Descended from David: Sermon Preached on 18th December 2022 (The Fourth Sunday of Advent)

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25     

“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David…’”

The Fourth Sunday of Advent can be a difficult moment in the church’s calendar for a preacher. The outside world is already at the height of its Christmas party season, yet in the Church we are commanded to wait for a few days yet, to remain a little longer in that state of longing that defines much of our lives as Christians, that of waiting for a new and better world to emerge. We try our best to be patient, to avoid jumping the gun by celebrating the Christ-child coming into the world before Christmas Day, but St John’s is already full of Christmas trees and we’ve all probably been to a few Christmas parties.

The Christmas concerts and nativity plays we attend tend to jumble up elements from the different accounts of Christ’s origins. As Advent also begins the cycle of Gospel readings for each year, I thought this odd moment in the Church’s year might give us an opportunity to look specifically at Matthew’s account of Christ’s origins and what they might mean for us, because most of our Sunday Gospel readings through until next November will come from Matthew, including this morning’s Gospel.

The accounts of Jesus’ origins are very different between the four Gospels. Mark, the action gospel, doesn’t worry at all about Jesus’ origins – he starts by establishing John the Baptist as the messenger prophesied by Isaiah… and then simply gets on with the action, with the first scene being Jesus’ baptism at the start of his public ministry. John starts with the wonderful prose-poem proclaiming Jesus’ supernatural origins at the beginning of the universe, which we will hear as the Midnight Gospel next week, before also getting straight into the action of Jesus’ public ministry without worrying about his earthly origins. Luke is the source of most of the stories familiar from nativity plays – the shepherds, the angels, the manger, and all that. Its account of Jesus’ birth is also told from the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth, giving an unusual prominence to the voices of women for a work of ancient literature. Matthew give us the Wise Men and King Herod, and the terrible massacre of the babies of Bethlehem, all too believable as we look at the worst despots of our own world.

Yet especially in the light of Luke’s account, we can find today’s reading from Matthew about Jesus’ origins a little disappointing. The story of Mary’s pregnancy is told entirely from the perspective of Joseph. Given our own cultural context, we almost certainly find ourselves taking a sharp breath when we hear that Joseph “planned to dismiss her quietly”.

Also jarring is how obviously important it is to Matthew that Jesus is a descendant of King David, the greatest of Israel’s rulers. Both Jesus and Joseph had already been established as descendants of David in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel; in today’s reading, the angel who convinces Joseph to take Mary as his wife, addresses him as “son of David”. King David is a key element in the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel, yet we often neglect it in how we understand Jesus Christ today.

King David with his harp on the tower of Christ Church, Shaw. © Gerry Lynch, 24 June 2017

Partly, I think, that is because in our culture, most of us consider someone’s ancestry as being of little importance in telling us about the sort of person they are. Thank the Lord, this is now considered rather politically incorrect. But it also marks us out as being different from most cultures historically, and so we can miss why it was important to Matthew and his readers that Jesus was a descendant of David, and what they would have taken from that about His character and mission on Earth. I think it remains important for us too that Christ was descended from David, and given that David Evans’ Bible study group is looking at King David at the moment, it might be interesting for us to think about why.

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Waiting Patiently: Sermon Preached on 11th December 2022 (The Third Sunday of Advent)

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

Readings – James 5: 7–10; Matthew 11: 2–11

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”

The other day, I tried to order one of those little plastic ice scrapers for the car from Amazon, partly so that I could be sure of getting here to take this service this morning! Given the pre-Christmas rush, I couldn’t get one to arrive before the middle of next week.

“How dare they”, I fumed inwardly to myself, “I’m an Amazon Prime member specifically so I can get deliveries of almost anything I need overnight. Just because they’re busy, and just because half the factories in China have been shut for most of this year, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have nearly anything I need within 24 hours!”

A snowy scene as I left St Peter’s, Poulshot, after preaching this sermon.

Patience is a virtue: but not one I have ever been much possessed of! The structure of modern society doesn’t help, with its promise that it can satisfy any of our wants almost instantaneously. Yet fulfilling most needs more significant than an ice-scraper or a case of wine demands patience, and can’t be done with a few clicks on a website.

By the time John the Baptist came along, some strands of Jewish opinion were waiting with impatient fervour for a Messiah, a religious-political leader who they believed would remove the Roman occupiers and usher in a new political order of justice and righteousness in a godly independent state.

