I have just returned from two magnificent weeks on placement at Trinity Parish Church in a rural part of northern Jersey. I was looked after royally by its rector and people. I also took some photographs. Here are six of the best – they are among a larger collection going up in ones and twos on a Flickr album as I process them.
If you want to see any of them bigger – off site – just click on them.
This sermon, on beauty, was preached by Christopher Herbert on 25 May 2014 as part of St Paul’s Cathedral’s sermon series ‘What I Want to Say Now: Retired Bishops Speak Out’. Listening to it via YouTube more than eight years after it was preached, I was struck by its commitment to the appreciation of beauty as a means of apprehending as best human beings can something of the true mystery of God. Herbert criticises trenchantly the Church of England’s neglect of the patrimony of buildings, prayers, poetry, and hymnody it has been bequeathed. If anything, this has become more entrenched since 2014.
More optimistically, on the other hand, I think there are possibilities of the image-oriented Instagram generation rediscovering the joys in ‘reading’ a Church and its contents in a way that probably hasn’t been true since the Reformation, which Herbert inevitably misses and few in the Church have yet noticed.
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A couple of months ago, a book was published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s entitled A Companion to the Bible and the Arts, and in it is an essay by Nicholas Bielby, and that essay has not left me alone. It’s actually about the subtleties and difficulties of biblical translation, and in it almost as a throwaway line he writes this:
If beauty is an attribute of God and His Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of His Word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells us and we would hope to find it in the way it is told.
His essay is a delight, and thought it focuses on biblical translation, it ranges more widely into the whole field of aesthetics, and I want to quote him again:
An aesthetic experience has this sense of rediscovery of something unknown, but entirely familiar, because it feels right, and true, and beautiful.
You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t overload the word ‘feeling’. Because something feels right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.
Well, I’ve read and reread that essay with great enjoyment, partly because it is so carefully written, but also because it raises an issue to which I believe we need to give serious attention, and that is the whole question of beauty.
Continue readingReadings – Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10: 38–42
‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’
Earlier this week, a member of the Trinity congregation told me they thought this was the hardest story in the Gospels to deal with. Many of us have a visceral emotional reaction to it, which we try to suppress because we want to be good Christians who value our Bibles. Yet we find ourselves disappointed in the Jesus who seems to bark at an overworked Martha when she asks for help. If that’s your instinctive reaction to the story, please don’t suppress it, but hold on to it as we unpack it.
An ’away match’ in Jersey in July; what a hardship posting?!?!? (Trinity Parish Church, 10 July 2022, © Gerry Lynch_
This reading, from Luke’s Gospel, is one of three Bible stories that mention Martha. The other two are in John’s Gospel: they are the raising of Lazarus, and then John’s version of the story of the woman pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet.
While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”.
The story in John’s Gospel of Jesus visiting the house in Bethany for a meal is so similar to the one we heard this morning that we might well wonder if they are different accounts of the same event. In that one, Martha serves dinner while Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with some very expensive perfume.
Any conversation between Jesus and Martha needs to be understood in the context that they are the closest of friends. He wasn’t snapping at a stranger.
So, I wonder was Jesus gently teasing his dear friend Martha here? Would Martha have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs and being the perfect host and told her just to take it easy for a few hours? Because basically He did tell her that – “you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing.”
We get the sense that perhaps Martha was the sort of very practical person who can’t relax until every bit of work is done – but then keeps finding another little job to do. Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.
It is tempting to get our sense of our own worth from what we do, rather than from accepting what we are. Of course, we all have a regular round of tasks we need to get done to earn our living and keep ourselves and our homes in order. But that is not what makes us valuable; you, I, and every human being in the world is of value simply because we are children of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes, therefore, we need to give ourselves space to just be – to be ourselves and to be with God, to accept ourselves as the people God made us, imperfect but loveable and dearly loved by God.
Continue readingReadings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29
“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”
It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011
On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.
The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.
There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.
This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.
It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.
Continue readingReadings – Isaiah 40: 1–11; Luke 1:57–66, 80
A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’
Some of you will by now know of my fondness for financial crisis movies. One, called The Big Short, tells the tale of the few who saw in advance the coming American mortgage crash of the late 2000s. They were a ragbag collection of outsiders – an autistic genius, bright young things with no stake in the system, and even a man so honest about his own greed that had no illusions about the probity of others. They were scoffed at for years, but they were right, and betting against the market made them earthly riches at the very moment when others were losing their shirts.
