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

Posted on July 5, 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.

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Would You Sacrifice Your Son? – Sermon Preached on 28th June 2026 (Fourth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Genesis 22. 1-18; Matthew 10. 40-42

“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest … and offer him … for a burnt offering…”

A large square oil painting dominated by expansive fields of blue, yellow, red, and green. In the lower centre-right, an elderly bearded man in red and brown robes kneels and looks upward, his right hand raised and gripping a knife. Beneath him, a younger man lies prostrate on the ground, clothed in yellow, his face turned outward toward the viewer. A large blue winged angel descends diagonally from the upper centre of the composition, one arm extended downward toward the knife. To the upper left, a green tree stands before a pale blue background, with two small crouching figures sheltering at its base. In the upper right, rendered in darker, earthier tones, a crowd of figures surrounds a crucifixion scene, with a cross visible at its centre. The background throughout is loosely worked in swirling washes of white, yellow, pink, and blue. A signature appears in the lower left corner.

Marc Chagall, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1960-6), hangs in the National Marc Chagall Gallery, Nice.

If God is merciful, why do men sacrifice their children to their gods? Today’s pairing of readings, seemingly so awkward and contradictory, is linked by the common theme of God’s mercy, and asks us how we should share God’s mercy with those around us.

The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is at once gripping and repulsive. The temptation is, as always with the more difficult Old Testament texts, to distance it from our own modern condition, because we would never do anything as crazy or barbaric as sacrificing our children for God, would we?

The conventional way to read the story of Abraham is that his faith is being put to the test, and that’s what the text itself pushes us towards. At the end of this passage, the angel of the Lord says explicitly that because of Abraham’s iron faith, God’s promise to him so long ago that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars has been confirmed.

But here’s the thing – the story was clearly strange and fearful also for people of its own time, as much as for us. Although Abraham is acting on a commandment of God, there is something furtive about his behaviour. At no point on their three-day trudge to the place of sacrifice does Abraham explain to his two young servants what is happening, and when they arrive, he leaves them behind, plainly lying to them about what he is about to do with Isaac.

He also lies directly to the boy about what is about to happen – when Isaac innocently asks where the sacrificial lamb is, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide one. But that’s not what Abraham thinks is about to happen – Abraham thinks he’s about to kill his own son, and won’t tell him the truth.

So there is a shadow of dissembling resting over this story. Abraham may have passed a test of faith set by God, but it’s as if he knows there’s something shameful about the way he’s done it. Shouldn’t Abraham have asked if God would really have demanded he embark on a course of action that he had to lie about to those closest to him? Was there a better way to be faithful? Surely, we should always ask hard questions if someone is asking us to sacrifice our children.

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The Sword and the Sparrow – Sermon Preached on 21st June 2026 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 6.1b – 11; Matthew 10.24 – 39

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus, in white robes with arm outstretched, addresses a group of twelve men gathered on a rocky hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The apostles stand or crouch in clusters, some leaning on staffs, their expressions attentive and apprehensive. A smaller group of onlookers watches from the lower left. The landscape behind is arid and hilly, with pale water visible in the middle distance under an overcast sky.

James Tissot, Ordaining of the Twelve Apostles (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Musuem.

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t have many of those cuddly quotes you see on social media with AI-generated graphics attached to them. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, says Jesus, and to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven. Fear God, for He can destroy both your body and your soul in Hell. Not the sort of stuff you see on Instagram next to a photo of some pink roses.

This is hard stuff, about division and failure and judgement. It’s also about the sovereignty of God, His rule over the universe and His power to dispose of us as He sees fit; not only His power, but His right to do so. It is stuff that we often prefer not to think about. We want to stick with the idea that God is love and can forgive all, and there’s no need for anyone to suffer or struggle – in particular, we hope that there isn’t any need for me to suffer and struggle.

But we’ve had a week of headlines that ought to remind us that a world where there is no judgement is a world where there is no justice – from the monstrous abuse and murder of a baby by the people who adopted him, to warmongers perpetuating the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine at horrendous cost in human life. And if justice requires that God will judge the world, that means justice requires that God will judge each of us as individuals. So let’s turn back to the Gospel reading fully aware that we live in a world where all of us sometimes choose intentionally to do wrong things, and some people sometimes choose to do truly monstrous things.

Our Gospel reading is part of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve Apostles the first time He sent them out on their own to preach and heal in His name.

