Embracing Our Humanity: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 19th December 2021 (The Fourth Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45

“…as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.” 

If you’re interested in some intelligent listening, may I commend this year’s Reith Lectures on Radio 4? They are being given by Professor Stuart Russell, a British academic who works on Artificial Intelligence at the University of California. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a computer whizz to understand them – Professor Russell is very good at explaining his subject in terms understandable to an intelligent non-specialist audience.

A copy of the painting of The Visitation by James Tissot

The Visitation (1886-94) by James Tissot; now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

We have now lived through half a century where ever increasing computer power has radically transformed the way in which we live. The growing power of computers and the consequent disruption to established patterns of living will continue well into the future. Professor Russell, like most experts, thinks many of the jobs made unnecessary by new technology will be ones requiring high levels of education and specialist knowledge. For example, many fewer lawyers and doctors will be needed given the way the expertise of the best can be packaged and made available worldwide. Why do we need the average hospital consultant or barrister when a computer programme will make the knowledge of the very best available to all for a tiny marginal cost? Similarly, who will need the average teacher or university lecturer when the best in the world can be streamed via the Internet to every tablet from Devizes to Dubai.

The experts, however, all seem to agree we will still need just as many people who earn their living by taking care of others and their personal needs – from hairdressers to care home assistants. I hope that means there will continue to be a robust demand for priests.

Please note: when our expertise becomes redundant, there is still a value – including an economic value – on our humanity.

Let us keep this in mind as we reflect on our Gospel reading, and Mary’s visit to Elizabeth to celebrate their pregnancies, for it is all about the value of humanity and of human life.

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Proclaiming Forgiveness: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th December 2021 (The Second Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Luke 3:1-6; Malachi 3:1-4

“He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

It seems that in this pandemic, we’re always waiting. This time last year, we were waiting for the vaccines to arrive, having just heard news that seemed too good to be true about their effectiveness. This year, we’re waiting to see if they’ll still work as well against the Omicron variant. Waiting can sometimes be a nerve-grinding, exhausting, process, most of all when we wait poised between utter despair and relief. Let us be honest – the Second Sunday of Advent in 2021 involves just this kind of joy-sapping, emotionally fraught, waiting.

A painting by Domenico Veneziano of St John the Baptist surrounded by bare mountains and scattered woodland. He is naked.

St John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Domenico Veneziano (1445). Now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Waiting is, however, part of the human condition. It is also a major theme of the season of Advent, where we wait for Christ to come into the world at Christmas. Even Jesus had to wait for the appropriate time to start his public ministry, which meant waiting for John the Baptist; and John himself presumably had to wait for the right moment to begin preaching, in a time and a place that was full of shifting political and religious tensions.

It is of note that Luke locates John the Baptist at a definite historical moment. His preaching didn’t happen at a random moment in history, but at a particular time and a particular place, and I quote from this morning’s Gospel:

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”

From the time when he is writing, Luke is probably looking back around sixty years to the ministry of John the Baptist. That is a long time, but well within the living memory of older people; prominent public figures of the time will still mean something to most people. John the Baptist’s ministry is presented as a historical reality, in the not too distant past. It is as if a modern writer were writing about, say the Cuban Missile Crisis or miniskirts, by saying:

“In the eighth year of the reign of Elizabeth the Second, when Macmillan was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Kennedy President of the United States, and Khrushchev and Mao Chairmen of the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and China, during the archiepiscopates of Geoffrey Fisher and Michael Ramsey.”

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Reading the Signs of the Times

Posted on November 25, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

This article first appeared in the September 2021 edition of Franciscan magazine.

“In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son.” So begins the Letter to the Hebrews. These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.

The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways. Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ. Personal presence matters; the Word was made flesh because we are creatures of flesh and blood.

What might the digitisation of human relationships, accelerated by necessity due to the terrible pandemic we are enduring, mean for the Church? Let us first explore its wider societal impact to shed some light on that.