Now, Matthew’s Gospel identified Jesus as the Messiah in its very first sentence, and it does so again in this morning’s Gospel reading. But that is something intended for those, like us, reading the story much later: in the action of the story, even Jesus’ closest followers have not worked out his true identity by this point. When, shortly afterwards, Peter does work out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell anyone. The time was not yet ripe.

The messages that pass between John and Jesus here are interesting in that light. Firstly, John the Baptist, in prison at the hands of Herod Antipas, asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” So, despite the fact nothing could possibly be better news for John in those terrible circumstances than to hear that Jesus, the man he baptised in the Jordan, is the Messiah, he is prepared to wait if the time is not yet ripe for God to send it.

Another interesting thing is that Jesus doesn’t simply say that He is the Messiah. Instead, he asks John’s messengers to relay news of his miracles and says “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Jesus presents the evidence of what he is doing in the world, but respects John’s right to make up his own mind about his nature in good faith. Whether or not he accepts that Jesus is the Messiah, he will be blessed if he takes no offence Him.

There is a lot in this exchange that chimes with our experience of how God interacts with humanity in our world. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. Maybe it is possible, in the vastness of the universe, that some lengthy sequence of random events led to the existence not only of life, but intelligent, self-aware life, with a sense of morality.

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The Power of Names

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.” In the Common Worship Daily Office, this verse from Isaiah 43 is recited three times on Thursdays. It was written for the community of Hebrew exiles in Babylon at a time of much fear, when some were losing faith and wondering if there could really be a single creator God. This was a silly ideal to their sensible neighbours in Babylon, to whom it was obvious there were many gods. There seems of have been growing apostasy from Judaism and assimilation into the cosmopolitan mass.

Therefore, God reminds them here that he has not forgotten them in their long exile, but remembers each individual by their name.

Names are powerful statements in Scripture. After winning an all-night wrestling bout with a mysterious angel, Jacob is renamed Israel, meaning, “I have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” But the successful contest has come at a cost – Israel’s hip has been dislocated in the struggle, and he will presumably spend the rest of his life walking with a limp.

*  *  *  *  *

The walls of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem are lined with black binders, each containing hundreds of pages bearing witness to those who died in the Holocaust. Stacked neatly on shelves, they stretch along the walls of the circular chamber like the rings of an alien planet. Decades of research means that by now 4.8 million names of roughly 6 million Shoah victims are now known and memorialised in those binders. With the passage of time, the identities of most of the remaining million or so will soon be lost to history – but not to God, who remembers His children by name forever.

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The Kingdom of Heaven: Sermon Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington, Sunday 4th December 2022 (The Second Sunday of Advent)

Readings – Romans 15: 4–13; Matthew 3: 1–12

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

This morning’s Gospel doesn’t mention Jesus directly; it instead tells the story of the public ministry of John the Baptist. Yet, it is important for understanding Jesus’ ministry and mission, especially as related in Matthew’s Gospel, which will supply nearly all of our all of our Sunday Gospel readings between now and next November. For it directly connects the preaching of John and of Jesus. John in his preaching calls on people to: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Matthew later reports Jesus using this phrase habitually, word for word, in his own preaching.

The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence (1910) by Evelyn de Morgan.

“The kingdom of heaven” is a phrase specific to Matthew’s Gospel and it is repeated twenty-four times in it, so it is important to think about what it might mean, for we are going to be hearing it a lot in church over the next year.

The “kingdom of heaven” is a phrase that is never rigidly defined; Jesus explains it mainly in parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; it’s like treasure hidden in a field; like a merchant in search of fine pearls; like a net that was thrown into the sea; like a landowner who goes out in the early morning to hire workers.

Parables catch us in different ways in different points of our lives. The same story can present us with different truths and different lessons depending on how and where we hear it. So the kingdom of heaven seems to be hard to pin down, to be something that changes depending on the person encountering it and the context in which it’s encountered. It isn’t something that’s rigid or fixed, but instead lives and breathes and adapts and evolves.

This can seem frustrating when all we’re looking for is a few simple rules for life – if you’re looking for that, I recommend the Ten Commandments painted on the wall behind me – but remember, if the kingdom of heaven really is something that is truly from God rather than just being invented by people, then it must lie partly beyond human understanding.

More than that, and this really is good news, if the kingdom of heaven is truly from God, it isn’t something that can be grasped or controlled by human beings as a way of setting themselves up in power over other human beings. It can’t become an oppressive power structure, in the way even the most enlightened earthly kingdoms do from time to time. Indeed Jesus will say early in his public ministry, in the Sermon on the Mount, that this kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Those who seek power often seek to take the kingdom of heaven by force and prevent those they disapprove of from entering it – but they do not own it, for it is the possession of the humble and those who are the victims of unjust power. When we seek to control the kingdom of heaven, it seems to crumble in our grasp; yet it is so precious that people will sell all that they have to possess it.

