Higher Things? – Sermon Preached on 14th May 2026 (Ascension)

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot (Benefice Service)

Acts 1.1–11, Ephesians 1. 15-23, Luke 24.44

 “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” 

A large oil painting set against a darkened basketball arena filled with a blurred crowd of spectators. At the centre, the silhouette of a basketball player rises in mid-dunk, one arm stretched high toward a golden basketball hoop and backboard. Within the player's outlined form, painted in meticulous Renaissance style, is the dead Christ from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross: pale-skinned, crowned with thorns, eyes closed, head tilted back, loincloth draped at the waist. His limp body follows the athlete's upward trajectory, so that crucifixion and slam-dunk occupy exactly the same gesture. Fragments of van der Weyden's red-robed mourning figures and gilded background are visible within the silhouette. Brass nails punctuate the outline, pinning the Christ figure to the athlete's form. At the lower right, outstretched hands reach toward the ascending figure.

Titus Kaphar, Ascension (2016). Circulates around the properties of the 21c Museum Hotels Group.

Higher things. What do we mean when we say, “she was the sort of person who often had her mind set on higher things”? If I said that meant someone who spent her life seeking to do good, serving others, creating and sharing beauty, and contemplating the deepest truths of human nature and the universe we live in – well, I don’t think many of you would disagree with me.

This isn’t necessarily a specifically Christian thing or even a religious one. We all know people of other faiths or no faith whose lives are obviously devoted to goodness, and service, and more profound thought than those of most people. Buddhism calls people to the Four Sublime States of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity; Islam calls people to akhlaq: the practice of virtue, morality, and good character within oneself and in one’s treatment of others. The early Christians themselves drew much of their understanding of the good life from the pagan Greek philosophers whose writings did so much to form the Greek-speaking, multi-cultural societies in which they lived. The highest goods in Christianity have always resonated with all sorts of people; the Faith would not have been capable of spreading if that were not so.

If there is a specifically Christian list of higher things, it is perhaps in the humbler virtues. Now, I can’t set every reading from St Paul in one service, but there is a list we didn’t hear tonight from Paul’s letter to the Colossians about the virtues we should surround ourselves with if we have been raised with Christ: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, mutual forbearance, forgiveness, and love. Higher and more humble at the same time – that’s a good eight-word summary of the sort of lives Christians should seek to live.

And, of course, some Christians struggle with the idea of an actual heaven; can’t quite get their heads round the idea that we’re actually going to ascend to some higher state of being, but still want to form their lives on the pattern of Jesus Christ, or perhaps are just called to worship for reasons they can’t themselves understand. As the Collect puts it, “that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell.” That is a prayer for this life, not necessarily the next: to live life as best we can with our hearts and minds risen and dwelling with Christ.

But St Paul writes in tonight’s Epistle reading that he prays that the people he is writing to “may know what is the hope to which he has called you” – and that is to follow Christ to the higher state of existence to which He Himself rose on that first Ascension Day.

Why do I think that’s a credible hope? Well, to explore that, let’s look briefly at the lower things.

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Faith Can Be Hard Work: Sermon Preached on 10th May 2026 (Sixth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on May 10, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 17.22–31, John 14.15–21

“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him…” 

A close-up photograph of an elderly woman wearing a white habit with blue stripes at the edges, and a small wooden cross on a cord around her neck. She has a deeply lined face and is smiling warmly at the camera. The background is dark, almost black.

Mother Teresa in Washington, 1995, © John Matthew Smith used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Mother Teresa was probably the world’s most famous Christian in the late 20th Century. The ‘Missionaries of Charity’ she founded sought to be an expression of God’s love for the whole human race, beginning by serving the sickest and poorest in the slums of Kolkata, a city where fewer than one in a hundred people are Christian. Initially she was little known outside India, but in 1969 the BBC sent Malcolm Muggeridge and a camera crew to make a documentary about her, and she became world famous. She attracted both admirers and detractors in abundance. Indeed, many people both admired her works and disagreed with some of her attitudes at the same time – I know that, because I was one of them. But there was no doubting her commitment to giving her life to serving people who many would prefer to ignore.

