Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

Of Course You Can’t Walk On Water – Sermon Preached on 9th August 2026 (Tenth Sunday after Trinity)

9 August 20269 August 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 10.5–15; Matthew 14.22–33

“…beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’”

A wide expanse of calm sea under a clear pale blue sky, occupying the lower two-thirds of the frame. The water shifts from deep teal in the foreground to a lighter turquoise towards the horizon, its surface finely rippled and catching the light. Across the middle distance lies a low, narrow island covered in dense dark green pine woodland, with a pale sandy shoreline and a few small buildings visible among the trees. A second, smaller wooded islet sits to the left, and further low islands are just discernible along the horizon on both sides. Several small vessels are scattered across the water: a white sailing yacht with a purple sail, another with white sails to the left, and a number of motorboats leaving thin white wakes. On the far right horizon, two larger ships are visible in silhouette. The photograph appears to be taken from an elevated position, looking down and out across the water. — *“Here, fancy a walk over to those islands?” © Gerry Lynch, 26 July 2017.*

A couple of summers ago, I was on the way to Jersey, on a very hot summer day, on a big slow ferry across the English Channel, when I decided to get off and go for a walk. The water was lovely and cool after the stuffy cabin, and it was enjoyably strenuous to climb up and down the waves, but my shoes were starting to get soaked and stained with salt water, and I worried about how they’d stink the cabin out.

Of course, this never happened. I made this up. People don’t walk on water. If God had wanted us to walk on water, we would be born with skis instead of feet.

Jesus can walk on water because Jesus isn’t just another small-town preacher and holy man, but the Messiah, sent by God as Saviour of the human race. This is one of the miracle stories in the middle part of Matthew’s Gospel where the disciples, and Peter in particular, are confronted with more and more evidence of Jesus’ divine origin. These form the backbone of our readings from Matthew’s Gospel through this late summer and autumn and Peter will, before too long, be the first to work it all out.

Peter was the first person to confess that Jesus is the Messiah. A great man. But Peter wasn’t God. So, Peter couldn’t walk on water. It isn’t that Peter couldn’t walk on water because he didn’t have enough faith – or that he was able to walk on water while he had his eyes on Jesus, but lost it when he got distracted by the wind. Jesus isn’t telling off Peter as “You of little faith” because he can’t walk on water. People can’t walk on water.

Address at the Interment of the Mortal Remains of Caroline Jackson, 5 August 2026 (St Oswald’s Day)

8 August 20265 August 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Oswald’s, Widford

Psalm 121; 1 Corinthians 15.50–58

“Therefore, my beloved brethren … know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Interior of a small stone chapel looking east from the west end towards the chancel arch. Whitewashed walls tinged pink, an open roof of dark timber rafters with white plaster between. Two painted boards in decorated frames flank the pointed chancel arch, lettered with the Ten Commandments; traces of medieval wall painting survive around the deep-set leaded window on the left, where a vase of garden flowers stands on the sill. Box pews of pale, weathered oak fill the nave on both sides, with a dark carved wooden pulpit or reading desk to the left of the arch. Beyond, a small altar with two candles and a cross stands below a traceried east window. The floor is worn stone flags. In the foreground right, a book ledge holds stacked red hymnals and blue books, with laminated notices propped above. — *St Oswald’s Widford © Gerry Lynch, 5 August 2026*

The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7^th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.

The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.

It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.

Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.

Generosity and Difference – Sermon Preached on 2 August 2026 (Ninth Sunday after Trinity)

2 August 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 9.1–5; Matthew 14.13–21

“…I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people…”

Densely packed stone rooftops of Jerusalem's Old City at dusk, under a sky graded from deep violet to vivid pink. A floodlit church bell tower with a pyramidal roof and arched openings rises at the centre, with a domed church, a crenellated tower flying a flag, and a green-lit minaret beyond. Satellite dishes, water tanks and washing lines cover the flat roofs in the foreground. — *Dusk behind the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City from the Ecce Homo Pilgrim House. © Gerry Lynch, 18 November 2022.*

Last April, a French nun was attacked near the Old City in Jerusalem, attacked from behind and shoved to the ground by a man whom she had done nothing to provoke and couldn’t even see. It’s increasingly common for Christians in Jerusalem, whether foreigners or local Palestinians, to be verbally abused, spat at, or even beaten up by Jewish extremists. But this incident was caught on camera. The next day the Israeli authorities charged the man with religiously aggravated assault. The case has not yet come to trial.

