A Clergyman’s Diary: Along the Marches Border

Posted on July 17, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

If you’re here because you heard about my #50kInADay walking fundraiser – click here to find out more and support me.

An invitation to celebrate the Eucharist in a village in the Diocese of Hereford where some good friends live provided not only the opportunity for my first ‘away match’ since my priesting, but for some final preparatory walking before my 50k in a day fundraising effort. A march along the Marches border, as it were.

Herefordshire has some glorious walking country, especially when the thistles and foxgloves and buttercups are at their finest and the countryside is full of dancing butterflies and buzzing bees.

St Swithun seemed in good form on his feast day and we will not have to deal with rain for the next 40 days, it seems. It was, however, a frustrating day of blocked or unmarked rights of way and being forced onto main roads. But 30km was walked as planned, albeit on a different route to that originally planned. Some of it was quite steep.

Friday, which was the feast of St Osmund, was very hot indeed. There were fewer access problems as I walked Offa’s Dyke Path from Kington to Hay-on-Wye, shuffling back and forth across the English/Welsh border. This does not take the most ‘efficient’ route, but spends a lot of time going through sheep farms at the 300m+ level before ascending and descending very steeply indeed when it goes through a village. Idyllic scenery though, and squadrons of Red Kites at times.

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Devizes Curate to Walk ‘50k in a Day’

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

A Wiltshire clergyman plans to walk five miles more than a marathon in one day to raise funds for his churches, and to help the victims a brutal but often ignored conflict.

The Rev’d Gerry Lynch, Curate of St John with St Mary, Devizes, will attempt a whopping 50 kilometre sponsored walk on 20 July to help cover the income his parish lost during lockdowns, as well as for colleagues in the frontline of caring for those fleeing an ISIS insurgency in Mozambique.

The Rev’d Gerry Lynch said:

“Like many organisations, St John with St Mary lost several income streams during the pandemic, with potential consequences for what we can offer to the people of the town if we can’t fill the hole.

“But others have things more difficult than we do. My friend Manuel is the bishop of a city named Nampula just outside the area of the ISIS insurgency in northern Mozambique. This city of 750,000, already home to a UN camp for 17,000 refugees from other countries, is now struggling to provide food, clean water, and shelter for half a million fellow Mozambicans who fled their homes in terror. Many, including children, have witnessed traumatic events and mental healthcare is also urgent.

“I thought I could raise some money both for our needs in Devizes and for friends in another part of the world dealing with a situation we can scarcely imagine.

“I have a BMI over 30 and a 25½ inch inside leg so my build is not what anyone would call athletic. Still, long countryside walks were basically what kept me sane during the lockdowns and my endurance has gone through the roof.

“When I first considered a sponsored walk, I thought I’d walk a marathon distance. Unfortunately I did a 43.4 km walk a few weeks ago and posted it on social media, and people worked out it was more than a marathon! So I’m going to have to go the extra five miles for a full 50k in one day –just over 31 miles for those who prefer old money.

“People can support me at justgiving.com/crowdfunding/50kinaday or by making out a cheque to PCC St John, sending it to the parish office on Long Street, Devizes, SN10 1NP, and marking it ‘50k in a Day’. Your generous gift will go straight to where it will make a difference.”

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The Baptist’s Wounds: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, 11 July 2021 (The Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on July 11, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6: 14–29                                 

“‘He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.”

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

Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head on a platter is one of the most grizzly images in the Gospels. It remains shocking not least because so many Christians have died throughout the ages for telling powerful rulers truths that they don’t want to hear. When you next go to Salisbury, look at the rows of statues which adorn the West Front of the Cathedral – there is a helpful Wikipedia article which has information on each one of the one hundred and ninety-six of them – and note how many of them were martyred for their faith.

The last few decades have added to the numbers of those martyred for speaking truth to power. I think of St Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot dead by members of a far-right militia as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in 1980; or Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Polish priest hunted down four years later by secret policemen of the then Communist regime in his country. In our own Anglican tradition Janani Luwum, the Archbishop of Uganda, was martyred in 1977 by Idi Amin for protesting that dictator’s murderous rule. Few people seem to know of the seven brave Anglican monks of the Melanesian Brotherhood, murdered in 2003 by a warlord in the Solomon Islands as they tried to mediate during a period of interethnic fighting. So, let me remember by name from this pulpit Nathaniel Sado, Robin Lindsay, Francis Tofi, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu, and Ini Paratabatu. 

