Celebrity and Humility: Sermon Preached on Sunday 2nd April 2023 (Palm Sunday)

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

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

Philippians 2. 5–11; Matthew 21. 1–11

If Jesus made his second coming in the near future, how would we know about an event like his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday? I suspect we might learn about it from TikTok, or a YouTube video, probably made by one of the army of professional YouTubers trying to cash in on Jesus’ popularity.

When I talk to primary school children, one of the most common things that both boys and girls say they want to be when they grow up is a “YouTuber”. You might wonder if that can actually be a job. Well, the highest paid video-maker on YouTube in 2020 earned US$26 million in that year alone. He is a boy from Texas called Ryan Kaji who reviews toys, and 2020 was the year in which he had his ninth birthday.

A watercolour painting in dull colours by James Tissot of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey carrying a palm surrounded by cheering crowds.

James Tissot, The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem, (1886-94). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum

So, the Palm Sunday story should resonate powerfully in our era of celebrity. Jesus rides into town like a king, and He is quite conscious of what he is doing; He seeks to fulfil Hebrew prophecy, with a direct quote from Zechariah. What comes next has clearly been carefully thought through, and Jesus seems to have made preparations for His triumphant entry to the Holy City with people in Jerusalem who call him “the Master”, but who aren’t known by even the closest disciples who have travelled with him from Galilee. The crowds greet Jesus like a conquering king entering his new capital, spreading their cloaks in front of him and forming a guard of honour.

Today, we break the story here, with Jesus the darling of the masses. Yet within just a few days, the story will take a dramatic twist. To be a darling of the crowd and greeted as a coming king is, needless to say, a serious threat to the actual kings and rulers of a society. The authorities soon launch a campaign of black propaganda against this preacher who some people see as a prophet. The propaganda is effective and soon enough the masses turn against Jesus. When He is brutally executed just five days later, those members of Sunday’s crowd who come to see Jesus on the Cross do so not to cheer, but to jeer.

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Our Mucky Humanity: Sermon Preached on 19th March 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Lent)

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Ephesians 5. 8–14; John 9. 1–41

“…he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes…”

Some of you will have noticed that there was a rugby match between England and Ireland yesterday. For those who have not the slightest interest in sport, let me cut a long story short by saying that Ireland won comfortably. I tell you that not to gloat – although I’m sure that some of you will be cynical about my intentions! – but to provide context for this morning’s readings.

When I was schoolboy I wanted, for a brief time at least, to play rugby for Ireland. In my imagination, I would see myself in a green jersey on the pitch at a packed Lansdowne Road, on a mild March afternoon like yesterday’s, in the final weekend of  a Six Nations championship, crashing over the line for the winning try as the seconds ticked down in a Grand Slam decider. Hopefully, a Grand Slam decider against England! It has, however, been a long time since five-foot-five has been a sufficient stature for international rugby, and so those dreams had to remain unfulfilled. I must trust that God’s plans for me never involved international rugby, for otherwise he would have given me an extra centimetre… or twenty. Indeed, in His good sense God probably realised that I was never going to enjoy a life of getting up at half-five every morning to lift weights and down protein shakes. God made me to be me, not just in my soul and my mind, but also in my body, which He made specifically for me, with its stumpy little legs and fat backside.

The Healing of the Man Born Blind, painted by El Greco in 1567. It now hangs in the Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma, Italy.

Christians face the constant danger of reducing their faith to something otherworldly, overly spiritualised, and detached from physical reality. Yet one of the things that stands out in this morning’s long Gospel reading is the sheer physicality of its portrayal of Jesus. The passage rejoices in the messiness of human life and the human body – Jesus spits in public, indeed in front of his own followers, then rubs his spittle in the mud, makes a paste out of it, and rubs it in the blind man’s eyes.

Even more significantly, this comes immediately after Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus has therefore just identified Himself with “I am”, the Hebrew term for God, and said His life was of global importance. Then He gets His hands muddy with his own spit and washes a stranger with the product.

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Ye Must Be Born Again: Sermon Preached on 5th March 2023 (Second Sunday of Lent)

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Romans 4:1-5, 4:13-17; John 3:1-17

“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”

 “Ye must be born again.” I saw this phrase a lot when I was a kid growing up in Belfast, on the noticeboards of churches and sometimes on posters stuck up on lamp-posts. It made very little sense to me, just as it initially made very little sense to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading.

