Building A Country Fit for Pandemic Heroes

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Gerry Lynch

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

This time of the year always provides a strange intermezzo in the Church’s liturgical cycle. The long forty days of Christmas seem out of sync with the secular world, perhaps starting to drag a little at the point when they are rescued by the season’s culminating exclamation point of Candlemas. Then we have the briefest of spells of Ordinary Time, its only appearance between December and June, before the privations of Lent begin. In the cycle of the natural seasons, the days are mercifully starting to stretch but are often viciously cold. It is a time of being neither one thing nor the other.

So it is with the pandemic. Having not always managed Covid-19 well, as I write the UK has made a bright start to the vaccination process. At this point, it has vaccinated the fourth highest proportion of its population in the world, behind only three Middle Eastern countries: Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. I have no idea whether that will remain the case by the time you read this, but the local vaccine rollout in Wiltshire seems to have been extremely impressive, with many of you in the highest priority bands having told me that you have had one or even two jabs already. If the scientists are right, the appalling death rate should start to come down quite rapidly as people are being vaccinated, quite rightly, in order of risk to life, along with our frontline health and social care workers.

The rest of us will have to wait, and so the pandemic is far from over, and healthy people in their thirties and forties, who rarely die of Covid-19 but can end up desperately ill in hospital before fighting it off, are probably still many, many, months from vaccination. The UK is unlikely to reach the fabled herd immunity threshold until late summer or even autumn. We will still be living with the tedious restrictions of distancing and isolation for at least the first half of 2021, although probably in an increasingly attenuated form as time goes on. 

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“The Word was Made Flesh”: Sermon Preached at Midnight Mass in St George’s, Belfast, on Thursday 24 December 2020

Posted on December 25, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-14

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

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

The Incarnation by Murillo, c. 1677

Our epistle reading at this Midnight Mass, the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, states that God “has spoken to us by a Son.” 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 that didn’t involve anything connected with this rather odd claim that God “has spoken to us by a son”.

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.

Ancient Near Eastern cultures were quite comfortable with the idea of divine messengers; indeed the word ‘angel’ comes directly from the Greek work for “messenger” and the Old Testament claims to record angelic appearances from as early as patriarchal times. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus. But while angels announced that Jesus was about to come into the world, they don’t seem to have been able to do the work that God required Jesus to do.

God didn’t dictate a series of writings to Jesus, nor to His followers, at least not directly. That was a way that God had communicated with His chosen people in Palestine in the past, when he gave the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Horeb. God continues to communicate with His people today through the series of writings we call the Bible, but Jesus wasn’t their author, nor were they handed down from on high, but instead were the product of centuries of laborious debate by the Church. But the only record we have of Jesus writing is with his finger, in the dirt on the ground, at the time when a woman was brought to Him to be stoned for adultery.

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“Waiting”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 6 December 2020 (the 2nd Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-10

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you

Madonna and Child in an Advent-tide Old St Paul’s, Edinbugh. 14 December 2018. © Gerry Lynch

At the start of the week, I had to order a few items from a major online retailer. I’ll not give it any free advertising by mentioning the name. Suffice to say it’s a firm called after a major river in South America known for, how shall I put it, being very efficient in tax matters. Among the items I procured is the new external mic for the parish’s tablet to improve the quality of our streaming, which I hope those of you watching at home are enjoying, as well as some cabling to improve the internet connection around the curate’s house.

I wanted the cabling to arrive before the Advent course started on Tuesday evening, and I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t seem to find any delivery options earlier than Wednesday, even though I was willing to spend a few quid extra to do so. It’s absolutely ridiculous, after all, that in the middle of a global pandemic, I can’t have all my consumer desires satisfied within 24 hours.

Or, maybe not.

We have become a culture that has had our capacity to wait eroded by consumer industries that know we’ll spend more with them if they can satisfy our needs instantly. I’m not enough of a hypocrite to stand up here in the pulpit and pretend to you that I don’t love it, either. It is, however, only part of the story. For all of us life involves much waiting, not least when we are very young or very old, and for the most vulnerable among us life is largely a matter of waiting. We usually find ourselves waiting because we are in a situation where we are either dependent on others, or else dependent on circumstance and therefore in a situation where only God can help. Right at this moment, the whole world is in waiting in hopeful agony for the vaccines that seem set to deliver us from the nightmare that has been the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty.

To be human, in this world of matter, space, and time, is to wait. One of the gifts of this season of Advent is that it hallows and allows us to bring before God the waiting that punctuates our lives. After all, the Church has been waiting since the day of Ascension, waiting for the return of the Lord.