Nor have these martyrs all been clergy and religious. Brave laypeople have also given their lives for refusing to collude in the lies of repressive régimes, like Steve Biko, the practising Anglican and founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, beaten to death by the police of the apartheid state.

David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch

David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch

Indeed, it was in South Africa that I definitively got to know a prophet: David Russell, who was Bishop of Grahamstown from 1987 until 2004. David radiated the peace of Christ and was very good to me at a difficult time. He could have had a much easier life than the one he led. South Africa-born, he came to England to train for the priesthood and studied to postgraduate level at Oxford. As such an able man, he could have become a Prince Bishop of the Church of England, and campaigned against the repressive government of his homeland from a powerful pulpit. Even in South Africa, he could have ministered in a White suburban parish, and challenged the government from there. That wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable, but it would have been a lot easier than what he chose to do. Instead, he rejected the arrant heresy that a priest must be of the same race as the people he or she serves by ministering in illegal shantytowns on the Cape Flats, home to people banned from living in the second city of their own country simply because of the colour of their skin. This led to several years of house arrest, an actual spell of imprisonment, and being constantly spied upon by the security services. It also led him to meet his wife, to become a highly respected bishop important in his country’s transition to democracy, and in the fullness of time to become an officially honoured national hero. While some prophets face death, David lived to find a sort of Resurrection in his later years.

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Good Enough for God?

Posted on June 19, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

This article first appeared in the July 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

Among my closest friends are the three remaining Anglican Benedictine monks from what was once Nashdom and then Elmore Abbey, now resident in Salisbury Cathedral Close. When I first came to Wiltshire in 2013, they were four, and Dom Kenneth Newing, who had been Bishop of Plymouth before taking monastic vows, was one of the dearest, wisest, and holiest friends I have ever had. 

Dom Kenneth Newing on the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood, at the tender age of 93.

Dom Kenneth Newing on the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood, at the tender age of 93. © Gerry Lynch, 30 September 2016.

I first met Kenneth when he had just turned ninety, and he already showed signs of mild but definite cognitive impairment. He took time to process complex conversation and find the precise words in response, but he remained an acute observer of people and retained excellent memory for both the immediate and distant past. For those with the patience to take time to talk to him, he was wise and perceptive in conversation. He remained so almost until his death five years later. In his last years, he contributed much to the Church and the life of those he lived and worshipped among.  

The Church of England has set itself the task of becoming younger and more diverse. On the surface, nobody could object to this. Scratch deeper and this objective is riddled with problematic assumptions. The Church should seek growth, just as the leaves on the trees do at this time of year. That’s one of its jobs. Must new or revitalised Christians, however, necessarily be young? Are the older members of our society redundant passengers to be ignored in favour of those likely to have more years of active Christian commitment? Similarly with diversity. We must absolutely reject anything in ourselves that refuses to embrace as equals everyone regardless of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. But are congregations that look less like our metropolitan centres and more like our provincial small towns of less value to God?  

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Like A Mustard Seed: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, 13 June 2021 (The Second Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Corinthians 5: 6–17; Mark 4: 26–34

“‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed…”

Mustard Seeds. © Eugenio Hansen, OFS and used under Creative Commons 4.0

Mustard Seeds. © Eugenio Hansen, OFS and used under Creative Commons 4.0

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

I suspect many of you remember a BBC comedy series from a decade ago called Rev. For those of you who don’t know it, it is about the trials and tribulations of an East End vicar, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, and his congregation in a gentrifying but still sometimes troubled parish. His flock isn’t very large, and sometimes their motivations for being in church are frankly mixed, from the lady of a certain age who is, shall we say, often very taken with gentlemen in clerical collars, to the incoming middle-classes who turn up to get their children into the parish primary school, without remotely taking anything that goes on in Church seriously.

A consistent theme is Adam’s sense of his own inadequacy. Adam feels inadequate compared with the vicar of the lively parish down the road, with its in-house rap artist and huge congregation of young people, and inadequate compared with his very clever pal from theological college who has a column in The Guardian and a regular slot on Thought for the Day. Yet every once in a while, an encounter happens that makes Adam realise that he is indeed called by God to be the person he is, moments of grace where only he, precisely because of his transparent flaws, can bring the light of Jesus Christ into a situation where a grander or more self-confident person would never be allowed to enter.