You might think that such works were inspired by an unshakable faith. So it might surprise you that Mother Teresa experienced a profound sense of God’s absence for half a century.

“Even deep down”, she wrote, “there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”

From 1948 until her death in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced this spiritual emptiness with only a five-week respite in 1958. Nonetheless, she pressed on with a life that could have been simpler and more comfortable, clinging to faith through habit and endurance even when her soul had run dry.

In our first reading today, St Paul tells his audience of clever intellectuals in Athens that God made us so we could seek Him, feeling our way towards finding Him; and even though we often experience ourselves as groping towards God like this, Paul says that he is never far from any of us.

There are times in my life when I feel far from God – but not many. Sometimes I’ve been angry with God and told Him so. There was a period when I asked Him to take my faith away from me because I was so disgusted with the Church. But rarely have I felt God to be absent. In the times when I don’t sense God’s presence, it is because I’m distracted and not paying attention – and once I start paying attention, He is there.

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Grace and Revenge: Sermon Preached on 3rd May 2026 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Acts 7. 55-60; John 14. 1-14

“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” 

On a long flight this week, I watched an extraordinary film from Iran, called It Was Just an Accident. A veteran director named Jafar Panahi, who has been imprisoned for previous films, shot it on location in Iran without official permission. The story follows a former political prisoner working as a mechanic. One day, a customer brings in a car to be fixed, and the hero recognises him by his peg leg: it’s his old torturer.

A medieval fresco painted on a vaulted ceiling depicting the stoning of Saint Stephen. Four figures in colourful clothing — greens, yellows, ochres, and blues — are shown in dynamic, striding poses with arms raised, hurling stones. Clusters of rounded stones are scattered across the ground. At the bottom centre, a partially visible prostrate figure represents Stephen, shown in blue garments beneath his attackers. The painting style is characteristically medieval, with flat, linear forms and expressive gestural energy. Decorative red scrollwork and foliate motifs fill the upper background. The plasterwork shows extensive craquelure, indicating great age. A section of a whitewashed pillar or arch is visible at the lower right. The overall palette is warm and earthy, with pigments that retain considerable vibrancy despite evident wear.

Early 16th Century depiction of the stoning of Stephen, St Lawrence’s Church, Lohja, Finland. © Gerry Lynch, 23 July 2017.

He tracks the secret policeman down, kidnaps him, and takes him out into the desert ready to kill him, but can’t bring himself to do so because he isn’t entirely sure of his identity. Then follows a bizarre drive around Tehran, where the hero collects other former political prisoners to see if any can be entirely sure that the man who is now drugged in the back of his van was indeed their torturer. A very black comedy, the film succeeds partly because it refuses either to sanitise or to dehumanise the villain, who is a ruthless killer but also a loving husband and tender father. The heroes, in turn, must battle to preserve their humanity in the way their torturer has failed to guard his, as they face a choice between grace and revenge.

St Stephen faced a choice between grace and revenge. Just before today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, he had been dragged up before a religious court on trumped-up charges and defended himself in a sweeping speech which concluded by warning his hearers that they are the latest in a long line of Jerusalem Jews to resist the Holy Spirit, persecute God’s prophets, and fail to keep the Law they claim to revere.

This sends the crowd into a violent rage against Stephen, but as they are about to mob him, he sees a vision of Heaven opened, and “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”. Now, Christ is usually depicted as being seated at the right hand of the Father, so this is normally interpreted as standing as an advocate for Stephen, and maybe also standing to receive him.

Perhaps it was this vision of Christ’s presence with him that allowed Stephen to do what he did next: taken out and brutally lynched, his last words are, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” This is the standard of forgiveness by which we are called to live as Christians.It isn’t easy.I certainly don’t manage to live up to it all the time. But it is how God teaches us to act. Such forgiveness is what God is like.