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Faith over Fame – Sermon Preached on 14th June 2026 (Third Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

A woman reclines while having her makeup applied by two unseen stylists. One stylist applies lip colour with a brush, while another works on her hair. She has dark, glossy hair swept back, heavy eye makeup with dark liner and mascara, and full, glossy lips. She is wearing a black top with a sequinned neckline. The image is shot at a slight angle, with a blurred red object in the foreground.

Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.

Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.

How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.

If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.

So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.

In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.

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Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

A detail from Veronese's The Feast in the House of Levi. At the centre of a long banquet table draped in white, Christ sits in a rose-pink robe with a faint halo, his long hair falling to his shoulders, reaching toward a dish. He is surrounded by guests in richly coloured Renaissance dress: bearded older men in red, blue and orange, a young red-haired man leaning in at his right, and a servant in yellow raising a glass behind. Two large spaniels sit on the chequered marble floor in the foreground, with pale classical architecture and open sky behind.

An excerpt from Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573), hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

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Unclean Lips – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at All Saints’, All Cannings (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Isaiah 6.1–8; John 16.5–15

“Woe is me! … because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!”

Starting in 1972, the animal psychologist Francine Patterson began to teach an infant gorilla named Koko a modified form of American Sign Language. Patterson claimed Koko could sign a thousand words and understand twice that number in English. I remember seeing Koko speaking on children’s programmes when I was a kid, where we were told that this was absolutely the case (and some people still claim that is so).

Other researchers, however, found that while Koko could indeed use signs to request food, play, or affection, her handlers were, to a large extent, seeing what they wanted to see and ignoring the many times that Koko signed arrant nonsense in search of a reward. Koko could only use signs in a simple, isolated way, with no evidence of the complex, rule-based sentences that even young human children use.

Koko’s life was not in vain, however. She transformed public attitudes to gorillas, previously seen only as dangerous and brutish, just as their habitats were coming under terrible pressure and needed protection. She died eight years ago at the ripe old age – for a gorilla – of forty-six.

Those with longer memories recalled a horse in early 20th Century Germany nicknamed Clever Hans, whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that he could not only spell words by pointing his hoof at a blackboard, but could also tell the time and even do arithmetic well enough to work with fractions. Unfortunately, when von Osten died, nobody else could get Hans to multiply fractions, and the poor creature had a miserable end, drafted into the First World War as a warhorse, where he was either killed in action or, perhaps, consumed by hungry soldiers.

A black-and-white photograph, apparently from the early twentieth century, showing two men and a horse standing in a cobbled courtyard in front of a brick wall. On the left, a young man in a cap holds the horse's bridle. In the centre, an elderly bearded man in a long coat and apron stands beside the horse, which is dark-coated and tall. To their left, a large blackboard mounted on a stand is covered in rows of handwritten numbers and arithmetic problems, including fractions and multiplication sums. Several small round objects, possibly balls or stones, are scattered on the ground at the base of the blackboard. A second, smaller board with abacus-like apparatus is visible in the background.

Clever Hans’ owner claimed he could spell, tell the time, and even work with fractions.

Words are the fundamental thing that separates us from animals. Even animals who have an impressive range of calls use closed systems of communication – we see no open-ended creativity among them, or combining of existing elements to make new concepts. Humans can use the power of language to touch the hem of God Himself. We can use our God-given power over language to speak truth, or we can use it to facilitate deceit. This is not always a case of maliciously and wilfully telling lies. As the stories of Koko and Clever Hans show, people often hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

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Create, Suffer, and Love – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)

2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

A large late-medieval brick town hall dominates the centre of the frame, its dark slate roof punctuated by small dormer windows and crowned by a tall square clock tower with a pointed spire. The tower displays a clock face and is decorated with red and white heraldic shields. Crenellated parapets run along the roofline, giving the building a fortress-like character. The façade features rows of arched and rectangular windows in warm red brick. A small statue on a pedestal stands in front of the building. The surrounding market square is busy with parked cars, a yellow delivery van, and a cyclist in a high-visibility jacket. To the right, a neighbouring building with an orange-tiled roof is partly visible. The sky is overcast and wintry, with bare trees to the left.

I was hoping for a few ales in Kalkar’s Rathauskeller, but it closes at 9 pm! © Gerry Lynch, 5 April 2018.

I was in Germany last week, which enjoyed the same heatwave as we did. I was therefore looking forward to exploring the pub culture as well as the much cheaper German pub prices. I arranged to meet someone I knew from social media but had never met in person, at 9.15 on a Wednesday evening. He lives in a town the size of Devizes, but he warned me that there wouldn’t be a pub open in that town for us to meet in. Instead we had to meet in the larger county town, about the size of Trowbridge, and even that wasn’t exactly lively.

