Making it in the World to Come: Sermon Preached on 24th March 2024 (Palm Sunday)

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot, Holy Cross, Seend, and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 2. 5-11; Mark 11. 1-11

“he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

If you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got to get out there and sell yourself. The modern world is no place for humility, especially with the job market being the way it is. Pay close attention to your image, not only in the physical world, but especially on social media. To build your profile there, never forget that outrage sells and angry people click.

In the style of Giotto, Jesus riding on a donkey gives blessings to some passersby, some of whom have a halo and some of whom don't.

Giotto, The Entry into Jerusalem (1305). In the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

That’s a reasonable summary of the sort of advice that might be given, in an entirely well-meaning way, to an ambitious young person trying to make it big in a bad old world.

Now, we all know that St Paul has the reputation of being a real old curmudgeon, with views completely incompatible with the modern world. That is clearer nowhere than in this morning’s Epistle reading, when he writes:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who … emptied himself … humbled himself and became the obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Holy week turns the values of the 21st Century West upside down. Then again, it also turned the values of the Roman Empire upside down, and it turned the values of Second Temple Judaism upside down. Our Western obsession with self-fulfilment dies on the Cross, just like the Romans’ obsession with power, and the Jewish leadership’s obsession with piety.

And within Holy Week, if there is one story that really speaks to our own times, to the manias and failings of the 2020s, it is that of Palm Sunday. At its core, Palm Sunday is a story about the fickleness of celebrity.

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Sin and Grace: Sermon Preached on 17th March 2024 (Passion Sunday)

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Michael and All Angels’, Urchfont (at the Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Exodus 7. 8-24; Romans 5. 12-21

“…where sin abounded, grace did much more abound…”

When we hear the strange story of Moses and Aaron confronting the Pharaoh, with sticks that turn into snakes and rivers turning into blood, its remoteness to our own world can make us dismiss its enduring relevance and power. For not only is the story set more than three thousand years ago, but it is told with a powerful dose of magical realism.

A lithograph in Marc Chagall's classic brightly coloured, abstract, modernist style of Moses and Aaron appearing before Pharaoh on his throne surrounded by courtiers.

Marc Chagall’s Moses and Aaron with Pharaoh, from his 1966 portfolio “The Story of Exodus”—a time when this story resonated powerfully with the secular public, especially thanks to the African-American civil rights movement.

Look beyond the unfamiliar setting, however, and it could be a story from 2024. A persecuted minority protests to the authorities, and when that fails, they turn first to a demonstration of people power, and then an escalating campaign of civil disobedience, leading to non-violent direct action and then intentional property damage.

Pharaoh is also like many a hard-hearted ruler in today’s world, unable to read the signs of the times and all too quick to renege on promises of reform. He overestimates his own strength and underestimates the damage his opponents can cause him. In tonight’s reading, the campaign of the Hebrew people against Pharaoh’s persecution is still in its earliest phases. Everything will get much worse—but it will end in liberation for the good guys.

It would be nice if we could say that they all lived happily ever after. But the problem with stories like this is that yesterday’s freedom fighters almost inevitably turn into tomorrow’s oppressors. When they arrived in the Promised Land, the descendants of Moses and Aaron weren’t too worried about the rights and freedoms of the people already there.

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Death and Our Troubled Times: Sermon Preached on 17th March 2024 (Passion Sunday)

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Hebrews 5. 5-10; John 20. 20-33

“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Our Gospel reading this morning starts with one of those scenes in John that feels like it has been written in an intentionally surrealist way. It is set in Jerusalem, a few days before the Passover. The Passover was and remains one of the great Holy Days of the Jewish year. It is a celebration of liberation from slavery, of new life after a living death, that a long time ago was wrapped around an even more ancient festival celebrating the biological new life of springtime. This wasn’t any old Passover, either, but the one that would mark the end of Jesus Christ’s earthly life. During the build up to it, some Greeks come up to Philip, and say to him, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” He and Andrew go together to see Jesus.