This incident came to mind when I read this morning’s Epistle reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. You see, St Paul hadn’t started as one of Christ’s followers, but as someone who constantly persecuted them. His worst moment was when he stirred up a lynch mob that stoned poor St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. By the time he wrote today’s first reading, about fifteen years later, he had been on quite a journey. Whenever I see one of those extremist leaders of the West Bank settlers being interviewed on TV, I can’t help thinking of Paul, back in the days when he was still Saul. Indeed, the place where St Stephen was probably stoned is no more than a mile from where the nun was attacked last April.

None of us emerges into the world as an island. We all have a backstory – family, ancestors, nation, perhaps even more than one nation. These backstories are all complicated. Our family stories all have their dark moments – the relation nobody wants to talk about, the cousins who studiously avoid one another at weddings. Of course, every country has episodes of shame in its history as well as episodes of glory. The story of the Church is one containing much wickedness as well as good – when we encounter members of other faiths, we need to remember that.

Christianity emerged into the world from Judaism. Except for Luke and Acts, the entire New Testament was written by people who, like Christ Himself, lived and died as Jews – Jews who happened to come to faith that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. But none of them ever thought of themselves as being anything other than Jewish, and indeed there was quite a battle in the first two decades or so of the Church about whether Gentiles – in other words, people who weren’t Jews – could become Christians at all unless they became Jews first. St Paul argued that they needn’t do so, and Paul won the argument in the end, but we can hear echoes of it throughout his writing.

A Devouring Minotaur – Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant

9 August 202631 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Some notes after reading Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha (London: Reaktion Books, 2026).

Book cover, duotone red, for "Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant" by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha. Hoxha in a coat and trilby, mid-wave with one hand raised, against a background of the letter Z repeated in a fence-like pattern.

“After Nixon’s visit to China, a group of disappointed radical Marxists from Washington state hung a banner in downtown Seattle reading: ‘Defend Albania, Marxism’s last hope’.”[1]

Despite its diminutive scale and its poverty, Albania in the latter decades of the Cold War retained a wider importance to cognoscenti on the Far Left worldwide because of its unflinching and unembarrassed Stalinism. This was the product of the unflinching and unembarrassed tyrant who ruled the Balkan country for forty of its forty-seven years of Communist rule, Enver Hoxha, most of it as a minotaur defending his maze. With perfect timing, Hoxha died exactly one month after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the USSR in early 1985 – granting the world just the tiniest sliver of overlap between the last holdout of Communism’s murderous but potent heyday in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the man who would inadvertently dismantle the structures that allowed the system to remain rigid despite its increasingly obvious contradictions.

Hoxha thought he and his régime were of global importance every bit as much as his more enthusiastic overseas admirers. In my latter primary school years, those immediately after Hoxha’s death, Radio Tirana, at some financial cost to this small and impoverished country, dominated the shortwaves with its portentous, somewhat sinister, interval signal introducing programmes in twenty languages, aiming to export Albania’s vision of revolution. I doubt programming in other languages was any less tedious than that in English, which was soporifically dry and always delivered in a halting, heavily accented monotone, bemoaning the machinations of “American imperialists” and “Soviet socialist imperialists”.

Politicians are Scared of Calling Out Muslim Homophobia

9 August 202630 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Three people embracing in a close group hug at an outdoor event, seen from behind, with the Brandenburg Gate visible in the background under a bright sky. A rainbow pride flag is partially visible at the edge of the frame.

My thanks to Unherd for running my short piece on the comments of Sir Chris Bryant MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on the attack on the Christopher Street Day LGBT+ parade in Berlin last weekend. Sir Chris refused to acknowledge that the attacker was an Islamist even after the German Interior Minister publicly stated that to be the case.