A young and powerfully built man holding a big yellow sign with the text "John 3:7" on it in black writing. Several young women and men, one holding a pram, are standing behind him.

Is this what being born again is about? Street preachers in Belfast 6 April 2013. Photo © Allan Leonard and used underCreative Commons 2.0.

As I became older, I started noticing that the street preachers who popped up in the city centre on Saturday afternoons liked using it. They were quite clear that they were born again, and therefore that they were proper Christians: and they were also clear that the rest of us were not proper Christians – especially if we happened to be Catholics.

Aged around eighteen, I found myself walking past a church where an Evangelical youth rally was about to start, and going in out of curiosity. I came forward at the altar call because I did indeed want a closer personal relationship with Jesus; perhaps, in the way of the young, I wanted some of the obvious sense of certainty that the people leading the rally seemed to have. I was quickly disappointed, however – on hearing my obviously Catholic name and the strongly Republican part of the city I came from, the people holding the rally clearly coveted a convert and a ‘conquest’. I found it the experience so nauseating that I bade my farewells and left as soon as I politely could.

I’m sure I’m not the only person here who has had experiences like this. This makes us rather nervous when we hear the phrase “you must be born again”. Indeed, it might seem that the translators of the Bible version we use in St John’s are nervous about it as well. They prefer the phrase: “You must be born from above”. Now, let’s be clear that this is not some get-out-clause invented by liberal New Testament scholars. The same Greek word “anōthen” can be translated either way. In any case, this matters little – whichever word is chosen to translate this phrase, Jesus is very clearly speaking of the idea of a rebirth – a heavenly, spiritual, rebirth.

But here’s the rub – in this story, being reborn isn’t something that people choose for themselves. “The wind blows where it chooses”, as Jesus says. If we are ‘born again’ it is because the Holy Spirit has blown its way into our lives for reasons of its own. It is not in our gift or our choosing. It isn’t something that we should wear as some sort of badge of pride or see as a prize for our achievements. To be born again is a gift of God the Holy Spirit.

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When We Are Angry At God: Sermon Preached on 12th February 2023 (Second Sunday before Lent)

Posted on February 12, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Romans 8. 18–25; Matthew 6. 25–34

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

“…the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Can any of us imagine anything more terrifying than an earthquake? In Turkey and Syria last week millions of lives were devastated in the space of a few minutes in the middle of the night. The images on our screens overwhelm us even from this distance; we can scarcely imagine the feelings of those on the ground, sleeping in tents or in their cars amid the rubble.

When I was in my twenties, I took three holidays travelling on my own in southern Turkey, around some of the regions worst affected by this week’s earthquake. Cities mentioned in news reports this week – Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman – aren’t abstract places to me. They’re where I met the Arab workmen on the bus who didn’t speak Turkish, let alone English, but shared their peaches with me. They’re where I met the police officer on the first morning of Ramadan who invited me to break the fast in his home with his family that evening. They’re where, a few days later, I found the pub on the upper floors of an office building that was still open in Ramadan, and got drunk late into the night with left-wing political activists while we taught each other Irish and Kurdish folk songs.

It is a part of the world with its troubles, like many places, and also an incredibly hospitable one, rich in music and architecture and human kindness. Its people did nothing to deserve the hell visited on them last week.

Two men and a woman walk past a building flattened in the 6 February 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Turkey. Dust from rubble clearly hangs in the air.

Earthquake damage in Hatay, Turkey. Credit – Hilmi Hacaloğlu.

Earthquakes aren’t caused by human beings. The slipping of tectonic plates is simply the way the world works. Their randomness and violence can leave us angry at God. Perhaps all the more when we hear Jesus telling us in this morning’s Gospel reading to look at how pretty God made the lilies of the field and so trust that He will make sure we will have all we need. But sometimes God doesn’t send people what they need to eat and drink or wear. Many thousands of people over the next few weeks, especially in Syria, some of them devout Christians, are going to die from hunger and cold. Let’s be honest about that. A faith that is incapable of being honest about the reality of human existence is a faith that is scarcely worth having.