A close up of many grains of wheat, perhaps around a hundred.

But we never get to find out if the Greeks ever saw Jesus. Like characters in a David Lynch TV show, they now vanish from the story, never to reappear. Instead, Jesus gives Andrew and Philip a cryptic response, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

To make sense of all this, we need to remember what is unique about the Holy Week timetable in John’s Gospel. Does anyone know? Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, John shifts the day of Jesus’ crucifixion to Thursday. So Jesus becomes the Passover Lamb, the animal sacrificed by Jews, to this very day, to celebrate the deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt: Jesus too be sacrificed to deliver people from slavery—from the slavery of sin. More than that, in going into the ground he will bear fruit not only for the Jews, but for the whole world, and these mysterious vanishing Greeks symbolise that in Christ, delivery from bondage will now be opened to the whole human race.

This is why the people who set our readings paired this passage of John with this morning’s other reading, from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Not only is Jesus the Passover Lamb for the whole human race, but he is a great High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek”, in other words a priest just like the Kohenites who were the only people permitted to perform the animal sacrifices in the Temple. These sacrifices were made for a variety of purposes, but some of them were offered in expiation for sin. It is not animal sacrifices in the Temple, however, that Christ the great High Priest offers, but Himself sacrificed on the Cross. And unlike the animal sacrifices which need to be continually repeated, Christ’s sacrifice of Himself is enough for the sins of the whole world forever.

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Church Times: Prayer Book can bridge class divides

Posted on March 16, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Thanks to the Church Times for publishing, in what would normally be Angela Tilby’s diary slot, my little meditation on the Cranmer Awards finals, the Book of Common Prayer, social class, and (while we’re at it) Islam.

Two young men smiling, one in a leather jacket, the other in a bow-tie.

Charlie Mutton on the left with the Diocese of Salisbury’s other Cranmer Awards senior finalist, Rueben Fisher from Dauntsey’s School.

“The Prayer Book’s language conjures a beauty that touches the heart, and yet still feeds the intellect. We are fools if we neglect its enduring power to nourish Christians in their earthly pilgrimage.”

Click through to read the whole thing. (Five articles on the Church Times website per month are free with no need for registration.

It was written as a celebration, in part, of the senior title in this year’s Cranmer Awards coming back to the Diocese of Salisbury thanks to Charlie Mutton from Poole. We also managed a second place in the Junior Section thanks to Sherborne’s Cosmo Mills (a potential future winner), and I was also very proud of our Junior and Senior entrants from this end of the Diocese, Izabela Sullivan and Rueben Fisher from Dauntsey’s School.

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Motherhood and Apple Pie: Sermon Preached on 10th March 2024 (Mothering Sunday)

Posted on March 13, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’”

A mother helps her young daughter to make apple pie.

Who could argue with the idea of motherhood and apple pie? Well, most of us.

“Motherhood and apple pie!”—Who could argue against motherhood and apple pie? The Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary tells me that this is a phrase we have imported from North American English, and is “used to represent an idea of perfect home life and comfort.” All those of you in the congregation who are mothers can confirm, that’s what motherhood is, isn’t it?—Perfect home life and comfort!

Or maybe not.

Our Gospel reading for Mothering Sunday is not, thankfully, some sanitised, cartoonish, version of what motherhood is about. This is motherhood at its rawest—Mary watches Christ, even speaks with Christ, as He is put to death. The trauma from experiencing the death of a child, including an adult child, is perhaps greater than that of any other type of bereavement. One can scarcely imagine what it feels like to witness it at first hand, in these circumstances. As some of you know, my sister died when we were both children, and I know only too well how devastating the death of a child is to a mother – and to a father. Yet, look at the memorial tablets on the walls of our parish churches and it is obvious this was a distressingly frequent event until the last hundred years or so—and it was frequent even for the well-off. Such is the human condition.

To love is to open yourself to hurt. To bear children is to open yourself to being hurt, through the hurts they themselves live through, and sometimes even directly by them. So God too, in creating humanity in His image and thus granting us free will, opened Himself to being hurt by the life He had given birth to.