It is now a generation since communication started migrating into digital spaces, mediated by screens. I notice this shift most profoundly in pubs; people on their own are much less likely to strike up conversations with strangers or the barman than they were when I first discovered their amber-tinted pleasures in the mid-1990s. Instead, singles constantly flick through their phones to pass the time. A more specific example: gay bars have closed at an astonishing clip, rendered commercially unviable after losing the section of their custom primarily interested in casual sex to dating apps which leave many of their users experiencing incessant digital rejection. Gone with the bars is the broader sense of community they provided, including for those who had no interest in hooking up. A good pub, gay or otherwise, allowed people to meet in a way that transcended class, politics, race, and educational levels, at least to the extent their locality or workplace environs did.

On social media, in contrast, people often slip into clusters of the like-minded, forming small and cohesive online communities trapped in their own groupthink, increasingly incapable of assimilating any alternative viewpoint, and regarding their very expression of such as at best fake news and at worst an act of hostility.

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Crumbling Empires and Eternal Bliss: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 21st November 2021 (Christ the King)

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Revelation 1:4b-8; Mark 10:17–31

 “My Kingdom is not from of this world.” 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Some of you know, and some of you don’t, that I am a very keen radio ham, and a particular enthusiast for Morse code, which is still in use by hobbyists around the world on a daily basis. My love affair with radio started when I was an eight year old boy, on discovering that the radio cassette player my parents had given me as a Christmas present had a switch marked “Short Wave”. At first, tuning the dial on this strange waveband was unpropitious, as the adults had all assured me would be the case, revealing only strange bleeps and noises and a few stations in languages I didn’t even recognise.

Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv's Paton Bridge.

Remnants of a vanished empire: a Soviet red star from 1953 on Kyiv’s Paton Bridge, 11 August 2017, © Gerry Lynch.

Within a few hours, however, I had discovered programmes in immaculate English from Sweden, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and things developed from there over the following weeks and months. To a child always fascinated by maps and already at that tender age becoming interested in politics, that cassette player became like a magic carpet to distant lands, so much more remote in those pre-Internet days of the 1980s.

One of the most ubiquitous stations, and certainly the most bizarre, was Radio Tirana, which dominated large parts of the Short Wave spectrum with its creepy and unforgettable theme tune, introducing broadcasts that promoted Albania’s official state ideology in every language from Armenian to Zulu. It seemed to despise equally both what it described as American Imperialists and Soviet Socialist Imperialists, but its real ire was reserved for the oul’ enemy – the imperialists of Yugoslavia.

The undoubted king of the dial, however, was Radio Moscow, which in English alone had not only a North American service, and a World Service aimed mainly at audiences in Africa and South Asia, but for an hour at 8 o’clock every evening the wonderful Britain and Ireland Service. It was presented by gentlemen who were very well-spoken indeed, sounding like they had been educated at Marlborough and Cambridge – because they probably had been. They presented the failures of the Soviet Union as being the inevitable flaws of a system that was still merely Socialist, and that these would ultimately disappear as a perfect political system, a genuine Communism, inevitably emerged.

I discovered all this at Christmas 1985. Within a few years, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even the mighty Soviet Union all vanished from our maps. Empires rise and fall. They always have done and always will do, and they are always profoundly flawed entities.

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Have Mercy On Me: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Ramsbury, Sunday 24th October 2021 (The Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 24, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

“…he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’” 

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

This morning’s readings can be great sources of hope for us, but they can also be disturbing. It all depends what mood or what set of experiences we approach them from. In their very different ways, both Job and Blind Bartimaeus have been dealt a rough hand by God, and have suffered for years. Then, in response to prayer, God fixes each of their problems in a trice. The second part of their lives will be so wonderful they could hardly have dared wish it for themselves. The readings can also be disturbing, however, because God does not do this for everyone, not even for many people who pray faithfully. 

An exterior shot of Holy Cross, Ramsbury, in the Diocese of Salisbury in golden February light.

The preacher was “playing an away match” at Holy Cross, Ramsbury. © 22 February, 2018.

I read an article in Church Times a few weeks ago about a brilliant young academic, who met the love of his life when they were both reading for their doctorates. He had been brought up outside the Church, but thanks to his fiancée, he came to faith in Christ for the first time. The he was struck by what seemed at first to be a routine viral infection, but this left him with a crippling post-viral syndrome which has now lasted for many decades. He has lived in almost permanent exhaustion and pain. His career went nowhere, and his condition placed enormous burdens of caring on that young girlfriend who became his wife. Decades of faithful prayer for healing were met only with occasional false dawns; after so many years, the answer to his prayers was, finally, a sense of peace with his illness, with God, and with the world. 