Stephen Fry, who is a rather crusading atheist, was once asked in an interview about what he would say to God if he found out after he died that there was in fact an afterlife. He responded with honest anger “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?’” If the best answer Christians can give to that, or to the dead children under the rubble in Turkey and Syria, is that if only everybody lived as Jesus taught us, then the world would be wonderful, then we deserve to be rejected by the world. If promises of material security – that often seem to be broken – were all there were to the Christian faith, then the world would be right to reject it.     

That isn’t the whole story, however. St Paul reminds us in this morning’s epistle that we do not hope for things we see, but what cannot be seen. Our hope as Christians doesn’t lie entirely in this world, but also in what lies beyond it. St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle that the agonies of today are the labour pains that herald the coming glory, which we wait for along with the whole of creation.

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Salt, Light, and Doomed Rulers: Sermon Preached on 5th February 2023 (Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

1 Corinthians 12. 1–12; Matthew 5. 13–20

“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified … so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

You may know the famous poem by Shelley, named Ozymandias. In it, he gazes at an enormous, ancient, shattered statue lying in the pieces in the middle of a desert. The face has broken off from the main body of the statue, and now lies half buried in the sand, but its “sneer of cold command”, artfully and accurately sculpted, still bears witness to a long-forgotten ruler who was used to having his every instruction obeyed.

The inscription below reads:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

This was a man who could clearly strike terror into the hearts of his subjects and his enemies alike. The wise thing was obviously to not put yourself at the wrong end of Ozymandias’ power. And yet the poem concludes:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A stonecarved bust of young and handsome man with some damage to the skull, in a museum room. The young man's expression is a sneer of cold command.

The famous bust of Ramses II (ca. 1250 BC) immortalised in poetry by Shelley. © Pbuergler and used underCC BY-CA 3.0

It is said that Shelley penned those lines after reading descriptions of the statue of the Pharaoh Ramses II, who lived 3,200 years ago and whose bust now stands in the British Museum. He ruled Egypt shortly before the great crisis of climate and economics that we now know as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which upended the Mediterranean world of its day. For all his might and power, Ramses’ legacy was swept away by forces of history beyond human control.

As St Paul reminds us this morning, the rulers of every age before us have passed away. Those of our age are doomed to pass away also, through forces that they are unlikely to be able to detect in advance, let alone control. The last remnants of the world that I came of age in, that of the long boom between the end of the Cold War and the financial crisis of 2008, have just been swept away by a virus invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps some future poet will see the wreckage of an ancient statue of President Putin, or President Macron, or Boris the Unsteady, and write a meditation of the quality of Shelley’s on the transience of power and the shortness of human life. This poem speaks to us not so much because it teaches us something new, but because it reminds us of things that we instinctively know, but which the world, and especially the media locked into its over-excited twenty-four hour news cycle, risks making us forget.

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Worship is Worth It: Sermon Preached on 29th January 2023 (Fourth Sunday after The Epiphany)

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Evensong in St Mary the Virgin, Bishop’s Cannings

Genesis 28.10-22; Philemon 1–16

“…this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house.”

Philemon is not a text that preachers tend to thank the lectionary for throwing their way. Nonetheless I think it has quite a bit of interest to say to us here this evening, especially when paired with our Old Testament reading from Genesis, one of the most famous passages from that book, Jacob’s Ladder. Evensong often gives us the chance to engage with parts of the Bible that are rarely read in the Sunday morning lectionary. Tonight it certainly has.

White angels climbing up and down a ladder, representing a famous vision of Jacob in Genesis 28. A red sunset hovers overhead and a dark town is in the background. This is a painting by Mark Chagall from 1973.

Chagall, Jacob’s Ladder (1973).

There is often debate in the Church about whether the Church’s primary job is to help the needy or to worship almighty God. We often hear a similar debate about evangelism, where some argue it should be de-prioritised or even avoided entirely for the sake of helping the poor. In his letter to Philemon, St Paul sees all these things as being intimately connected with one another and mutually reinforcing one another. He prays for Philemon that “the communication of thy faith may become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus”. It is when we take time to recognise the good that Jesus Christ does in us and through us, and to thank Him for that in prayer, that we become effective in sharing our faith.

Philemon is a difficult document because in it Paul discusses Onesimus, a runaway slave, with Philemon, who is his owner. Any thought of doing anything other than condemning slavery makes us outraged, and rightly so. The sad reality, however, is nearly every human society, on every continent, began practising slavery as soon the development of agriculture made it practical. What more demonstration of the reality of original sin do we need?