Sir Chris was “ordained as a priest in the Church of England before he first left active ministry and later Anglicanism entirely because he couldn’t reconcile his homosexuality with his Church’s treatment of gay relationships. Naming Christian homophobia is considered laudable in his own support base.

“But naming Muslim homophobia? This, in contrast, threatens the unofficial British state settlement around crimes which undercut the narrative that multiculturalism only has benefits and never brings new problems. The most obvious case is of nationwide grooming gangs. But there has been a constant drumbeat of lesser yet still serious incidents, from the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 to the Wakefield woman forced to go to the local mosque to plead for her son’s life in 2023 after he damaged a Quran.”

The Pearl and the Furnace – Sermon Preached on 26th July 2026 (Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

27 July 202625 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 8.26–39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.

“‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered ‘Yes.’

A woman stands bent over a large open trough or tub, her sleeves pushed back and her arms sunk into a mass of dough, working leaven through the meal. She wears long, plain robes gathered at the waist, her head covered, inclined toward her work. The setting is a spare domestic interior with a suggestion of a wall and floor behind her, and light falling from one side. The composition is close and shadowed, the figure filling most of the frame. Fine cross-hatching models the folds of cloth and the bulk of the dough. — *Sir John Everett Millais, The Leaven (1864) in the Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, London.*

Have you understood all this? The yeast and the flour and the treasure in the field, and the pearl of great price? And the good fish and the bad fish – and the furnace of fire?

The disciples confidently told Jesus that, yes, they had. But at this stage of Matthew’s Gospel, when He is still teaching and healing in Galilee, there is much they don’t understand about Jesus Himself. The disciples are far from working out that Jesus is the Messiah, further still from realising that Jesus is not here to bring them a lifetime of comfort and worldly success, but to die for the sake of their eternities. So perhaps one of the things that we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel is how much the disciples have yet to understand about Christ, how much work the yeast has yet to do, how far the mustard seed has yet to grow. As with them, so also with us – or at least let us hope that God still has much spiritual growth to raise in us.

One point of parables is that people can never understand them in their entirety – they land differently with each of us, and each of us will read them differently at different points of our lives. Like the kingdom of heaven itself, when we try to grasp the parables too tightly, to turn them into definitive statements of policy that we can use to make ourselves into insiders and others into outsiders, then they disappear into meaninglessness.

Yet there are insiders and outsiders, says Christ. Which is which is for Him to judge, not us, but there are good and bad fish – and the bad fish will be thrown into a furnace of fire. I always like to sidestep the implications the implications of the bits of the Bible where people get put in the fire by talking about the refiner’s fire, the furnace that turns a cheap alloy into gold or silver. But what is left when you throw an unhealthy fish into a furnace, but perhaps a few charred bones? This set of parables isn’t just hard to understand, it finishes on a hard and judging note.

Living Amid the Weeds – Sermon Preached on 19th July 2026 (Seventh Sunday after Trinity)

19 July 202619 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 8.12–25; Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43

“The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No…’”

What happens when the people we are supposed to look up to fail? What happens when the people we would like to see as examples and patterns for our own lives turn out to be no better than the rest of us – and often much worse?

Oil painting of a riverside landscape with windswept trees under a cloudy sky. In the centre, a bare-chested man scatters seed from a basket on his hip as he walks across a harvested field. On the left, two labourers lie slumped and asleep against a tree trunk; on the right, another man lies asleep on the ground, his head resting on his arm. A river with a small boat and distant hills is visible in the background. — *Domenico Fetti, The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (1620-21). Hangs in the Courtauld Institute, London.*

As a society, we’re speedrunning that experiment. Trust in democratic institutions is crumbling. Only one in eight of us now trusts governments to put nation before party all or most of the time. There is a growing political gap in how much people say they trust judges, scientists, teachers, professors, and civil servants – for a large minority of the population, they are the political priesthood of the other side.

As for other sources of authority, they too have seen their credibility dissolve. The Royal Family? Let’s not dwell too long on Prince Andrew. The world of celebrities? Rife with abuse.

The Church, and its priests and bishops – [fx: LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT] – well, they certainly have their share of wrongdoers, with regard to sex and money, of course, but also in handling safeguarding disclosures and episodes of bullying.