And here is the unique thing about the Christian understanding of God: Jesus Christ was God made one of us, and in that He exposed Himself to one of the worst fates the world can inflict on anyone—a brutal, humiliating, public, death, in front of his mother.

Motherhood as a perfect home life and comfort? If, only.

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We Preach Christ Crucified: Sermon Preached on 3rd March 2024 (Third Sunday in Lent)

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

1 Corinthians 1. 18-25; John 2. 13-22

“For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.”

I wonder if any of you have heard of the Bethel Bible Church of Redding, California? With 11,000 members, it is one of America’s biggest churches, in a little city smaller than Bath. With a firm faith in the power of God to work miracles, the Church is perhaps most famous for the “glory cloud” that sometimes appears at its services. This takes the form of a fog of golden dust that falls gently from the roof of its huge auditorium. Some scoff at the idea that this could be a miracle—but I think that it’s a real miracle that people haul all those heavy bags of glitter to the top of a huge building. I do envy the pastor there in some ways—it must make it easier to get people to pay the parish share when you can make godly glitter rain from the roof every time finances are a bit tight.

Matthias Grünewald's gruesome 1515 Crucifixion. Christ, visibly covered in cuts and wounds, is surrounded by St John, Mary, and Mary Magdalene with looks of horror on their faces while the Roman Centurion looks on with something more like awe.

Matthias Grünewald, Crufixion (ca. 1515), now hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel

St Paul writes in today’s Epistle that, “Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.” Today’s world is not so different from St Paul’s. It’s easy to scoff at Bethel Bible Church’s glory cloud but the world still wants the Church to prove itself by signs, and in our materialistic age that means to demonstrate its value in practical terms; people are often a bit suspicious of it, so they also demand that the Church prove itselves in alignment with the received wisdom of our own times. The Church is defensive and tetchy, as declining organisms often are, so while it usually happy to broadcast its good works, like a secular charity would, it gets a bit tetchy when its wisdom doesn’t align with the currently received wisdom, like a secular politician would. The Church is also very vain about being wise, even though it often conducts its internal affairs in a very unwise way.

Now wisdom is a funny thing. Like “beauty” it is usually a good thing, sometimes a divine thing, but it also has a second edge to it, a negative one when people get so wrapped up in wisdom that they ignore what’s right in front of them.

In that light, we need to ask if Jesus was, in fact, wise? Today’s Gospel reading is the very first act of Jesus’ public ministry as St John records it. In it, he goes off to Jerusalem, where His Galilean accent will stand out like a sore thumb, waltzes into the Temple, the epicentre of not just religious authority but local Jewish political power, overturns the money-changers’ tables, then chases them out with a whip. And why did he do that? So he could fulfil an ancient prophecy that He was the Messiah. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound “wise” to me, but a bit nuts.

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Losing Your Life: Sermon Preached on 25th February 2024 (Second Sunday in Lent)

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 4. 13-21; Mark 8. 31-38

“Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Do you want to have a happy, successful, prosperous life? I certainly do. I don’t want to suffer, or be picked on, still less persecuted, and I certainly don’t want to lose my life—at least not until I’ve had my fair share of the good times.

Ilya Repin's brightly coloured "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" of 1860, with Jesus in gold next to a disfigured, red and black Devil, in front of a dark blue background.

Get Thee Behind Me Satan, by Ilya Repin, ca. 1860. Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Rostov-on-Don.

Poor Peter always gets a hard time for provoking Jesus into saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” But he’s only reacting like any of us would do if were told by our best pal that we would have to suffer on their behalf. In fact, if we saw someone we knew being spoken to by their best friend in the way Jesus spoke to Peter, we’d probably tell them to get a new best friend—even more if we heard them being told something as weird as “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake…will save it.”