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation”, says St Paul in today’s Epistle reading, from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is natural to feel inadequate when faced with words like that. I don’t know about you, but my faults have remained persistent throughout my journey of faith. Following Jesus Christ as my Lord hasn’t turned me into a heroic crusader against evil who makes sinners repent by the sheer radiance of my goodness. I am as flawed, as self-centred, as inclined to take the path of least resistance, and sometimes as plain annoying as I always have been. 

Yet: “There is a new creation.” This is where context matters, because St Paul wrote these words to a new and immature Church in Corinth, the Eastern Mediterranean’s sin city, a city of sailors on shore leave joining the locals in hard partying and loose living. We might think of it in our terms as Amsterdam multiplied by Ibiza. Paul didn’t write those letters to the Corinthians because they were the example of what a Church should look like, but because they were the most troubled of all the churches he established – sometimes immoral, obsessed with wealth and bling, and rather selfish. And yet St Paul didn’t give up on them. They were at the beginning of a journey that they didn’t even seem to understand: but they had made a start. Great things often have small beginnings, and the people who start them are never perfect. God called the Corinthians to follow Him in His Son Jesus Christ, not because they were the models of sainthood, but because they were the people He needed to fulfil his purposes, there and then.

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Higher State of Consciousness: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Devizes on Ascension Day, 13 May 2021

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’”

Readings – Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53.

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

In the summer between my A-Levels and the start of university, that magical time of life when one is at last able to get into nightclubs, that time when drinking second-rate beer out of a plastic beaker at two in the morning seems the most wonderful thing on earth, the big dance track in all the clubs was called “Higher State of Consciousness”. The electronically distorted words “Higher State of Consciousness”, were continually repeated over a pumping bassline, while a sort of Morse-code rhythm screeched over the top at excessive pitch. I think whenever I heard it I was, to be honest, mostly in a fairly low state of consciousness or at least a rather inebriated one.

The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali

The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali

The reason I’m bringing this up – because I’m sure you’re wondering – is that sometimes people spend a lot of time getting themselves into a tizzy about what happened physically at the Ascension and why that proves that those who disagree with them aren’t real Christians but in fact brain-dead fundamentalists, godless heretics, or some other insult. But the concept of ascension, in popular conception as well as in Christianity, relates more to state than it does to physical place. Heaven is not somewhere above the sky or beyond the Moon’s orbit; but it is somewhere other than here, and higher than here.

Our two readings tonight comprised the only original narrative accounts of the Ascension, both of which are by the same author. The first brings the Gospel of St Luke to a conclusion, the other begins the Acts of the Apostles. The chronology is difficult to reconcile between them; the geography doesn’t feel entirely consistent; the dialogue doesn’t quite match. Especially given that these accounts were written by the same author, it certainly doesn’t seem like St Luke was that worried about what we might think of as accuracy in courtroom witness statement sense.

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Easter Day Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, 4 April 2021

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

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

Josef Žáček, Resurrection (1988). which hangs in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice, Czechia.

Josef Žáček, Resurrection (1988). which hangs in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice, Czechia.

When I was boy, the local radio station my mother always listened to in the morning had a daily feature of the wackiest snippets from the day’s papers. One Easter week, it told the story of a church on the previous Sunday, that I seem to remember was in Devon. When the parishioners arrived for the main Easter Day Eucharist, they were told that their newly installed vicar, the Reverend So-and-so, had died suddenly on the afternoon of Good Friday. Nonetheless, his wife had battled on to make the church bright and full of new life for Easter morning. The show must go on and all that.

The parishioners were distraught, some openly weeping as the service began, with a strangely hollow Gloria and then the readings. At the end of the Gospel, some strange bumping noises began to be heard from the giant, two metre-high, papier maché egg, that some of the churchgoers only at that point noticed was stationed just below the pulpit. Soon, holes began to be punched in the egg from the inside by a pair of furious fists. Suddenly, out jumped the vicar, with a cry of “Surprise!

He said his aim was to allow the parishioners to actually feel the sense of shock that the first disciples felt when they realised that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. The parishioners were, however, deeply unimpressed. I think they must have written some stiff letters to the Bishop of Exeter afterwards.

I can promise you that I shan’t resort to such histrionics at any point in my time with you at St John’s. That Devon vicar from 35 years or so ago clearly made a rather crude error of judgement. Yet, for all its emotionally manipulative crassness, his stunt did get across one easily missed point; the experience of the Resurrection was, at least at first, deeply disturbing and upsetting.