Our epistle this morning is from the Second Letter of Peter, which is very much a product of waiting – indeed a text which was written at a time when the waiting had become almost too much to bear. Despite its name, it was almost certainly not written by St Peter; as early as the 3rd Century, Origen regarded its true authorship as a matter of doubt, as did Eusebius who wrote some decades letter. Now, as I am not a scriptural literalist, I don’t think doubts about the letter’s authorship necessarily reduce its value to us. Firstly, I take seriously that all Scripture is God-breathed and written for our instruction, and that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit in the process by which it decided conclusively on the canon of Scripture. But that does not mean reading the Bible as if it were instructions for a piece of flat-pack furniture. Scripture teaches us as much as anything else through the blind spots and misunderstandings of the people who wrote it, for we are human beings just like them, prone to the same mistakes, and especially prone to co-opting God for our own agendas.

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Things Have Gone Wrong At The Tavistock. Central Government Must Step In.

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

I’ve long since passed the point when I thought posting anything political on the internet made any difference, and what I’m about to say is on an issue where questioning a particular orthodoxy often results in abuse.

But I don’t actually want to look back in a year or two and think I kept my head down on this issue for fear of some aggro on social media. Or even for fear of losing friends who had once been good friends.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s lead for safeguarding children, Sonia Appleby, is taking her own employer to court as a whistleblower, claiming that she was victimised after bringing forward concerns from clinical psychiatrists working on the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the only adolescent gender clinic in England, which also receives referrals from Wales and both jurisdictions in Ireland.

The Trust is bringing forward disciplinary action against another clinician, David Bell, who had been approached by GIDS staff with concerns because he was a staff governor on the Trust, and who then wrote an internal report critical of GIDS.

It has been reported that 40 clinicians resigned from GIDS in just three years to early 2020.

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“Like A Thief in the Night”: Sermon Preached for St John’s Devizes Digital Worship on Sunday 15 November 2020 (the 2nd Sunday Before Advent) by Gerry Lynch

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night=

© Used under fair use -The image is used for identification in the context of critical commentary of the work.

Before I sat down to plan my sermon for this morning, I thought I would want to say something optimistic and cheerful at a time when we were locked down for a second time, and locked out of our church for a second time. Then I looked at the readings for the day and found I had to preach on texts about the Second Coming, and about a worthless slave being thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Oh dear, I thought to myself. 

So I had a wee pray about it and I realised that I didn’t want to be cheerful and optimistic at all. I wanted to be hopeful in this new lockdown, which is something quite different. Hope is not optimism; it does not depend on taking a positive spin on the facts; nor is hope good cheer, for hope is the most powerful tool we have for carrying us through the times when we are at our bleakest. Real hope doesn’t come from talking about posies and fluffy bunny rabbits. One of the things that most often renews our hope is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well. Real hope must be capable of enduring the worst that the world and humankind can throw at it, for the worst will inevitably be thrown at it at some point. Hope outlasts optimism and good cheer, global depressions and planetary pandemics; along with faith and love it will endure unto eternity. Hope will survive the end of the world. 

We associate the Second Coming with the end of the world. We hear and read a lot about the end of the world a lot at the moment, or at least the end of the world we knew on New Year’s Day 2020. At moments we must all have lapsed into depression that this new abnormal will never end, that we will never again share the peace in church, that we’ll never again have a large group of friends round for a drink, that we’ll never lose the terror that we’ll wake up one morning not being able to smell the coffee, with a high temperature and a dry persistent cough. We lock down full of fear as the November days grow rapidly shorter and darker, and fear that the world has indeed ended, and we’re in a sort of hell. Then we learn the news about the vaccine trial and we wonder if we dare hope that there will again come a time when we sing hymns together and find ourselves chatting to a stranger in a pub who becomes a new friend and hug our loved ones without fear.

This morning’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, however, does not write about the end of the world, but the coming of the day of the Lord. This passage is often associated in the popular Christian imagination with the end times thanks to some very shaky theology from as recently as the 19th Century. Later there was a 1970s American film called A Thief in The Night, a second rate B-movie with a bit of Jesus thrown in, which was very influential in fundamentalist Protestant circles. In it, a lady wakes up to find that her husband and millions of other real Christians have been taken to heaven, leaving her and other fake Christians behind with the unbelievers under the jackboot of an oppressive world government run by the UN which wants to force her to have the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and damn her for all eternity! All of this got a high budget, Internet-era, makeover with the Left Behind series of books and films which were, if anything, even worse: a living reminder that while good taste can’t be bought, bad taste can.

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IN MEMORIAM GERARD BENEDICT NEWE 1907-1982

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Gerry Lynch
Layde Church, Cushendall, 8 April 2019, © Gerry Lynch.

Where Layde’s old tombstones tell the tale
Of time before we felt the flail
Of England’s “for your own good” yoke
You must have stood on many a morn
And blessed the day when you were born
In May’s bright sunshine and turf-smoke. 