And I know what you’re thinking – what on earth does this have to do with the Holy Trinity? Did the Rector get heatstroke, or perhaps have too much of the unholy sort of spirit when he was across the North Sea?

Well, let’s park that for a moment, and return to it once we’ve had a chance to talk about what it means to be human, and what it means to be God.

To create, to suffer, and to love – these are three of the deepest experiences that human life contains. Creating, suffering, and loving are central to making us human.

They are also central to what God is – God also creates, suffers, and loves.

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Dream the Impossible – Sermon Preached on 24th May 2026 (Pentecost)

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 2.1-21; John 20.19-23

“…your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…”

A stylised illustration depicting the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. Three smiling soldiers in olive green uniforms and berets stand in the foreground, holding rifles adorned with red carnations. A woman embraces one of the soldiers joyfully. Jubilant crowds surround them, some holding carnations, others waving Portuguese flags and signs reading "Viva a Revolução" (Long live the Revolution), "Democracia" (Democracy), and "Liberdade" (Freedom). The setting is a recognisable Lisbon street scene, with terracotta-roofed buildings, balconies decorated with flowers and flags, a yellow tram marked No. 28, the Elevador de Santa Justa visible in the background, and shop signs for a café, livraria (bookshop), and sapataria (shoe shop).

An old friend of mine back in Belfast, who died some years ago, had a girlfriend in the 1950s, when he was young. She was his first serious love, until she dumped him – for an Englishman! – a schoolmaster, who taught overseas in schools for British expatriates. She soon married the schoolmaster and accompanied him to his next job, in Lisbon.

Despite being jilted, my friend remained good platonic friends with his ex, and they corresponded for some years. To keep her in touch with her home town, my pal sent her copies of the Belfast Telegraph. Portugal had by then been under the grip of an authoritarian dictatorship for a quarter of a century, the Estado Novo of António Salazar. While it avoided the worst aspects of fascism and certainly couldn’t be compared with Nazism, it was hostile to free expression, and its secret police, experts in the use of psychological torture, suppressed anything and anyone that smacked of liberalism, socialism, or secularism.

Now, the 1950s Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the Ulster Unionist establishment, wasn’t exactly a well of liberalism, socialism, secularism, or any other form of racy radicalism. Still, my friend’s ex-girlfriend would receive her copies of the Belfast Telegraph with many holes cut in them, stories Salazar’s secret police would rather the Portuguese didn’t know about.

By the 1970s, Portugal was caught up in a quartet of bloody end-of-empire wars in Africa and its main export was its people, yet the Estado Novo continued, seemingly secure, just like Franco in next-door Spain. Then one April night in 1974, a group of army officers, fed up with sending young men die in unwinnable and cruel wars, launched a coup. The radio told people to stay at home, but instead they came out onto the streets to celebrate with the soldiers, pushing carnations into the barrels of their guns. The Estado Novo fell without a shot. Portugal then had a bumpy spell of brawls and even riots between socialists and conservatives, but eventually left-leaning and right-leaning parties found enough common ground to manage a transition to a free democracy, and eventually to prosperity. And nobody saw it coming – not the experts and not anyone else.

We never really know what is around the corner. I could have told a similar story about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Less positively, we could all share recollections of the way that coronavirus crept into our news bulletins and then crashed into our lives in the first months of 2020. But there are always plenty of people telling us to worry about the ways our lives and the state of the world might change for the worse. We sometimes forget that things do often get better, in dramatic ways that nobody predicted, often when things seem to be at their darkest.

Pentecost is the feast of things getting better in dramatic and unforeseen ways. Pentecost is a story about two things – about the Church, and about God.

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Risen, Not Restored – Sermon Preached on 17th May 2026 (Sunday After Ascension)

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

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

Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11

“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” 

The upper portion of Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, photographed looking upward. Christ sits enthroned at the centre within a pointed mandorla outlined in gold, wearing a pale white robe. His face is angular and gaunt in Sutherland's distinctive modernist style, with dark features rendered in bold, almost sketched lines. Both hands are raised, the right in a gesture of blessing. The background is a striking vivid green, woven in broad, uneven brushstroke-like bands. Flanking Christ on either side, set within smaller rectangular panels, are two of the four living creatures representing the evangelists — stylised, energetic figures with wings and haloes, depicted in earthy tones against darker backgrounds. Fine vertical lines from the tapestry's warp threads are visible across the surface, emphasising the monumental textile's handwoven character.

The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.

No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.

They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.

But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.

And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.

That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.

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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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