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A Season of New Life

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

This article first appeared in the April 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

I went for a very long walk earlier this week, even by my standards. A whopping 43 km (27 miles for those who prefer pounds, shillings, and pence). The highlight came just after sunset, heading west into the twilight on the Roman Road between the Cherhill Monument and Morgan’s Hill. Silhouetted against the orange sky was something I’d never seen before but entirely unmistakable – a mad March hare, leaping wildly, full of joyful abandon.

The Roman Road between Avebury and Morgan's Hill just after sunset. A ploughed track and an orange sky.

The Roman Road between Avebury and Morgan’s Hill just after sunset, © Gerry Lynch, 23 March 2021

New life is all around us in this season. What will our world look like in the months and years to come? While we can’t be certain of the course of the pandemic, at present our hospitals are emptying and vaccinations are proceeding at pace, so we should plan for a return to normality in the first part of this summer. What sort of things might help us renew our life as a parish community?

I think there are two key elements to this. Firstly, enabling our existing worshippers to deepen in faith and in relationship with one another. Also, to deepen in trust that we really are the people God has called to serve Him in this place. Secondly, giving people who are not yet part of our congregation the chance to engage with us, and for us to provide pathway to faith for the majority of people who think of themselves as entirely secular.

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Clearing the Temple of our Souls: Sermon Preached Digitally for St John with St Mary, Devizes, on Sunday 7 March 2021

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2: 13-22

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

I love Giotto’s painting of the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that forms the centrepiece of today’s Gospel. It has a raw edge that defies any domestication of Christ; Jesus, a cold fury on his face, is whirling the whip above his head, but he looks more than anything like he’s about to punch the moneychanger nearest him in the face. 

The reception of this story by the Church in the present moment fascinates me. The Giotto painting is the source of countless memes, little social media slogans, in the churchy parts of Facebook and Twitter, where people say that Jesus angrily whipping the money changers out of the Temple is the Jesus they emulate. The funny thing is the same people find the idea of the wrath of God absolutely taboo, as I suspect most of us do, dismissing it as primitive and theologically dubious. 

We don’t like the idea of God’s wrath in the abstract, but we like the angry Jesus when his fury is directed at people we disapprove of. After all, we’re not the sort of people who would set up a stall in the cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral to sell animals for sacrifice and exploit continental tourists by offering them a terrible exchange rate for their Euros. It’s OK for God to be angry at people like that, the sort of people who make us feel a bit smug and superior, but we’re quite sure God would never be angry at us. 

We only need to spell that approach out to realise how ludicrous it is, a cheap co-option of God as a sort of magic totem who is always on our side. Please God, we’re more mature and self-aware than that, open to understanding that the Jesus who judges the moneychangers has not only the right, but the duty, to judge us. We must know that the God who knows every hair on our head also knows the darkness that rests in each of our souls. We also know that any representation of a human being without shadow isn’t a human being at all but a cartoon, a caricature, and that anyone claiming to be such a flawless being is a liar. If Jesus Christ, who is God, is correct to be angry at the moneychangers in the Temple, then He must also at times be correct to be angry at us.

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New Life After A Sojourn in the Wilderness

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

This article first appeared in the March 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

Although summer remains far away and we could yet be overtaken by a genuinely cold snap or even snow, the signs of new life are all around us at present. The snowdrops are magnificent, especially in our local woodlands, and the days are getting rapidly longer: each day currently gives us an extra four minutes of daylight. It soon builds up.

We trust and pray we are also seeing signs of new life after the pandemic. The number of new Covid-19 cases in the UK is decreasing at some speed, the horrifying daily death toll is also mercifully falling rapidly, the number of people vaccinated is going up, and the government has presented its roadmap out of lockdown, promising an end to restrictions by late June. As ordinary citizens, we can do little but trust and pray that our scientists and statisticians have done their modelling correctly and that this will indeed be our last lockdown.

In that light, after discussions at the Parochial Church Council, we are planning a return to services in church on Sundays. There has, however, been a recent and fairly significant outbreak in Devizes, with local infection rates running at 2½ times the average for England. This has gone almost unreported in the local press, but is a reality. Responsibility demands we wait for that to subside before bringing people back into church, other recent local outbreaks indicate we can expect this to happen quickly under lockdown conditions. The PCC has delegated the decision on a date of return to the churchwardens, who will review the situation every week. We will not delay any longer than necessary, and barring truly exceptional circumstances envisage being back in church by Holy Week and possibly some time before. We will contact people by e-mail, or by telephone for those without access to the Internet, on the Monday before any Sunday return.

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