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Not Cowboys, but Sheep: Sermon Preached on 26th April 2026 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 2.42–47; John 10.1–10

“…the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”

A man rides a dark bay horse with a black mane and tail away from the camera along a road, surrounded on all sides by a dense herd of sheep in shades of brown, black, cream and white. The rider wears a green and tan camouflage jacket and a black woolly hat, and sits in a traditional saddle. To the left, two cars — a white saloon in front and a second vehicle behind — are halted on the road, hemmed in by the flock. Scrubby grass and low earthen banks line the right side of the road. In the distance, a range of bare, arid mountains stretches across the horizon under a bright blue sky filled with large white cumulus clouds.

Driving sheep along a major road near Khochkor, Kyrgyzstan, © Gerry Lynch, 27 September 2025

What could be more American than a cowboy? The rough-hewn frontiersman, driving his cattle along the untamed frontier, encapsulates both the American Dream and American nightmares. The courageous individualist risking everything to get the job done in a place far from government support, where the added risk is an acceptable price to pay for freedom, is as American an ideal as it gets. The wresting of the land from the Native Americans to make the cowboy possible was one of America’s original sins.

What could be more Kyrgyz than a nomad? If you went to my photo talk the other week, you’ll have learned that the nomadic pastoralist with his herds of sheep, horses, or yaks is at least as powerful a symbol of national identity in Kyrgyzstan as the cowboys are in America – and the same is true across the Central Asian ’stans and Mongolia. We could also talk about the gauchos of Argentina, Kenya’s Maasai, or the Bedouin of the Arab world.

The idea of the nomadic animal herder as the incarnation of the nation seems remote and alien to us in this more settled country, even though Wiltshire was one of the last places in these islands where this way of life survived, dying out less than a hundred years ago.

But for Jews in the Ancient World, some of their greatest national heroes and holy men had been shepherds before God called them to lead flocks of people – Abraham started out as a herdsman, and Moses famously kept his father-in-law’s flock after he left Egypt the first time.

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Interview with Radio 3 Controller Sam Jackson

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Gerry Lynch
Two men stand smiling together in a BBC Radio 3 studio. The man on the left wears a tan tweed blazer, purple and white striped shirt, and a bright red polka dot bow tie, with a BBC lanyard around his neck. The man on the right wears a dark navy blazer over a patterned shirt. A BBC Radio 3 logo (large red number 3) is visible on the wall behind them, along with a studio microphone on the left and windows in the background.

Me with Sam Jackson, 16 March 2026, public domain image.

I caught up with BBC Radio 3 Controller Sam Jackson last month to talk about how classical music can touch the soul deeply, whether the BBC’s top brass cares about high culture, social class and classical music opportunities, this year’s Proms programme, how he came to faith through the Alpha Course, and him leading children’s work at his parish church in Hampshire…

It’s in this week’s Church Times. Do have a read. (The Church Times gives free to a limited number of articles per month, and there’s no need to register, so click away.)

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Our Weird Faith: Sermon Preached on 19th April 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” 

A young kitchen maid, of Moorish complexion, in a white headcloth and dark olive-green smock stands behind a wooden table, her head bowed and her hands resting on a cloth on the tabletop. On the table in front of her are two large earthenware jugs, a shallow metal basin, a small dark pot, a white jug with blue decoration, a stack of plates, a mortar and pestle, and a bulb of garlic. A small white cloth lies folded on the table. Behind her on the right hangs a cloth-wrapped bundle. In the upper left corner, visible through an opening or hatch in the wall, a smaller scene shows three figures seated at a table covered with a white cloth, with one figure gesturing towards another who sits opposite. The painting is lit from the left, with warm brown and ochre tones throughout.
Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1620–2). Hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.

Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.

But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.

This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.

“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.

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Christians Help Iraq to Qualify for World Cup

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Screenshot of a Church Times article headlined 'Christians help Iraq to qualify for World Cup', bylined Gerry Lynch, dated 7 April 2026, with the subheading: 'People were in tears of happiness, says Parish Priest of St Mary's Cathedral of the Assyrian Church of the East, in Ealing.' Below is a photograph of a floodlit stadium at night.