Where, one asks, is the justice in all that? If we accept that God does at times answer prayer in miraculous ways – and I do accept that – it leaves us wondering why He doesn’t do it more often. 

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Five Years in Jail for Saying “I’m Gay”? We Must Speak Out

Posted on October 23, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

I have sent this letter to my representatives on Church of England General Synod as clergy in the Diocese of Salisbury, and copied it to my MP, my diocese’s bishops, and Lord Lexden, a government peer who often raises LGBT-related issues in the House of Lords. Please feel free to use it as a basis for letters to your General Synod reps or in your own contexts, church or secular. The internet is full of angry chain e-mails, and politicians and bishops get more than enough of them. Your letter will be received much more warmly if it is polite, and much more powerfully if you and others like you take time to put things in your own words.

Five years in jail, just for saying, “I’m gay” or “I’m trans”. It seems unimaginable that such a law could exist, let alone be supported by Christian leaders. But a Bill currently before Ghana’s parliament would do just that – and the country’s Anglican bishops have come out in favour. 

Ghana’s archbishop, the Most Rev’d Dr Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, has said he and his colleagues will “do anything within our powers and mandate to ensure that the Bill comes into fruition.” 

Ghana already criminalises sexual activity between people of the same sex with up to three years in prison. But this law would, astonishingly, make even coming out a crime punishable with a lengthy prison sentence and compulsory so-called conversion therapy. Anyone who advocated for LGBT rights could face up to ten years in prison. Families and professionals who failed to report LGBT relatives or clients would also face jail time. People with naturally occurring physical intersex conditions would be subject to forced surgical procedures. 

Archbishop Ben-Smith says this monstrosity of a proposal is a matter of pride and hope: “We as leaders must leave a legacy everyone will be proud of. Christ-like legacy of hope.” 

Forced surgery, psychological torture, and lengthy terms in prison a “Christ-like legacy of hope”? Dare we be silent when our brothers and sisters whom Christ died to save face such terror sinfully proclaimed in His holy name? Dare we allow the powerful anti-Christian forces in this country to say that this is what we Christians mean when we talk about our hope in Christ? 

We cannot be silent in the face of this horror. 

Nor should we believe that our voices will not be listened to. Last year, just before the lockdowns came in, I interviewed one of the most senior figures in the apartheid régime. As South Africa’s Minister of Police from 1986-92, Adriaan Vlok ordered his fellow Christians to be spied upon, tortured, poisoned and bombed, and thought he was defending a Christian state in doing so. 

Adriaan has long since repented of the evil he committed, and is one of the few figures from the old racist régime who will speak on the record about those times. Sitting in his front yard just outside Pretoria, he told me that the sources of opposition that weighed most heavily on the minds of top apartheid politicians were churches domestically and around the world, because they believed that as Christians they had to acknowledge what their fellow Christians said. If our voices are strong and united, they can make a difference in Africa. 

Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which is continually presented as the Anglican Communion’s standard on homosexuality, says that, “We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God”. How can you listen to someone if you lock them up for speaking honestly? How can you love someone if you are subjecting them to psychological and surgical torture? 

I implore you to speak out, especially those of you who disagree with me on the issue of whether the Church should affirm same-sex relationships, because I think your voices will be the most powerful in standing up for fundamental civil liberties in the secular sphere. 

I therefore ask: 

  1. Will you publicly call for this Bill not to be passed? 
  2. Will you publicly call for the bishops of the Internal Province of Ghana to withdraw their support for this Bill, reminding them of their commitments under Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference? 
  3. Will you ask our Archbishop to publicly call for this Bill not to be passed? 

A final point – some of you will be mystified at the reference to Resolution 1.10; others will know exactly what it is and be unhappy that I even mentioned it. The point is that it is used by opponents of accepting same-sex relationships as a basis for stonewalling any change in the status quo. We are not asking for anything new here – just for people around the world to live up to the minimum commitments they made in a resolution introduced to suit opponents of same-sex relationships. And the same basic minimum for trans people.