As the dog clambered on your knee
You looked at Scotland past the sea
Where flew the exiled childer Lir. 
Framed by hedges thick with whin
The land of our oppressor-kin
Unlike the English, known and near. 

That vantage showed the road you trod
Family, faith, peace with the Prod
Made sense. The Troubles passed you by
Where still despite the passing time
Catholic, Gaelic, Scots, all rhyme
Hemmed in by Plateau, waves, and sky. 

Sell-out, traitor, and Castle Taig:
Ulster speech must eschew the vague
Not least for those that breach the ditch
That makes us prisoners of our worst.
There is a price for those who first
Trade victory for an even pitch. 

As a fig leaf you were courted. 
Brave kenosis, worse, was thwarted — 
Thucydides proved right once more.
To all but those who loved you best
Obscure to memory you must rest
Vague footnote in historian’s lore. 

Gesture met but with ill justice
Still you were correct to trust as
Morgair’s school taught, in the Lord. 
For now you rest with Him and show
Your glory from within below
The angels’ “Holy, Holy” chord. 

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A Clergyman’s Diary: Over The Downs to Marlborough

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

First day of a week off so I yomped over the downs to Marlborough in very muddy conditions.

The first 12½ mile leg to Avebury is all familiar now, but the canal towpath which usually gets me off to an easy flying start was very muddy, slow and hard going. Leaving the canal behind, as usual I saw no other human beings at all on the 5 miles between Harepath House and the long barrow at West Kennet; this was mostly good going except for a stretch of about half a mile coming to the top of Easton Hill where the bridleway had turned into sticky chalk sludge, which was very hard going, both slippery and sticky at the same time! I was rewarded for my exertions with corncrakes singing and giant murmurations of starlings.

From the long barrow, however, the whole Avebury site was chokka with half-term families and the paths were almost impassable with mud in places. Worse yet, The Red Lion could not provide me with lunch as it was solidly booked out, which is not a problem on a normal week. So I finished the fruit out of my backpack sitting on their wall and set out for Marlborough on an empty-ish stomach.

This turned out to be a blessing as I was rewarded with magnificent late afternoon sunshine over Fyfield Down with its mysterious sarsen fields, and while there were some people up there, I was absolutely alone in the valley east of the summit which was awash with trees in red leaf. Mostly much firmer footing too, just one mud bath on the way up from Avebury and that of only about 100 metres.

With about three miles to go, I realised I was going to be very tight to get the last sensible bus connection to Devizes at 1728. After that it’s either a nearly 3 hour odyssey via Swindon or £35 in a taxi. I pushed hard for the last 3 miles and made it with three minutes to spare, but only by walking on the pavements on the traffic saturated A4, rather than the pretty riverside walk from Manton with its fine views of Marlborough College.

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A Clergyman’s Diary: A Day-Off Walk to Avebury

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Went for a walk to Avebury on my day off today. A journey of Roman roads, hillside copses, ancient megaliths, giant puddles, and even half a mile walking on a practice track for racehorses. I took the risk of setting off in heavy rain again, but the forecast was for it to clear and it did within the first hour; after a genuinely bad squall on top of the ridge by the White Horse, there wasn’t so much as a drop, despite only dappled bursts of sunshine and a stiff breeze. Some change in the tree colour is now visible.

A total of 10½ miles/17 km via the Devizes White Horse and Morgan’s Hill – neither of which ascents were as strenuous as the several miles on the Roman road west of Avebury, which has 50 cm deep landrover tracks for its entire length. Even worse, today large parts of it resembled the Para-Elemental Plane of Ooze (I’ll assume you’re all familiar with the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons™ 1st Edition™ Manual of the Planes™).

All concluded with a good pub lunch in the Red Lion. I felt I’d walked hard enough to earn an aperitif, and asked the waitress if they had any Madeira. She indicated that they did. Did they have more than one type, I asked? She said the only “La Bira” they had was Peroni. Neither did they have any sherry other than Bristol Cream – “which usually only comes out at Christmas” – so I had to make do with a whiskey and soda. A bit naughty at lunchtime but I felt I’d burned enough extra calories negotiating muddy landrover ruts to justify it to myself.

On the 49 bus home, at 3.30 on a Thursday afternoon, I made it five people on board; a sixth got off just as I boarded, while another two joined at Bishops Cannings. This is the Swindon to Trowbridge via Devizes route, which should be one of the busiest in this part of Wiltshire. I really fear for the viability of our public transport, especially our bus companies, which are a Cinderella at the best of times.