Indeed, while our first instinct when reading this letter is to stand in pious judgement over St Paul and the Roman Imperial society that produced him, we might consider that for all their faults, the Romans never came close to threatening the planet’s capacity to support human life, something we’ve done remarkably quickly through nothing more sophisticated than burning a bit of coal and oil. We are very quick to judge those of the past perhaps precisely because we know that us people of the present are, for all our wealth and technological power, just as flawed as our ancestors.

So, I think part of what this difficult letter has to teach us that there is no perfect social or political order and that there never will be — we must live our lives as Christians and seek to do good and follow Christ in a world that will always have dark aspects. We can, of course, work to change the political system and the laws we live under. Christianity supplied most of those who led the worldwide abolition of slavery in the century before last and we thank God for them. But we won’t always succeed in our attempts to make the world a better place; in fact sometimes we won’t even be pushing for the right things. Attempts to create utopia, to actually build heaven on earth, have usually led to hellish outcomes; the first society to reintroduce forms of slavery after having previously abolished the practice was the Soviet Union, which claimed to be a staging-post towards the perfect system of governing the world.

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We Only See the Light in Darkness: Sermon Preached on 29th January 2023 (Candlemas Transferred)

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 2. 14-18; Matthew 2. 22-40

“…a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Today’s Gospel reading is set in a time when faith was thin and political realities were grim. Corruption and oppression reigned in the land but those most committed to change were often fanatical and violent. Religious leaders seemed more interested in power and privilege than praising God. It was a time and a place, in other words, like many others and not entirely different from our own.

Some did keep faith in these difficult circumstances – Mary and Joseph were two such people, presenting their baby son in the Temple for purification on the fortieth day after His birth as the Law of Moses required. The idea that ritual purification after birth might be important has become remote to us in recent generations. It can therefore surprise us that Candlemas, which we keep today as the feast that commemorates Christ being presented in the Temple, was one of the earliest Christian festivals and remains one of the most important.

A 13th Century drawing of Mary and Joseph presenting the infant Jesus to Simeon at the Temple in Jerusalem - or at least what a 13th Century artist thought that looked like - while Anna worships and nine onlookers watch.

Giotto, The Presentation of Christ (c. 1311).

Mary and Joseph were not the only people keeping the faith in those hard times. Simeon and Anna spent their lives deep in prayer and close to God. So much so that Simeon was led by the Holy Spirit to the infant Christ and knew he was the long-promised Messiah; Anna also knew the child was specially sent by God without anyone telling her. It is interesting that they were both very elderly, given that the elderly are often held to be of not much account in a world that is obsessed with vigour and power and achievement; but God has a more generous standard than the world of who is valuable and who is fit to do His work. The old are as valuable to Him as the young.

The marginal are also as valuable to God as those in the centre of things. God chose to become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ – not as a king, and not in one of the world’s power centres, but as the son of a woman who became pregnant in suspicious circumstances, to be raised as the son of an artisan, belonging to a people under a foreign occupation they bitterly resented.

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Once Again, America Chooses Ireland Over the UK

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Unherd published a piece of mine on US government interventions on Northern Ireland, and why Ireland’s special relationship with the USA usually trumps the UK’s (read more here).

Irish influence in America is not just about raw political calculation, nor entirely about the large number of Americans who proudly bear Irish ancestry. The technocrats miss that the founding myths of both the United States and the modern Irish state are the same story told in different contexts: a successful domestic revolution against British imperialism.

A screen grab of an online newspaper article with the headline 'Once again, America chooses Ireland over the UK', and a photo of Joe Biden wearing a shamrock in his lapel pocket.

Put bluntly, the Irish special relationship with America has trumped the traditional Special Relationship because the Irish can tell a more emotionally compelling story to an American audience. This is a powerful tool in an era that venerates sentimentally charged narratives.

[…]

As long as administrations in Dublin are headed by pro-market technocrats protective of American multinationals’ investments in Ireland, Washington’s pro-Irish stance is unlikely to change, and London will just have to take the geopolitical pain. Or, as seems increasingly likely, the UK government will have to accept that Northern Ireland will remain substantially within the EU’s regulatory orbit. This will be the price for a final dash to scrap EU regulations in Great Britain before the next general election.

For the full article, please click through the link.