Thanks to the Church Times for publishing a short news piece from me on the hugely disproportionate number of Christians playing for Iraq’s second ever World Cup-qualifying squad—and also to its first World Cup outing, in 1986. A notably devout Christian, Ammo Baba, scored Iraq’s first ever international goal, against Morocco, in 1957, then coached the side to its first and most recent World Cup in 1986.

Read it all here.

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We All Need Doubt: Sermon Preached on 12th April 2026 (Second Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 12, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”

A dimly lit scene showing four men in close proximity, their faces and hands dramatically illuminated against a dark background. One man, bare-chested with his robe pulled aside to reveal a wound in his right side, guides the hand of a second man whose index finger is extended and appears to be probing the wound. The second man leans forward intently, his face close to the wound, brow furrowed in concentration. Two further men press in from behind, peering over the shoulders of the first two, their expressions conveying intense curiosity. The lighting falls sharply from the upper left, casting deep shadows and emphasising the physical, tactile nature of the moment. The figures fill the picture space almost entirely, with very little background visible.

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.

Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.

Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.

And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.

What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

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The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

A large, densely populated painting set in an English churchyard. Figures in various states of undress emerge from tombs and from between pale stone grave markers, some stretching, some clambering upright, others still dazed. The scene is crowded and unhurried rather than dramatic — people appear bemused, curious, or quietly absorbed. A woman in dark robes kneels among flowers in the foreground. A robed figure reads from a scroll near the centre. Angels and armoured figures stand among the risen dead. The church itself is visible in the background, bright white. Flowers — daisies, lilies — grow abundantly across the grass. The overall mood is strange and domestic rather than triumphant, as if resurrection were an ordinary if unexpected event occurring on a quiet English summer morning.

Stanley Spencer, A Cookham Resurrection (1924-7) – in the ownership of the Tate Modern, London, but not currently on display.

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

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Awe and Glory: A Reflection for Holy Week (Wednesday 1st April 2026)

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Reading—Mark 9. 2-8

A vast, open landscape photographed at dusk or just after sunset. The foreground shows a recently harvested field, its dry golden-brown stubble occupying the lower third of the image, with a grass-edged farm track running diagonally from the lower right toward the horizon. At the centre of the horizon stands a single solitary tree, silhouetted in dark brown-black against a spectacular sky. The sky is the dominant feature: deep, rich cobalt blue at the top gradually softens through lighter blue into a luminous pale glow near the horizon, which itself blazes with bands of warm amber and orange where the sun has recently set. The effect is one of vast space, stillness, and solitude — the lone tree the only vertical element in an otherwise horizontal, almost minimalist composition.

Awe in the everyday. ‘I Touched Infinity’, Potterne Hill, 27 July 2024, © Gerry Lynch.

A perfect sunset, a chord by Fauré, the giggle of a baby, the stars on a dark night – all of those can give us the most extraordinary sensation, for which we use the word awe. We become aware that we have encountered something that is more glorious than the language we have to describe it – much greater in scale and complexity, much greater in beauty and moral grandeur. We sense that we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. Wonder mixes with fear. We are lifted up out of the drudgery of our routine lives. Yet we also realise how small we are; if we are lucky, our ego deflates a bit.

Awe is more than just a feeling. It seems to remind us of facts of life that we often forget. The universe is indeed vast; each one of us is small and lives for the briefest of spans; yet we are distantly related to all life on Earth; the complex elements that make up our bodies were forged in the furnaces of long-dead stars. Everything does indeed connect.

Much of contemporary life seems as if it were designed to minimise the number of times we experience that sense of awe, and from thinking too deeply about it when it does happen. The constant buzzes and beeps, the 24-hour TV schedule, and the infinite scrolling websites aim to keep us chained to our screens so we never notice what is beyond.

To notice the truth of our lives, we need to escape their humdrum.

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