Most people aren’t interested in the Church – and if what we were selling was the idea that we’re in a position to stand in judgement over others, then they’d be right. The Church will not be the judge of the world, only the Saviour to whom it points the human race, Jesus Christ. Those who call themselves Christians will be under His judgement as much as anyone else. Now, if we truly seek to make Christ the guiding light of our lives, we can hope to live better lives than we would otherwise, but we certainly aren’t perfect.

In this life, God allows the good and the bad to grow together. Often, the wicked flourish. Now, I’m sure most of us have chapters in our lives that we’re not proud of, and most of us know how they tend to start. We do something small that we know isn’t quite right, and we get away with it, and it doesn’t cause us that much worry – after all, other people are getting away with the same sort of thing and mostly they seem to be perfectly nice people most of the time. Then our moral compass starts to go awry, small steps lead to larger steps, and we find ourselves deep amid the weeds, living in a way that would once have caused us shame.

Of Dandelions and Oaks – Sermon Preached on 12th July 2026 (Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

22 July 202612 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 8.1–11; Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23

“Listen! A sower went out to sow…”

I thought I’d start today with a bit of science. Why does a mouse have dozens of babies, and an elephant just one? Some species, whether animals or plants, have a low number of offspring and put a lot of effort into raising them – we are one of these, so are elephants and gorillas, big animals like us, but so are parrots. Some species have lots of offspring, so cannot, of course, put the same amount of effort into raising any single one of them – rats famously breed like… well, rabbits.

A thickly painted oil landscape. A large yellow sun sits low on the horizon at the centre, its rays radiating outward across a yellow-green sky in short, dashed brushstrokes. Below the sun, a band of pale gold stubble or standing corn runs the width of the picture; a small blue farm building with a red roof stands at the far left, and dark trees mark the horizon at the right. The foreground is a broad ploughed field rendered in dense, choppy strokes of blue, violet, white, and orange, with a pale furrow curving through it. A peasant in a straw hat, olive jacket, and blue trousers strides across the field from the right, seed sack cradled against his body, his right arm swinging out as he casts. Three dark birds are scattered across the soil. — *Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.*

A similar spectrum is seen in the world of plants – blow on a dandelion clock and many dozens of seeds will float on the breeze; oaks are very different, sometimes waiting for years to produce acorns, with each acorn loaded with enough reserves to survive decades of burial, drought, and being nibbled by squirrels – after all, the forest floor will still be there in fifty years’ time.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” writes St Paul to the Christians in Rome. There are many implications of the phrase “in Christ Jesus”. But one comes from remembering that Jesus is God, and God is Love – the Bible says so in those same three words. To be in Jesus Christ is to live in love. The Holy Spirit is love too – the love that flows between Father and Son, and a person in its own right, who ripples out from them through the whole universe, a universe whose beauty at every scale shows that it is loved.

We human beings are made in the image and likeness of our creator God; we reflect that image most clearly when we love. We are called both to receive God’s love as seed sown in us, and to sow seeds of that love in others.

God is constantly sowing seeds in our lives out of His love for us, usually without us really noticing. Some fall on the path, in the rocky ground, or amid the thorns. Sometimes our hearts are too hard for the seed to flourish; sometimes we’re too distracted by material things to respond; sometimes to respond to God’s love would mean doing unpopular or costly things, so we back off. We fear the condemnation of those around us, but the only condemnation we should truly fear is that of God, and when we respond to God’s love by sharing that love with others, then we are truly in Christ, and we need not, as St Paul reminds us, fear God’s condemnation. If you fear your harvest is thin, trust that the same God who sows in love also forgives and restores.

Changing Politics, Changing Country

9 July 20269 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

How does the Church of England navigate a Britain of a transforming party system, transforming demographics, and increasing division?