Eccentrically brilliant – Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short.
Outsiders often perceive truths too disturbing for those comfortable with the existing order. Yet the line between genius and madness can be thin and it can be hard to tell those voices crying profound truths into the wilderness apart from the cacophony of those howling at the Moon. Is it is always safest to herd ourselves behind conventional wisdom, because then at least if we are wrong, we will have plenty of company in our mistakes.
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Our first reading presents us with a vision of God nurturing and feeding His people after a time of trouble. This is from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, the introduction to the second of Isaiah’s three distinct blocks of writing, and it was written in Babylon, probably towards the end of the half century of exile from Jerusalem. It sought to reassure people who had suffered much for their faith that God had not given up on them and would soon allow them to return home.
One verse is quite difficult and often glossed over. While Jerusalem’s “penalty is paid” that is because “she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” There is no attempt here to avoid the idea that the exiles, mostly from the ruling elite of Jerusalem, were themselves largely responsible for their own misfortune. Instead of justice, they chose selfishness, idolatry, and the path of least resistance. They silenced and persecuted those who told them difficult truths they didn’t want to hear. They had lost the Kingdom and they had blinking well deserved it.
Continue readingReadings – Acts 2: 1–21; Romans 8: 14–17; John 14: 8–17, 25–27.
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”.
Seventy years and a few months ago, a young woman was on an exotic holiday with her husband in Kenya. She was staying in the Treetops Hotel, which was literally a very fancy and well-serviced treehouse, watching the big game animals play on the savannah below, when she heard the news that, half a world away, her father had died.
The death of a parent, as many of us know, is a wrenching moment in life, when one’s own personal world is knocked off its axis. What was different for this young woman was that she not only had to grieve as any child does a parent, but she also had instantly to become a Head of State, for this was the moment when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI.
Among the many tremendous changes that have taken place over the seven decades since, perhaps the most profound has been that in the status of women. The world of 1952 was still a man’s world. Women in positions of power were rare: Elizabeth’s first cabinet had not a single female minister. It was essentially unheard of for a young woman – and Elizabeth was only twenty-five – to be in any position of authority in society except with respect to children.
It took remarkable strength of character to thrive in that context – and she did thrive, through staggering changes. Her reign began as head of an Empire that stretched from Malaya to Jamaica, and continues into the age of Brexit. China was an impoverished global backwater seventy years ago, while the now-disappeared Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers. The Queen has seen two female Prime Ministers come and go, something unimaginable when she took office. Her reign began when homosexuality was against the law yet eventually saw marriage opened to couples of the same sex. In 1952, the Pill had not been developed, Elvis Presley and John Lennon had not been heard of, human beings had yet to set foot in Space, and the world’s few computers occupied vast sheds of tape reels and valves.
Continue readingReadings – Revelation 7: 9–17; John 10: 22–30
“…you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep…”
I wonder if I say the name William Stringfellow, does that mean anything to any of you? I don’t mean the man with the dodgy nightclub, but the American Anglican theologian of the 1960s to ‘80s. Stringfellow refused ordination despite having a doctorate in theology, preferring to live in a slum tenement in Harlem while working as a lawyer offering his services for free to the poor of New York.
Fancy a little light reading? (It is a surprisingly easy read…)
A garrulous, bibulous, chain-smoker, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture and theology, Stringfellow was heavily involved in activism against the Vietnam War. He was known in particular for allowing the famous Jesuit war resister Daniel Berrigan to hide in his house. This saw him visited by an FBI agent, who made the mistake of asking Stringfellow about the Bible. Questioning the legitimacy of Christian civil disobedience, he asked, “Doesn’t the Bible say you must obey the emperor?”
Stringfellow reports his own reply as follows:
I could not concede the simplistic premise about the Bible which his question assumed, and I rebuked him about this, taking perhaps forty-five minutes to do so. During the discourse, he wilted visibly, and, when I paused momentarily, he abruptly excused himself and departed. This was some disappointment to me, for I had only just begun to respond to the multifarious implications of the issue he had raised.
I introduce you to Stringfellow because not only did he always refuse to allow Scripture to be used to simplistically reinforce our pre-existing notions, but he had a particular demand that we read Scripture in tension. When confronted by passages of Scripture that seem to contradict or clash with one another, he argued that we should not seek to impose a false consistency on them, for we would inevitably do so in ways that simply suited our own ends. He argued instead for seeking to hear what God is saying to us in the dissonance between passages of Scripture – he argued that Scriptural Truth is often complex and can only be unveiled by being prepared to remain with the texts in tension.
