Our Best Laid Plans: Sermon Preached on 30 April 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – Ezra 3: 1–13; Ephesians 2: 11–22        

“And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto the Lord; ‘because he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever…’”

Tonight’s Old Testament lesson is one of those ones that can make little sense when we hear it read. It can seem to be a confusing mass of difficult names, of Shealtiels, Zerubbabels, and Jozadaks. So, let me explain what it’s all about, and why it matters today.

The return from exile is depicted in this woodcut for Die Bibel in Bildern, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

The story comes from the Restoration of Temple in Jerusalem, seventy years after its destruction by the Babylonians. This architectural wonder of Hebrew culture and civilisation, built by King Solomon, full of beautiful art and craftsmanship, had been looted and then razed. Jerusalem was intentionally destroyed, and its citizens were deported to hundreds of miles across the desert to Babylon.

For long decades afterwards, the idea that the Temple would be restored must have seemed like a pipe-dream. Then, however, the political situation changed. The Persians became the new great power in the Middle East, and under Cyrus the Great they swept away the Babylonians and allowed the many nations kept in bondage in their mighty capital to return to their homelands. Among them were the exiles from Jerusalem.

The portion of the Book of Ezra we heard from this evening records the restoration of the Temple from its modest beginnings, when Jews first re-gathered on the ruined foundations of Solomon’s Temple, meeting in fear of the people of the neighbouring lands despite their sponsorship by their new friends, the Persian imperial authorities. Then it outlines how, through hard-work and sacrifice, the means were found to lay a foundation stone for the new Temple. There were even some elderly people present when it was laid who remembered King Solomon’s one before its destruction.

What did they people do when the foundation stone of the new Temple was laid? They praised God; they praised God in music and praised God at the top of their voices; they praised God because ‘his mercy endureth forever.’

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Eleven Kilometres from Jerusalem: Sermon Preached on 23rd April 2023 (Third Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24.13-35

“…he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.’”

You may or may not know that our Bible readings for any given Sunday repeat on a three year cycle, and I very distinctly remember today’s Gospel reading, about the travellers on the road to Emmaus, at this point four cycles ago: on the Sunday that fell a fortnight after Easter in 2011.

A painting by James Tissot from 1900. Three men in long flowing robes, two in white and one in red, are waling as the walk along a rough path under some trees. This purports to be the scene from Luke Chapter 24, where a mysterious man talked to two of Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the mysterious man turned out to be Jesus.

The Road to Emmaus, James Tissot (1900). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I remember it so vividly, because I was in Cape Town, and one unfamiliar detail in this otherwise very familiar passage of Scripture left me feeling disorientated and far from home. Instead of Emmaus being about seven miles from Jerusalem, it was instead about eleven kilometres from Jerusalem. As their country converted entirely to metric two generations ago, miles are an unfamiliar measurement to most South Africans today. Of course, neither miles nor kilometres were used two-thousand years ago in the Roman Empire – both are translations for the convenience for us modern hearers, and Luke originally reported that Emmaus was located sixty stadia from Jerusalem.

I have driven across the Irish border often enough that a switch from miles to kilometres is a familiar experience, and this was a minor quirk of translation – but worship is such an intense and meaningful thing for most of us, including those of us who don’t go in for emotionally expressive worship, that even very minor changes in ritual, translation, or music can leave us feeling disorientated and bewildered.

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Christianity is Strange (Easter Day 2023)

Posted on April 9, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne, 9th April 2023

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8

Christianity is a very strange faith – if it were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Take Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. At first, she doesn’t recognise her close friend, whom she last saw just two days before; in fact, she thinks this stranger must be the graveyard’s gardener. It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognises that the impossible has happened; that the man whom she had watched being put to death is in fact alive. Yet there is something odd about his physical nature – He asks her not to cling to Him.

A "noli mi tangere" icon, 16th Century Crete.

An icon from 16th Century Crete of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Christ in the Garden on the first Easter morning.

In our reading from Acts, another of the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, Peter, has been asked to visit a senior Roman solider who has had a mysterious vision of angels. Peter recounts his own encounters with Christ after the Resurrection. In these encounters, too, Jesus’ physical characteristics are very odd – He is sometimes not recognised until He speaks or acts in a particular way; He sometimes appears in the middle of locked rooms. Yet He also eats and drinks with His disciples, apparently normally; they can embrace Him and even poke their fingers in His crucifixion wounds.

Jesus has clearly not been simply brought back to life, miraculously healed, but instead has become somehow different than He was. Nor is He a ghost or an apparition – He has a definite, tangible, physicality. The new life of the Resurrection is clearly something different from the mundane life of mortal human beings.

Of course, this could all be a story made up by people who couldn’t cope with the death of their hero.

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Why the Talking Snake Matters: Sermon Preached on Saturday 8th April 2023 (Easter Vigil)

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Genesis 1.1 – 2.4; Genesis 3; Exodus 14.10-15.1; Ezekiel 37. 1-14; Romans 6. 3-11; Matthew 28. 1-10

Didn’t we have an awful lot of readings this evening? And weren’t a lot of them from odd bits of the Bible with unscientific stories like creation in six days, seas parting to open a walking path, and talking snakes? Wouldn’t we better just talking about God’s love and how God wants us to love others?