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Jesus is Coming Back: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th November 2022 (The First Sunday of Advent)

Readings – Romans 13: 11–14; Matthew 24: 36–44

“…the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

I want to start this morning with a question: Do you believe that Jesus is going to, you know, actually return and be your judge?

I know we say in the Creed every Sunday, that “I believe that He will come in glory to judge both the living and the dead”, but if you’re like me, you’ll be more than a little uncomfortable with the topic.

The famous late 15th Century doom painting at St Thomas’, Salisbury. © Gerry Lynch, 31 July 2016

Part of the reason for that is because there are Christians who spend entirely too much time not only thinking about the Second Coming, but also shouting about it. These people always seem to be bad, sad, or mad – or all three at the same time – full of angry judgementalism towards others while howling at the moon themselves. We rightly don’t want to be like them.

So well tell ourselves that Christianity isn’t like that, or at least our Christianity isn’t like that. We remind ourselves that the Bible also says in three plain words that “God is love” – in fact, had our epistle reading from Romans started one verse earlier, we would have heard St Paul state clearly that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” We tell ourselves that means something like “God is all-forgiving and all-accepting”. That allows us to leave the preaching about Jesus coming back to the headbangers and fundamentalists and get on with trying to be more like this all-forgiving, all-accepting God.

Yet avoiding guilt by association is only one reason why we don’t like talking about the Second Coming. Another part of it is, of course, that if all this stuff that Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel is true, then we’re going to be subject to judgement at His hands when He returns, and we’re worried about that. Now, the uncomfortable reality is that especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which is going to supply most of our Sunday Gospel readings from now until next November, Jesus talks about judgement a lot. In fact, He talks about carrying out the Last Judgement Himself, in the same section where he says the nice stuff about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Does that scare you?

Well, let’s unpack it a bit.

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Must We Ban Russia Today?

The Critic kindly published my case that the UK and EU bans on RT are a betrayal of British and European values on free speech, that show an unwarranted lack of trust in the capacity of people in free societies to sort reporting from propaganda – read it all here.

“The liberation of Kherson, the results of US midterm elections and the mildest autumn in living memory in Western Europe have dealt a triple blow to Vladimir Putin’s grand strategy for the invasion of Ukraine — and possibly a fatal one. I’ve been watching RT’s attempts to spin the situation, and they’re desperately comic in a grotesque sort of way. If you’re in the UK or anywhere in the EU, you’ll have to take my word for that — because you’ve been banned from watching them since March. I’ve only been able to watch them because I’ve been in Israel and the Palestinian Territories for the last few weeks, where I can watch it freely. (RT, in case you’re wondering, is the official name for the TV station formerly known as Russia Today.)

“This bizarre ban flies in the face of a long-standing policy that media from other countries, even hostile ones, weren’t banned in Western countries. Adults were trusted to be able to sort propaganda from reporting for themselves. People in Britain were free to listen to Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War. During the Cold War, there was no attempt to censor Soviet Bloc or Chinese broadcasting.

[…]

“Today, free speech is seen as a threat, not just on the Left in the political Centre. Especially since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, many in the West who had been liberal with at least a small “L” have convinced themselves that the masses are feeble-minded and susceptible to brainwashing via old and new media, Russian-funded brainwashing in particular. Lacking the willingness to reflect critically on how their own failures may have contributed to the erosion of support for the liberal project, they have conjured a mind-controlling Russian bogeyman straight out of Eugene McCarthy’s America.

“Banning RT was always at best a failure of nerve. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now going badly, it is time to end what has become an embarrassing betrayal of our own values.”

For a more detailed argument and some fun anecdotes, click this link (and let my publishers know my writing attracts readers.)

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Northern Ireland is too Divided to Function

Unherd published a piece of mine on the risk that the present political stalemate in Northern Ireland might prove very long-term, and the factors that got us there. (Read it all here.)

“Given that genuine ideological impasse, it is a mystery why there was no Plan B for stalemate. … Perhaps part of the explanation lies in a lack of capacity and expertise in the Northern Ireland Office, which has become a Cinderella department over the last decade. It is too easy, however, to blame the civil servants. Although Northern Ireland was obviously going to be a minefield in the context of Brexit, there have been six Secretaries of State since the Referendum in 2016. Thatcher and Major between them chalked up the same number in eighteen years. One struggles to think of a senior government politician in London who has much grasp of the region’s complexities.