Photos taken with the Samsung A11 cameraphone and edited in Lightroom 6 – the difference with a real camera does show, I’m afraid. Where the cameraphone struggles most, inevitably, is with dark subjects against bright backgrounds. Still, I think these are enough to get the atmosphere of the day and share on social media with friends.

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“Rebuild my Church”: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes on Sunday 4 October 2020 (the 17th Sunday After Trinity) by Gerry Lynch

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Readings – Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

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

The Church of St Damian, Assisi. Photo credit Berthold Werner.

The Church of St Damian, Assisi. Photo credit Berthold Werner.

It is a time of troubles. Plagues, accelerated by the rapid growth in intercontinental trade, spread across the world with dizzying speed. The economic gap between rich and poor is yawning, and many of the young have given up on the ability of the existing order to usher in a just society and are seeking a completely fresh start, consigning the old ways to the dustbin of history with as much aggression as needed. The West and the Islamic world are at loggerheads, with Western powers embroiled in multiple bloody conflicts in the Middle East, which started so long ago that nobody much remembers how or why they started. I am not, of course, talking about the present day but about the first years of the 13th Century, a time when the older townsfolk of Devizes will still have remembered the Church of St John the Baptist being built. There is truly nothing new under the Sun. 

In that tumultuous time, a rich young party animal called Francis, whose feast we commemorate today, was having a life crisis. Set to inherit a family fortune, he had spent his youth hanging out with the troubadours, the wandering bands of minstrels who travelled around during the High Middle Ages making music, singing with them in his beautiful voice and partying with them. An attempt to settle down a little by turning his hand to soldiering had resulted in Francis spending a year as a prisoner of war. After that, his former life of drinking and dancing no longer had any appeal. He wandered the countryside of his native central Italy, half-starved and dressed in rags, begging God to show him a more meaningful way of life. One day, Francis stumbled across a church dedicated to Saint Damian, no older than the then relatively new St John’s, but already falling into disrepair. Amid the crumbling stones, he had a vision of an Icon of Christ Crucified that hung in the church speaking to him. “Rebuild my Church”, it said.

He took up the task with enthusiasm, starting with the physical rebuilding of that Church of St Damian, and going on to work for a spiritual renovation of the whole Christian world. Some of his schemes were perhaps a little overambitious: he once travelled to Cairo, reckoning that if he could only convert the Sultan to Christianity then he could end the wars connected to the Crusades. You will not be surprised to learn that he wasn’t successful.

But that isn’t the point – the point is that he gave things a go. Following Christ isn’t about following a series of step-by-step orders like the instructions for setting up a new mobile phone. As we know, that doesn’t guarantee success anyway. Richard Holloway once described the Christian journey as being less like marching to a heavenly military band and more like joining God in a jazz jam session, listening to the music God is playing and seeking to chime our own personal riffs with His. Christian obedience is about co-operating with God and recognising our own immense value to Him. God is not a cosmic sergeant-major waiting to scream at us angrily if we miss a beat. If God doesn’t pick up on the tune we’re playing, we can always get back into the beat in the next bar. New life can begin at any time. Following Christ is about trying to sense where the Holy Spirit is leading, trying different ideas, accepting that God will not pick up on some of them, because it’s only in a world of chance and risk and serendipity that other little tunes we toot can blossom into symphonies that are more magnificent than anything we could have imagined.

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Touched by an Angel?

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Gerry Lynch

Article originally published in the October 2020 issue of the magazine of St John’s, Devizes.

Angels guard Christ from above. Folio 220r from the Book of Kells (illuminated ca. 800).

Angels guard Christ from above. Folio 220r from the Book of Kells (illuminated ca. 800).

I started my first day as a curate with a swim. It hadn’t been planned in advance. Waking early on a bright and cloudless midsummer morning, I decided to cycle along the canal to Bishops Cannings. Despite noting with concern how narrow the towpath became as it passed the Marina, I felt invigorated by the deep orange sunshine on my face and cool air in my lungs. Due to be commissioned as a Licensed Lay Worker that afternoon, a milestone on a very long journey to ordained ministry, I felt gloriously and intensely alive.

The next thing I knew, my bike had somehow made a ninety degree turn and toppled down the bank of the canal, plunging vertically like the Titanic, and catapulting me through the air like a rodeo rider being thrown. I felt mud in my hands as I scraped the bottom. I couldn’t manage to heave my old boneshaker back up the bank, so I trudged home on foot, soaked and stinking of carp. Worse still, my mobile phone died – it was my only internet connection as my broadband wasn’t connected yet, and I needed to be able to get on Zoom to be licensed. What an inauspicious start to a momentous day!

I said some lairy things to God as I showered. On that day of all days, couldn’t He have protected me from such ignominy? Yet I later began to wonder if He hadn’t arranged that strange swerve to my own benefit. Let me explain.

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