Workshop presentation for the Diocese of Salisbury Clergy Conference, 8 July 2026, Bryanston School, Dorset

I. On radical cultural shifts

None of us interprets the world entirely as a blank slate. All of us see the world through a set of assumptions, values, and ways of understanding the world that a society or group takes largely for granted. We can call this a paradigm – a paradigm is the collection of usually unexamined beliefs through which people interpret the world, judge what is normal or plausible, and organise their collective life. These are never entirely fixed – they tend to change, gradually and organically, over time. We need these mental models, as reality is too complex for us to grasp in its fullness. But every once in a while a paradigm that had been convincing starts to become very poor at describing the reality that people experience. When that happens, the paradigm starts not to evolve, but to collapse: the old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense, and for a moment all sorts of new ideas seem possible; after a period of uncertainty, even chaos, a new paradigm starts to congeal.

My argument is that we are inside one of those transitions in the way that people understand the world – a paradigm collapse. Even if you’ve never come across the concept, we have lived through major collapses of a paradigm within living memory. One of them happened to the Church; one of them happened in another part of the world but was of global importance. How the Church responded to the first, and how the world responded to the second, tells us much about how to respond to the one which I believe we are about to experience.

1963: the collapse of Western Christendom

1963 was a time of radical change – television had arrived in every living room, car ownership was increasing rapidly while Dr Beeching was taking an axe to the railways, and the Pill was just starting to rewire people’s most intimate relationships.

Philip Larkin fixed the hinge of the British 20^th Century in that year, in the poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which starts:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The joke lands because it is true. Church historians of every stripe now locate in the early 1960s the moment at which a Christendom in place for over a millennium gave way with astonishing speed. Callum Brown, an atheist historian of religion in Britain who positively celebrates the change, insists the data show this “was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event” – one which followed a 1950s of rising church attendance and sacramental participation. Sam Brewitt-Taylor, who laments the change, has shown that senior Christian leaders suddenly conceded the arrival of the ‘secular society’ in 1963–64, making the collapse of cultural Christianity all but inevitable. The collapse of Christendom was less a case of gradual erosion since the Enlightenment, more an avalanche.

You Bunch of Failures – Sermon Preached on 5th July 2026 (Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

5 July 20265 July 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Romans 7.15–25a, Matthew 11.16–19, 25–30

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The other day, straight after taking a funeral, I had a long chat with the immediate family, and I kicked myself afterwards when I realised I had been far cheerier than was appropriate with people who were clearly deeply in grief. Then there was the plan for a “good night’s sleep” that disappeared into Cape Verde’s late-night heroics against the might of Argentina. I could go on, but the worst things I’ve done aren’t things I’d volunteer to reveal from the pulpit on a Sunday.

An oil painting of an elderly man seated on a simple wooden chair beside a fireplace. He is bent forward with his face buried in both clenched fists, his elbows resting on his knees. He wears a loose blue working suit and heavy, worn leather boots. His hair is thin and pale. The brushwork is thick and visible throughout, with strong directional strokes following the contours of the figure's hunched body and the grain of the wooden floorboards. The chair is painted in muted olive-yellow. To the left, a low fire burns in a plain hearth with a dark mantelpiece. The background wall is rendered in pale grey with broad, textured strokes. The overall palette is dominated by blues, ochres, and muted earth tones. — *Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.*

We all know the feeling. We all do things that strike us as quite mad afterwards – self-destructive or sometimes just wrong – sometimes things done in the spur of the moment, sometimes wrong courses of action that we’ve continued with for some time.

St Paul recognised this in his own life, writing this morning that even when he was overjoyed by God’s commandments, he saw “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin”. St Paul’s great insight was that human beings could never become truly good just by trying to follow God’s commandments, because we are all so prone to self-sabotage. That’s why the story of the Jewish people, although they were God’s chosen people, included the same failures and episodes of self-destruction as everyone else’s. Even when we know in our minds what the right thing is and set out to do the best, something inside ourselves, something that often seems out of our control, makes us turn to the worst.

Nobody’s perfect. We all know that.

So I find it odd that, if you pay attention to the way our newspapers are written and our TV programmes are made, they encourage us into a mood of feeling smug and superior. And that’s even before we discuss the algorithms of social media. It has all become much worse over the last couple of decades. I think that is because it is now possible to explore in minute detail what makes people tune in and tune out, what makes people disengage or click. The media and social media moguls wouldn’t press those buttons of smugness and superiority if they weren’t producing results for them.