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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A Clergyman’s Diary: Sunset at St John’s

Posted on September 22, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

St John’s provided the context for a stunning St Matthew’s Day sunset, as I walked home from the Tuesday evening Mass at St Mary’s. What a lovely town Devizes is. I am lucky to have ended up here for curacy.

Also, I love my Nikon D750 as much as I did when I first got it nearly six years ago. A great camera and a great investment on my part.

See more of my photography on Flickr.

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Wisdom and the Cross: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 12 September 2021 (The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Wisdom 7:26 – 8:1; Mark 8:27–38

“She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.”

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

On a bright weekday morning three summers ago, I began my day with Morning Prayer at Coventry Cathedral. Coventry was a convenient place for an overnight break on the long overland journey between Salisbury and Belfast, and I had long wanted to see the Cathedral. I was able to talk my way into spending the hour between the end of the service and the start of public visiting wandering an empty Cathedral on my own, with my camera and tripod.

John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

If you haven’t yet been there, I recommend a visit, and also making the effort to visit in the morning, for that is the time when John Piper’s baptistery window is at its best, ablaze with sun from the east, all twenty-eight metres of it.

Just occasionally people tell me they don’t like Coventry Cathedral. I couldn’t disagree more; few church buildings on earth incarnate the reality of the Resurrection more powerfully.

The parish church Cathedral of St Michael, one of the finest medieval parish churches in Europe, was blown to bits during The Blitz on 14 November 1940. As he went into the ruined Cathedral the morning after the destruction, the then Provost, Richard Howard, was struck by what he called “the deep certainty that as the Cathedral had been crucified with Christ, so it would rise again with Him.”

Less than twenty years later, the very different modernist Cathedral was dedicated, also to St Michael, surrounded by the still imposing ruins of 14th Century building, and incomprehensible without their presence.

Coventry Cathedral also showcases two interconnected British revivals of the two decades after the end of the Second World War – a revival of Christian faith and a revival of high culture. Unquestionably it was the high point of British modernism in the visual arts and architecture: Basil Spence’s cathedral housing John Piper’s windows, Graham Sutherland’s tapestry, still in 2021 the largest in the world, and one of Jacob Epstein’s last and finest sculptures. Yet this indubitable gem of 20th Century Christianity could not have existed without the destruction of the magnificent medieval St Michael’s.

The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

Resurrection follows death. Resurrection is not possible without death. Yet that does not make the death any less real, or any less painful, nor does it make the loss of physical presence that death entails any less final or less disturbing. That is the central paradox of the Christian faith. It is, in every sense of the word, disturbing.

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A Soldier Shot on the Afghan Frontier, 1889

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

In Rochester Chatedral, a cross executed in memory of Lt Archie Harris of the Royal Engineers “Shot while in pursuit of a Pathan robber on the Afghan frontier”, 11 October 1889.

In Rochester Cathedral, a cross executed in memory of Lt Archie Harris of the Royal Engineers “[s]hot while in pursuit of a Pathan robber on the Afghan frontier”, 11 October 1889.

History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme.

“A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
– Rudyard Kipling

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Doers Not Merely Hearers: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 28th August 2021 (The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on August 29, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8,14,15,21-23 

“…be doers of the word, and not merely hearers…”

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

 “The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.”

I read this remarkable sentence this week in article by a commentator who is not, as far as I know, a Christian believer, but is someone who understands the profound impact Christianity has had on Western culture.

“The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.”

This sentence referred to the international outpouring of anger that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May: the brutal public execution of a criminal by morally corrupt authorities behaving with terrible cruelty. The resonances with the story of Holy Week are obvious. Perhaps that is why it inspired such fervent proclamation of salvation for the oppressed through rejection of the currently dominant systems of political power which are transparently compromised.

George Floyd solidarity protest in Amsterdam, 1 June 2020. © BAMCorp and used under Creative Commons 2.0

In countries like ours’, the Christian story is woven deeply into every aspect of our mindsets. A few recent decades of triumphalist secularism has not yet undone the work of 1,500 years. Because Western civilisation became the first truly globally dominant one, it is easy for us to presume that the principles Christianity teaches about right and wrong are universal. But it certainly wasn’t part of Græco-Roman culture to exalt the weak or proclaim salvation for the oppressed.

Familiarity can blind us to how strange Christianity is – how wonderfully strange! – how subverting of the way that the powerful, clever, and rich try to invent clever ways of making that seem like the natural order of things is for them to dominate others. Only a very strange religion makes a tortured criminal its symbol of divinity, and puts the instrument of His execution everywhere from the tops of its temples to the jewellery around His followers’ necks.

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