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I Would Do Anything for Church Unity But I Won’t Do That: Sermon Preached on 22nd January 2023 (Third Sunday After Epiphany)

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes

1 Corinthians 1.10-18; Matthew 4.12-23

“…each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” …  Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?”

The divisions between the churches are often given as a reason why people reject Christianity. Therefore it’s a pity that we Christians can’t put aside our divisions and reunite the whole universal Church into one body, so we can witness far more effectively for Christ.

Many a sermon during Church Unity Week has begun with a statement like this. I happen, however, to forcefully disagree with it. (That wasn’t the bland and pious exhortation to ecumenism you were expecting twenty seconds ago, was it?)

Institutional unity wouldn’t mean we all agreed on everything anyway. I mean, as you’ll have noticed in the news this week, even in the Church of England we don’t actually agree on everything. The Roman Catholic Church the one body of any size that regards itself as being the only true and universal Church, is as internally divided as any other. Some of you may have seen in The Spectator a few weeks ago the deathbed letter of George Pell, the former Primate of Australia and leading Roman Catholic conservative in the English-speaking world, excoriating Pope Francis and his papacy. Given how deep the divisions within existing churches are, I wonder why so many of us seem to think reuniting into one big worldwide church institution is an ideal we should all aspire to. We’d still be divided within it.

Three men standing in front of a large banner saying "Homosexuality is Sin" with five other men behind them, two of them holding smaller placards saying "the precious blood of life" and "repent ye, and believe the gospel." A large warehouse-style building, brick built and old, is behind.

Some protestors perhaps not so keen on rapid institutional reunion with the Church of England, © Gerry Lynch, 28 August 2010.

There’s a negative way of thinking about the persistence of divisions among Christians, which is that they reflect our sinfulness, our pride, our inability to humble ourselves to truly discerning the mind of Christ.

I prefer to look at it another way. I prefer to start by noting that unity in Christ cannot mean uniformity, for that is not the unity that Christ modelled with His disciples when He walked the Earth. In the Gospels, Christ gives the disciples the freedom to argue and fall out with one another, and to misinterpret what He had to say. A generation later, Peter and Paul fought like rats in a sack. The Church of their heyday was as divided over issues like circumcision and whether it was morally acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols, as we are about same-sex marriage. Some of the issues that tormented the early Church seem obscure to us now, but if one takes time to understand their context they are about the same things that are most divisive in the Church today – identity, and the extent to which Christians should model a distinct way of life from the rest of society, or instead integrate within it to help it become more like the Kingdom of God.

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A Few Wise Men: Sermon Preached on Friday 6th January 2023 (The Epiphany)

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes, and on Sunday 8th January at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12

“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…”

Epiphany (1940) by Max Ernst.

The Epiphany is the fourth most important date in the Church’s year, after Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. Yet it is often neglected by secular society, and church-goers don’t generally turn out in great numbers for Epiphany services in my experience. Yet it’s a feast of great significance because, with Christ still in His cradle, it established Christianity as an explicitly universalising religion: by that, I mean one that seeks to make followers of people of every nation and language, rather than just from the Palestinian Jewish community who supplied Christ’s followers while He was on earth.

A lot is going on in our two readings this evening, so let me try to unpack some of it.

The fact that these men are identified by St Matthew as coming from the East, specifically, has interesting implications. The East was a place associated with wisdom and spiritual insight. The Wise Men are being identified by Matthew not as any old gentiles but some of the holiest and most intellectually gifted representatives of the entire gentile world. They already know that the new-born child they seek is destined to be king. In contrast, Herod, the temporal king of the Jews, is spiritually blind. This short-sighted and intolerant man can’t see anything in the arrival of these foreign visitors beyond a potential threat to his power. Wisdom and holiness do not come through ancestry: early in his story of Jesus’ life, Matthew has established an important principle.

Yet there is an obvious tension between universalism and the particular here. If Christianity is a universal religion, one might ask why Jesus should have been born as a Jew, as a male, in the Holy Land, in the 1st Century. Why there, and then, and in the form of this little baby born of Mary? Part of the answer must be that if Christian faith truly does encapsulate God’s plan for humanity, then God had to become human as someone in particular. None of us are blank slates. All of us have a culture and a heritage, and no single one of us can be everyman or everywoman. Indeed love can only truly be love if it is directed towards someone or something in particular; love in the abstract remains something unconsummated and unfulfilled.

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