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Ecclesiastical History Rocks: 1960s Pentecostalism and Nigerian Anglicans

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

I spotted this interesting article and follow up letter in the Church Times when exploring its coverage of the 1968 Lambeth Conference. The article notes that the number of Anglicans in “the western part of Nigeria” was declining in favour of Pentecostals. Nigerian Anglicanism had gone through phases of shedding both sects and adherents towards Independency since at least the 1920s. But this was possibly the first report in the press of a new phenomenon which would have significant impacts on Anglicanism across the world.

There was a major Third Wave of new Pentecostal Churches emergent in Africa from the mid-1970s; in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, Jesse Zink locates this surge as beginning a little earlier, with an evangelical revival during the civil war of 1967-70. It would be incubated and then enormously multiplied in student groups meeting in the margins of the expanding Nigerian university system of the 1970s. Matthews Ojo understands these African movements as originating in the 1960s Pentecostalist revivals in North America and Britain; but Nigerian Independency long had links with the Anglo-Saxon north, and the influence wasn’t always unidirectional either.

Also of note here is some indirect evidence of Muslim-to-Christian conversion in Nigeria, which is far from unknown but somehow seems to escape everyone’s notice.

Anglicans facing competition from the burgeoning Pentecostal scene in Africa was one of a complex cluster of reasons why the issue of homosexuality became so toxic within world Anglicanism from the mid-1990s onwards.

From the Church Times, 9 August 1968

Fewer Anglicans in W. Nigeria

The number of Anglicans in the western part of Nigeria, West Africa, is declining, to the benefit of other denominations.

This is revealed in the report published giving the results of a research project into the “Role of Religion in Yoruba Society,” conducted by the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife, Nigeria.

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A Clergyman’s Diary: A Wiltshire Transfiguration

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Gerry Lynch
The Wansdyke near Baltic Farm, 10 October 2021. © Gerry Lynch.

Nobody is quite sure when the Wansdyke was built, but the most commonly advanced theory is that it was built by the Romano-British after they were abandoned by the Imperial power to defend their stronghold in what is now Gloucestershire, Somerset, and northern Wiltshire, in the face of Saxon expansion spreading northwards from the English Channel. This would date it to around the end of the 5th Century. Regardless of exactly at which point in the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England it was built, it seems that the much later Anglo-Saxons had lost any idea about its purpose when, despite several centuries of Christianity, they named it Woden’s Dyke, after Odin, the king of the Norse gods, around the 9th Century.

The eastern section, in Wiltshire, has been much less disturbed over the centuries by agriculture and building than those further west, and this section, north of the village of Bishops Cannings, is particularly dramatic when lit by low late afternoon sun from the south in autumn and winter.

On a rainy day in midwinter, with the rain belting down for weeks, it can be a little disappointing, a flat bank of mud surrounded by dirty puddles. Yet the sun can transfigure it into mysterious magnificence in all seasons, always easy on the ankles, even for someone with my short legs and my fat belly. The ground remains springy and fast when in a hot dry spell when the surrounding terrain is drained and hard; and also when it is surrounded by wet muck.

Looking east from Morgan’s Hill towards Tan Hill, the Wansdyke just visible in the bottom of the valley, 10 October 2021. © Gerry Lynch.

It is as much as 4 metres high in places. It is followed by a long-distance footpath for all of this stretch. The view in the distance reaches to Tan Hill, at 294 metres above sea level the joint highest point in Wiltshire.

This is deep England. The countryside is not especially dramatic but rolls with a heart-healing, gentle, beauty. I walk here regularly, with various circuits of 12-18 miles (19-30 km) starting and finishing from my home in Devizes taking in stretches of it. When the light is like this, it makes my soul sing and fills me with gratitude for being alive.

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If You Sell Everything You Have, I’ll Buy You Lunch: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 7th October 2021 (The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 10, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Hebrews 4:12–16; Mark 10:17–31

“…go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor … then come, follow me.”

This morning, I’m going to set you all a challenge from the pulpit. Which of you is going to do what Jesus told the rich young man this morning, and sell what you have, and give it to the poor?

The painting by Heinrich Hofmann, entitled Christus und der reiche Jüngling, dating to 1889. Residing at the Riverside Church, New York.

Heinrich Hofmann, Christus und der reiche Jüngling, 1889. Residing at the Riverside Church, New York.

