before I was ordained.

Duty is a very unfashionable idea, but it’s hard to see how any society can function without it. In a culture where people have a strong sense of duty, we are more likely to know how things will work and that they’ll work at all. We will be clearer on our own responsibilities and clearer about where to expect the assistance of others. Societies where people have a strong sense of duty tend to have higher levels of trust and stronger social bonds—and they have all the benefits that flow from these things.

In times of crisis, we all depend on people doing their duty even at great personal risk. We will all remember the situation we faced in March 2020, when we depended on doctors and nurses doing their duty even though we knew little about Covid and we also knew there was a great shortage of personal protective equipment. At the other end of Europe, Ukraine’s survival as a nation depends on people doing their duty, in terrible danger and in horrible mid-winter weather, in the trenches that run the length of 700-mile front line.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have considered it their duty to gather to worship together on the first day of the week, Sunday, because it was the day of Christ’s Resurrection. They often did so in the face of challenges much greater than needing an extra morning to finish the Christmas shopping. Even now, this very Sunday, in places like North Korea and Iran, Christians will gather to worship Jesus Christ at the risk of their liberty.

If we, with all our freedoms, attend church every Sunday and follow the Church’s year—even on the odd Sundays when attendance tends to be low—we don’t just fulfil a duty that’s relatively easy for most of us, but we follow church’s year in its fullness, giving us a richer picture of our Faith.

What makes the Fourth Sunday in Advent interesting is that there is perhaps no other point in the year when the Church’s rhythm is so out of kilter with that of wider society. Most people assume that Christmas really started ages ago—how many weeks ago did you have your first mince pie?—with a lot of people finishing work last Friday, even the Christmas party season is starting to wind down. There is only the final blow-out on Wednesday to look forward to and that’s Christmas for another year.

But in Church, Christmas hasn’t even started yet. We are still in the season of Advent, the great season of waiting; in Advent the Church’s worship takes place in the key that forms so much of our lives—waiting with longing for God to break into a troubled world and our often troubled lives. We wait still for God to make His presence felt in all its fullness even as the rest of the world assumes the party has long started, because we know that God is often at work precisely in the opposite direction to where people are looking, in ways that will surprise everyone when they eventually come to light, through people the world considers of little account.

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You Brood of Vipers!: Sermon Preached on 15th December 2024 (Third Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 4. 4-7; Luke 3. 7-18

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

A scantily dressed man with a translucent shine around his head raises his right hand in the air as a group of women, men, and children gather round him with grim, sometimes excited, expressions of their faces.

Saint John the Baptist Preaching by Luca Giordano (1695). Hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Are you a viper? Have you, in the course of this year, exhibited any snake-like characteristics? You don’t have to answer that question out loud. But if the answer is yes, then you’re in the right place: because you need to repent, and church should be a place of repentance.

There is some contrast, isn’t there, between our two readings this morning. The crowds flock out through the Jerusalem Desert to be baptised by St John the Baptist, and he does the exact opposite of what a good PR man would tell someone to do today if they found themselves an accidental celebrity. The smart thing to do if you want to maximise your return on your fifteen minutes of fame is to make your biggest fans feel valued and loved in return for their loyalty—not to call them a den of snakes, and warn them that, “Even now, the axe is lying at the root of the trees”.

St Paul, in contrast, tells those reading his letter in the far off city of Philippi, “Do not worry about anything” for, “The Lord is near.” Rejoice therefore, he tells them, be full of peace and open gentleness.

Let me tease out this contrast between our two letters by repeating the question I started with: are you a viper?

If so, it’s time to repent.

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Requiem for a Dream

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Also posted at Slugger O’Toole

European flag carpet, Gift from the Republic of Azerbaijan. World Forum for Democracy 2016, Strasbourg, France. © Northern Ireland Foundation

Today, the Netherlands reinstituted border checks with Germany and Belgium. The new policy, which will initially run for six months, aims “to combat migration and human-trafficking”. According to the EU, fourteen of the twenty-nine members of the Schengen passport-free travel area currently have some form of “temporary” border control; of these all but Malta’s relating to a major international conference feel at least semi-permanent, with Russian sabotage efforts and “risk of violent actions against Israeli citizens” cited by some countries along with irregular migration and organised crime.

This hits me particularly hard because of the ten summers in a row between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s I travelled by buses and ferries from Northern Ireland to Germany – in the early years to West Germany – via Belgium and the Netherlands to spend the summer with a German family. I remember the infrastructure on the Dutch-German border being dismantled in the early 1990s; most traffic was waved through before that, although a differently coloured passport could occasionally attract attention from a bored border guard. But on the Antwerp to Eindhoven motorway, even in the 1980s, I can only ever remember a few trucks being parked up in service areas waiting for a customs inspection. Otherwise there was nobody around to check passports and not even a little booth to house them. I had to Google when was the last time private citizens last faced checks on the Dutch-Belgian border; it turns out to be 1947!