“Meanwhile, the ideological gaps between the parties are so genuine that some of Northern Ireland’s most experienced political commentators are speaking in terms of a permanent end to the Assembly. Brexit is the ideological difference most noticed by outsiders, but having a mandatory coalition where the two main parties are, respectively, to the Left of Corbyn and comfortable with the U.S. religious Right presents constant challenges. Deadlock over issues from grammar schools to gay marriage has seen stop-start suspensions of the Executive total a third of the twenty-four years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

“Northern Ireland’s rigid form of intra-communal power-sharing seems to prevent its politicians from dealing with their constituents’ actual problems, yet nobody has so far produced a viable proposal to reform or replace it. Until that happens, expect intermittent deadlock.”

For the full article, please click through this link.

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Heaven in Our Hearts: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes, Sunday 30th October 2022 (Commemoration of the Departed for All Souls’)

Readings – Isaiah 52: 7–10; Luke 24: 13–31

 “Now all the world she knew is dead
  In this small room she lives her days
The wash-hand stand and single bed
  Screened from the public gaze.”

The poem ‘House of Rest’ is not one of Betjeman’s more famous poems, but it is a lovely and profound one. It describes the life of a very infirm rector’s widow living in a nursing home. She spends her days living in her memories of the husband and children with whom she once shared an active, happy, life.

“Lincoln, by Valentine and Co.,
  Now yellowish brown and stained,
But there some fifty years ago
  Her Harry was ordained;

[…]

Aroused at seven, to bed by ten,
  They fully lived each day,
Dead sons, so motor-bike-mad then,
  And daughters far away.”

Death is part of all of our lives, yet we dislike contemplating it. That’s why we’re so keen to use euphemisms to describe death – passing away, departing from us – but death is as unavoidable and as real as it gets.

Funerals over recent decades have, on average, become much more jolly affairs, much more inclined to be celebrations of life than means of helping people process the overwhelming cocktail of experiences and emotions that proximity to death involves. It is almost as if a society where few people really believe in an afterlife doesn’t want to deal with how final and overwhelming death is.

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Accepting Our Limits: Sermon Preached on 23rd October 2022 (The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 2 Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14

“…the time of my departure is at hand.”

On Tuesday, I went for a long walk on my day off, as is my wont. It was an extraordinary day for the time of year, almost cloudless and with temperatures in the high teens. As I walked over the fields into Bishops Cannings from Devizes, I was confronted by a magnificent sight – two trees at the very peak of their autumn colour, framing that majestic parish church and lovely village pub with a riot of reds and golds. The light was absolutely superb.

St Mary the Virgin, Bishops Cannings, St Luke’s Day 2022, © Gerry Lynch.

Yesterday, I drove through Bishops Cannings and noticed that those trees had lost some of their leaves in the storms of Friday, and that their colours were losing a little of their lustre. Although the temperatures remain extraordinarily mild for the season, it was a cloudy day, without the translucent light of Tuesday morning. It was still a pretty scene – but no longer possessed of the sort of transfiguring beauty it held just four days before.

Autumn is a particularly transient time of year. Fresh beauties emerge from the landscape and vanish again in a matter of days. Soon will come the bare trees and bare fields of winter. That is also the pattern of our lives. Everything has a finite end, a limit. Nothing lasts forever, and many things that enlighten and energise our lives are around only for a very short span.

The present moment is all we have.

In our epistle reading this morning, St Paul is near the end. He clearly expects to die soon – he has run his race. This has not made him a perfect person, and he still seems to have energy to vent his spleen at those who he feels let him down in his hour of great need, in the passive-aggressive tone Paul often adopts.

I love Paul, and I love his writings, but I can definitely see why almost everyone seems to have lost patience with him at one time or another. Even the man who was perhaps his closest companion, Barnabas, a man so sweet-natured that he was nicknamed ‘The Encourager’, took his leave of Paul once in Antioch when his constant arguing became too much.

Paul was not perfect but, to be fair, at the core of his writings is the idea that salvation is not a reward for passing a particular standard of goodness but something that God gives us as a free gift, because God is love. And for all that Paul was a man with obvious faults, he was also a man with tremendous gifts. Here, he contemplates the end of his life without fear, absolutely trusting God will receive him in heaven.

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Are You A Leper?: Sermon Preached in St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 9th October 2022 (Seventeenth  Sunday after Trinity)

Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19

“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.

Two fences with a road running between them and two pedestrians passing with their back to camera.

Us and Them – the West Belfast Peace Line at Conway Street, 6 June 2020.

Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.

In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.

What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.

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