Indeed, I would argue that spiritual growth often comes from allowing ourselves to sit in the tension, allowing the weaknesses and fallacies in our thinking and our attitudes to be stretched out; to allow our spiritual muscle to be built up.
This morning we have two passages of Scripture which are to some extent in tension. A Gospel that sets firm boundaries about who are God’s people; and an Epistle reading that presents a vision of heaven that is packed with people of every possible kind.
Continue readingReadings – Acts 5: 27–32; John 20: 19–31
“Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”
I wonder when you last heard a friend or an acquaintance described as “a bit of a Doubting Thomas?” Perhaps you have even been described as a “Doubting Thomas” yourself. It isn’t usually intended as a positive assessment. A Doubting Thomas, including the original in today’s Gospel reading can often be presented as a cynic who is committed to nothing.
‘Still Doubting’, by John Glanville Gregory, after Caravaggio.
Yet ‘uncommitted’ isn’t the picture of Thomas we get from other passages in John’s Gospel. To shed light on this and some other things in this morning’s Gospel reading, we need to jump back to the 11th chapter of John. As I don’t expect you to remember what happens in every bit of the Bible by chapter number, let me reassure you that this is a passage of scripture familiar to most of you: it’s the story of the raising of Lazarus. One significant thing about it is that it’s the last miracle and indeed last major “action scene” in John’s Gospel before Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem.
Back then, when Jesus’ life was under threat by stone-throwing mobs, Thomas was the one who responded to His suggestion of a trip into deeply hostile Judaea by telling his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Here we see not an uncommitted backslider but a deeply loyal follower of Christ; perhaps even a fanatic.
Despite his deep commitment, can we blame Thomas for being sceptical, faced with tales from his friends that Jesus had returned from the dead, walking through walls to appear in the middle of locked rooms? We have all experienced people reacting to shocking news, especially to the death of a loved one, with denial. Indeed, I have found myself engaging in denial at times, and I suspect most of you have done so too. It’s a natural human tendency; so personally I have more than a little fellow-feeling with Thomas in this passage when he is wary of his companions engaging in denial.
The Church needs its Thomases, because it needs Christians of all sorts of temperaments and outlooks. It needs its sceptics as well as its enthusiasts, its pragmatists as well as its romantics. And that means that the Church needs all of you, just as you are, otherwise God would not have called you to be here this morning.
Continue readingReadings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’
What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?
St Mary’s, Potterne – a lovely place to celebrate my first Easter Mass. © Gerry Lynch
Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?
Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.
Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.
Continue readingThere is a pear tree next to the back door of the curate’s house. It has been a joy over the last two weeks noticing it change – from having bare branches, to the first green buds, and finally watching the flowers develop and form fully into a riot of subtle whitish greens and pinks.
Pear blossom in my back garden, 12 April 2022. © Gerry Lynch
Last year I didn’t notice it until it was in full blossom. Perhaps I was distracted by the return to church and some minimal amount of socialising in April 2021. At this time of year change happens quickly, but at first subtly. If one does not pay close attention, one is confronted by it suddenly, especially if life is very busy.
Modern life can feel like it has been designed to disconnect us from the natural world. One of the things I noticed in my first week in Devizes was how dark and detailed the night skies were from my back garden, even in late June, with a fine view of the Milky Way. As a city boy who had been interested in stargazing since childhood, this was a surprise treat.
Even after all these years, I can remember quite distinctly what the northern skies looked like from my parents’ back yard in the mid-1980s. By this period, in a city centre location, the skies were already considerably affected by light pollution. Yet things have degraded further to the point that I estimate that about three-quarters of the stars then visible in Belfast with the naked eye no longer are.
The Milky Way near Shaftesbury in Dorset, 12 August 2016 © Gerry Lynch
Even in Devizes, the night sky is only a pale shadow of what our ancestors’ took for granted. The summertime Milky Way, for example, should be full of structure and complexity – while it is impressively ghostly here, detail is no longer visible from Devizes. Many more stars would have been visible than are today in this country, even in remote countryside; against the dark countryside, the night sky felt bright. I have experienced this, even in recent years, in Dorset where the councils turn many street lights off in the early hours.
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