Those of us who have believed in the vision of a united Europe and saw it start to blossom in our lifetimes are watching our dream dying. There are plenty of shrilly self-deluding voices screaming that it has been betrayed by populists and jingoists and paid shills for Putin. The harsh reality, however, is that it is dying because it hasn’t survived contact with reality; and more specifically, it hasn’t survived contact with Europe’s reality of the 2020s being very different from what anyone imagined in 1992, let alone 1947.

We could summarise the history of the European Union over the last 35 years in a rock lyric: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the Moon.”

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The End of Our Era?: Sermon Preached on 8th December 2024 (Second Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

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

Philippians 1.3-11; Luke 3.1-6     

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord…’”

A painting of handsome, slim, young man, showing signs of a camel-hair loin cloth beneath a red robe that is not covering his chest. He is holding a staff and a lamb is on the ground to his left.

Caravaggio, John the Baptist in the Wilderness (ca. 1598), hangs in the Cathedral Museum, Toledo

The trouble with voices in the wilderness is that we don’t usually pay much attention to them. Let’s be honest, there are good reasons for that. There is a planet full of self-proclaimed voices in the wilderness crying out with opinions – let’s be polite and call them “eccentric” opinions – that seem barely in touch with reality. The world has always been full of loud voices whose sound and fury signifies little more than a need to be noticed, and that was even before the Internet.

If we’re being honest, John the Baptist must have seemed to most of those around him just such a… you know… “eccentric” character. Unlike Matthew and Mark, in Luke’s Gospel he isn’t described as living off locusts and wild honey; but Luke does say that the gift of prophecy came to him when he was in the wilderness. I wonder how you would react if I came back from leave and told you all the gift of prophecy had come over me in the wilderness. John wasn’t a respected figure in the world of clever scholars and political power-players in Jerusalem; he was a wild man living on the edge of society—just the sort of person we wouldn’t normally listen to. Yet realities were shifting. Something new was about to enter into the world, and the clever and powerful people couldn’t see it coming.

That’s what you would expect, though, isn’t it?—The people who have everything sorted, the people who think they understand precisely how the world works, can be blinded by their very knowledge and success when times change and something genuinely new emerges.

By any normal standards, John the Baptist’s life ended in failure, imprisoned and then beheaded by King Herod, having made not so much as a ripple on the mighty Roman Empire in which he lived. Yet, in calling attention to and ultimately baptising Jesus, he did something still remembered by billions of people today, when the power players of Emperor Tiberius’ court have long been forgotten.

St Paul’s end was rather like John the Baptist’s. Paul had once had it all, and had himself been something of a regional power player in the world of Jewish religious politics, a man who had the ear of high priests and who was capable of summoning a mob through his oratory and connections. Yet he had thrown all that away to chase a vision that came to him suddenly while on the road to Damascus. By the time he wrote a letter to the still new church in Philippi, which today’s epistle comes from, this proud Roman citizen had been thrown in jail.

The style of his letter, however, isn’t what you would expect from an ageing man enduring a grim imprisonment. Far from complaining about his fate, he is telling the Philippians how full of joy he is, not least because of the reports brought to him about how this church in Philippi is developing. It is a contrast to the often grumpy letters Paul wrote to other churches. The Philippians aren’t the finished article. They still have progress they need to make, in particular they still lack much knowledge and mature insight; but they are full of love and full of commitment to the Gospel. Paul is confident that God will bring to completion what He has already begun in them. These things take time.

With God, things sometimes take lots and lots of time. The famous lines of poetry and prophecy in our Gospel reading to ‘make straight the way of the Lord’ were written almost six hundred years before John the Baptist started crying out in the wilderness.

One thing that might have alerted people to the fact that John was worth listening to is that he wasn’t seeking attention for himself, as so many religious charlatans did then and still do now, but instead sought to point the way to someone else.

That someone was Jesus, the consummation of hopes that the Jewish people had long had for a Messiah, a great God-sent liberating king; and so he would be, but Christ would proclaim a kingdom not of this world, which did not offer political liberation but freedom from the bondage of sin. It was consciousness of that freedom from the chains of sin which made Paul full of joy even when he was a political prisoner

Everything needed for the reign of Christ’s kingdom to come was in place once Jesus gave up His life on the Cross. Yet we await the full consummation of the Kingdom He proclaimed, as Christians have done for 2,000 years. It might be a good thing that we still wait, for like those Philippians, we are not the finished article ourselves, and bringing these things to their fullness takes time.