I’m serious. Will somebody here, today, stick up their hand – I don’t want you to interrupt my sermon right now, but will somebody say to me at the south porch after the service, “Yes, Gerry. I’m in. I’ll get the estate agents to put the house on the market tomorrow, I’m giving the car to a young person without much money to whom it would really make a difference, and the family silver is going on eBay this afternoon.”

I’m mean it. If any of you takes up the challenge, I’ll stand you lunch at The Peppermill straight afterwards, along with a decent bottle or two, and you can come and stay with me for a month or two while you work out how you’re going to live your new vocation as a wandering mendicant, living entirely off the charity of others, for the sake of Christ.

Somebody here should give it a go. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus has promised you treasure in heaven if you do, and in fact he promised you houses, families, and fields in this world as well. Along, it has to be said, with some persecutions. But it will all balance out as a big net positive. So, what are you waiting for?

Oh, by the way, no not me, I can’t do it. I know I’m single and I have no dependants, but I’m the curate and I have to stay here and minister unto you. It wouldn’t be fair, especially to you, for you to lose your wonderful curate who is, of course, entirely irreplaceable. Also, the Diocese would never pass me to go on and apply for my first incumbency.

The apostles reacted much in the manner that most of us do after hearing this challenge to the Rich Young Man, and then Jesus telling them that God’s standards were so high that it was almost impossible to get into heaven. They moaned. And Jesus answered them, that for mortals it was impossible, but for God, all things are possible.

You can’t win heaven. You cannot meet God’s exacting standards. God made us human beings to be flawed. We will, you and I, often make complete messes of things. Acknowledging this is a liberating, life-affirming, idea in a world where our worth is too often measured by our achievements, and our failures are too quickly pounced on by an increasingly angry and unforgiving culture. It is liberating and life-affirming because if you can’t meet God’s standards then you can’t earn God’s love. God loves you anyway, just as you are. He undoubtedly wants you to live your life differently in some ways than you do at present. You could certainly be better than you are – I know I could be. But you are loved by God.

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Stumbling Blocks and Salt: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 26 September 2021 (The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on September 26, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – James 5.13–20; Mark 9.38–50

“Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

There is a striking and rather horrifying picture about our Christian past that occasionally does the rounds on the Internet. It is a photograph of two strangely shaped tombstones, located either side of a high wall. The tombstones are even higher, and from the top of each a hand stretches out to touch the other.

Grave in Roermond © memolands.com gallery

The touching hands between the tombs of Colonel van Gorcum and Lady van Aefferden in the Dutch city of Roermond. © memolands.com gallery and used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0.

The graves are located in the Dutch city of Roermond, and belong to Colonel van Gorcum, a Protestant cavalry officer, and his wife Lady van Aefferden, a Catholic minor noble. They were married in 1842, and after thirty-eight years of presumably happy marriage, the Colonel died and was buried in the Protestant part of the local cemetery, where the dead were divided from one another denominationally by a high wall. His wife therefore refused to be buried in the grand family plot, in the Catholic part of the cemetery, insisting that she would be buried on her own immediately across the wall from him. That is where she was laid to rest eight years later, in 1888, and their graves remain to this day a reminder of the capacity of love to triumph over bigotry.

Love conquers all – even tribalism and stupidity.

Christ presents a dire warning in today’s Gospel about those who place stumbling blocks in the way of faith. The horrid things done due to disagreements between Catholics and Protestants are a huge stumbling block to Christian faith for many, a major contributor to the decline of Christianity in this country and across Europe. Today we pay a heavy price for the sins for the past.

Of course, we’re not like that these days. We’re much more enlightened. Devizes is now absolutely normal in terms of today’s Christianity, certainly in this country, in that the social action of the Church, our commitment to supporting the needy, or the homeless, or people with addiction problems, is carried out absolutely ecumenically. Not only do Conservative Roman Catholics work hand in hand with staunchly Evangelical Protestants, but both work with people at the most theologically liberal end of the Quakers or Anglicans or Methodists, who might see themselves as following a Christian path towards a universal truth rather than understanding Christianity as even presenting a distinct truth at all. All of us seem to have taken on board Jesus’ command to the apostles today about the stranger healing in His name: “Do not stop him; for … whoever is not against us is for us.”

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