A tempera and gold painting on a copper base by William Blake of a radiant Eve being tempted by a golden, magnificently coiling, snake. Blake drew his inspiration for this scene from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament and from John Milton's epic poem 'Paradise Lost' (1667). Blake often experimented with painting techniques, and here the surface has flaked badly because of the poor adhesion between a glue-based paint and the copper support he used.

William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). Hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t agree. These readings form the main arc of the Christian story – how we are related to God, and why Jesus had to come into the world: that’s why we have them tonight. They aren’t a science textbook and God never intended them to be when He inspired them to be written.

Science may explain our biological evolution but it does not explain our moral evolution. One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how did we change from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense, the ability to tell right from wrong? Where does the sense of right and wrong come from? That question provokes another, related, one – why do we human beings so often do things that we know to be wrong? For we seem to be doomed to constantly damage not only other human beings, but other life-forms, however well-meaning our intentions might be.

One of the saddest realities of human existence is that, as we spread across the world, mass extinctions of the native wildlife followed us in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived. That is true on every continent and island; ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire, we’ve been wiping other creatures out. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture.

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Reflection on ‘Betrayal’ for Holy Week; Wednesday 5th April 2023

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Matthew 26: 20-25, 36, 47-50

Betrayal provokes emotions in us that are perhaps more disturbing than those that result from any other human experience. In that light, it is perhaps understandable how Judas has, in countries with a Christian cultural background, become a synonym for a particular type of wickedness. To call someone a Judas is one of the worst things one can say about them.

It is one thing to be attacked or undermined by an enemy, a rival, or even a random stranger — but when a trusted friend turns against us, the direct impact of whatever wrong they have done to us is often eclipsed by the feelings left by an abuse of trust, friendship, and love.

Being betrayed can, understandably, leave people very bitter. For all that such bitterness might be understandable, it is also dangerous. Bitterness is an emotional and spiritual acid; it risks corroding our humanity if we allow it to fester.

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Reflection on ‘Fame’ for Holy Week: Tuesday 4th April 2023

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Worton

Matthew 21. 12-16

“Fame! — I wanna live forever.”

Seven young adults in a posed photograph, some sitting, some standing, on a promo graphic for the 1980s TV show 'Fame'. Another young character is in a box top right.

Soon, anyone old enough to remember the original Fame will pretty much have lived forever

So ran the theme tune of a popular TV drama of my youth, about a group of teenagers at a specialist high school in New York for those aiming at a career in the performing arts. The young characters wanted to be famous for their talents – as did the young actors who played them. But we live in a time when people don’t become famous necessarily for their talents or achievements, but often become famous just for being famous. The celebrity lifestyle is one that some people actively chase, indeed that some are willing to degrade themselves to achieve, drawn like a moth to the flame of being a household name.

The Gospels present Jesus as something of a celebrity, followed by crowds everywhere; sometimes, as when he overturned the money-changers’ tables, he could even carry out what we might call today a ‘PR stunt’. Yet the crowds’ attention was often exhausting to Christ; in Galilee, after a day surrounded by throngs of people clamouring to be healed and to be entertained, he would retreat into the hills, or out into the lake on a boat. Sometimes, the crowds followed him even there. As we believe that Jesus Christ was God in human form, we see something here about the character of God that is perhaps a little surprising.

One of the hallmarks of the early 21st Century has been the way that technology has eroded the distinction between public and private life – for celebrities and public figures, certainly, and also for quite ordinary people.

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Reflection on ‘Judgement’ for Holy Week; Monday 3 April 2023

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Matthew 25. 31-40

Do we want to live in a universe where Jimmy Saville got away with it?

A medieval church, St Mary's in Potterne, brilliantly lit in golden colour by bright evening sun. Some tombstones are in the churchyard, also brilliantly lit, and a few primroses are just visible

I walked over the fields on a gorgeous spring evening to this wonderful church and then gave a reflection on judgement, damnation, and one of the vilest characters ever to disgrace British public life… © Gerry Lynch, 3 April 2023.

I found myself asking this as I prepared the readings for tonight’s service. Many of us will know the famous parable of the sheep and the goats that our bible reading tonight came from. It was rather too long for this short service, so I left out the bit about what happens to the goats. I left out the bit that may be the most important for us to hear, because I didn’t want to frighten or upset anyone.

The idea of God as divine judge is frightening and upsetting. Maybe, however, that’s no bad thing. It’s a pity that Jimmy Saville wasn’t a bit more afraid of being judged by God.

The Church has in recent decades downplayed the idea of divine judgement. It wanted to be positive, to celebrate the best in humanity; it often said that judgement really wasn’t what Jesus Christ, Love incarnate, was about. People weren’t fooled. They knew this was a rewrite of what Christianity had always said. You can’t escape for too long that the Biblical record is pretty clear that Jesus did talk a lot about judgement. Worse yet, nobody seemed much interested in this rewrite, which is probably part of the story of why the churches slowly emptied. If we don’t need redeeming from our sins, then why do we need a saviour?

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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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