Advent is the season of waiting. What we await are signs of God breaking into the world in new ways, which are always around us if we care to look; and ultimately the return of Christ to rule in glory. Talking about the Second Coming is often considered rather “eccentric”, and to be fair there are good reasons for that. We avoid the topic only partly because the idea makes us uncomfortable, which it does, but mostly because people who talk too much about it are usually holders of many strange opinions that seem barely in touch with reality. Yet we say in the Creed every Sunday that we believe that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. If we don’t hope for that what do we hope for? And what hope do we offer a world were old certainties are collapsing?

We have lived most of our lives at a time when we, living in a prosperous country with strong institutions and a high degree of individual liberty, thought of ourselves as being in an unending era of freedom and flourishing. At the end of the Cold War, which the Good Guys won, there was even a famous book called “The End of History” which claimed that with Western-style liberal democracy we had achieved the best form of society possible in the real world, and that although there might be bumps in the road, this was the inevitable long-term future of humanity. This post-Cold War glow shaped a whole generation of policy-makers and academics.

Thirty years later, those claims feel arrogant and stupid. It was always naïve and conceited to think that we were somehow the finished product. It now seems fairly clear that the era we have been living through is coming to an end. The end of an era always brings much chaos in its wake. At times, frightening things will happen—we know this, because frightening things have always happened. Yet all this feels a relief as much as a source of fear. I think we all started noticing that the things we were told sensible and caring people should believe had stopped making much sense.

I have no idea what will come next, and it will take time to emerge. Be careful not to be made afraid by the wailing of clever people as they discover the knowledge that once brought them success no longer makes much sense of the world. At the same time, it’s hard to know where one might find a latter day John the Baptist amid the oceans of crying “eccentrics” barely in touch with reality, and obvious charlatans pretending to be eccentrics.

Yet trust that God will be at work in this new time, often in ways unseen by many people and through people not considered important by the standards of the world. Christ has already done all things necessary to save the world and we should await with joyful hope His coming again to bring to completion what began when John the Baptist cried in the wilderness.

And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen.

Top image: The wilderness between Jerusalem and Jericho, 16 November 2022, © Gerry Lynch.

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The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13; Luke 21. 25-36

“…when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”

Happy New Year!

I haven’t got the calendar wrong by a month. The Church’s year starts now, on Advent Sunday. From now until Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday, we will journey through the great themes of the Christian story. Advent is a season of waiting, and so we start our journey in the waiting room. Advent is a season of humanity waiting through trials and exiles; of the disappointment of trying and failing that is so much a part of all our lives. It is a time which remembers how much of our lives are taken up with waiting, and also how much of the lives of nations and civilisations take place in periods when people see no obvious hope of things getting better on their own, and so wait for God to break into world.

A tempera on wood painting, originally an altar piece, of Christ teaching his apostles in the last days of His earthly life.

Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles, Duccio (1308-11) from Duccio’s Maestà; in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena.

God will indeed break into the world at Christmas, as a tiny baby. Then we will journey with that little baby as He becomes a man, go into the wilderness with Him during Lent, walk through death to resurrection and eternal life with Him during Holy Week, and then to the birth of the Church at Pentecost. After that comes the long season of Ordinary Time, the celebration of Christian life in the everyday, which starts as the summer begins and ends… well it ended yesterday. Today, the cycle repeats, Advent starts again, and we wait with longing for God to break into the world.

A new year for the Church also means a change to our Bible readings on Sundays. Our Sunday readings take us through a different Gospel on each year of a three year cycle – Matthew one year, Mark the next, and then Luke. Readings from John are scattered through all three of the years, especially around major festivals. This year, through to November 2025, most of our readings will come from Luke’s Gospel. There is much to be said about Luke’s unique understanding of Jesus’ life, but for the moment, let me just draw one point out: Luke is a Gospel of journeys

Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a lot of the same material, sometimes being word-for-word the same, but tell the same story from slightly different angles—John is really quite different. That’s why together Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, which sounds like a very difficult term, but synoptic just means seeing with the same eye. All three of them have Jesus’ ministry starting in Galilee, followed by a journey to Jerusalem, which leads to the final crisis of Holy Week. In Matthew and Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is a short interlude relatively late in the story. One thing that makes Luke distinct, however, it that this journey takes up almost half the length of the entire Gospel. That’s one of a number of ways that Luke presents Jesus’ life and our own as a grand journey: in Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, the whole world is on the move as a result of a great census called by the Roman Emperor; and the first witnesses to the Resurrection are two men on a journey to Emmaus.

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