Christianity, my brothers and sisters, is a very, very, weird religion. We often miss that weirdness, because Christianity was the framework through which nearly everyone in this country viewed the world for more than fifty generations—an unimaginable stretch of time. Perhaps Christianity was preached more than it was practiced, but it guided people in how they should behave even if they didn’t always live up to it. Now that it is in retreat, the strangeness of Christianity is starting to become visible again.

We forget how much Christianity, as it rose, upended what had been the established norms of right and wrong, and in a good way. The Wiltshire-based historian of the ancient world, Tom Holland, came back to the Faith after having abandoned it as a young man once he understood how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire, which were all about power and authority, often exerted with great cruelty. At the heart of the Christian story is Jesus Christ being executed in a particularly cruel way, despite having broken no laws, for reasons for political convenience. The Romans never missed an opportunity to remind the public of just how bloody and brutal they could be if they felt it necessary. This was a society that glorified cruelty as something that successful and honourable men did, not only out of necessity, but also for pleasure. Might is right and the devil take the hindmost—this was this value system that Christianity upended

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Choose Your Story: Sermon Preached on 18th February 2024 (First Sunday in Lent)

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

1 Peter 3. 18-22; Mark 1. 9-15

 “repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

We see all sorts of patterns in the universe that repeat on vastly different scales. Most famously the swirl of water down the bathplug has the same pattern as that of the clouds in a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic to batter us – like last night’s – and that of the impossibly slow swirl of stars in the arms of a distant spiral galaxy.

Snowdrops, in focus, in front of a church, which is quite out of focus, with raindrops also visible on the lens. The sky is grey. There is a St George's flag flying from the church tower.

Snowdrops and raindrops six Februarys ago at Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. © Gerry Lynch

The evidence of order in the universe is everywhere. At this time of year, we are particularly aware of the natural world following the pattern of the seasons. The flowers have arrived early in this exceptionally mild winter – we have not only the snowdrops but the violets and daffodils and even some of the blossoms. In very different climates, something similar happens. I have been on the South African/Namibian border in August, when the spring rain comes and briefly turns that parched landscape into a riot of multi-coloured daisies. There as here, what we see is new life following death.

In today’s readings, we see this pattern of new life following death, as part of an ordered universe. Jesus, God made human, does not start His earthly ministry until he has been baptised by John the Baptist. John was a great man but still a human being, so this Gospel reading is saying something very powerful—God puts Himself under human authority here, and respects John’s own distinct calling.

Baptism is rich in symbolism—a symbolic drowning before a rising to new life, a drowning of hate and selfishness and contempt and all the sins that keep us from loving God and our neighbours as we should. Our Epistle reading, from St Peter, looks back to the story of Noah’s Ark as a something that pointed towardsbaptism—the flood marks the close on an old and wicked order, a terrible but necessary death so that new life could begin.

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Is Lent What You Do?: Sermon Preached on 14th February 2024 (Ash Wednesday)

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10; John 8. 1-11

When I was at university, a big Catholic charity in Ireland had a major Lent advertising campaign to raise funds for its work in developing countries. The campaign slogan was very clever: not only does it stick in my head a quarter of a century later, but I remember how, back at the time, it struck a chord with one of my associates in student politics. This friend was and still is what you might call a sympathetic atheist—supportive of the Church as a channel for good works, especially looking after the poor; sometimes entranced by the beauty of Church music and architecture; but fundamentally convinced that there was and could be no such being as God. But the slogan stuck in his head—one evening, in the pub, when I refused a pint because I had given up drink for Lent, recited this charity’s slogan to me. It was: “Lent is what you do.”

A cartoon version of an ash cross such as is put on people's heads on Ash Wednesday.

Of course, it was nice that my friend missed drinking beer with me, but I wasn’t convinced by the idea that: “Lent is what you do.” My instinct was that Lent was indeed mainly about giving things up and that this was a good thing. Over the years since, my instincts then on this score have hardened into a firm conviction.

Of course, I understand the logic behind “Lent is what you do”, and why many of you will be surprised that I don’t like it. With the idea that Lent is about giving things up so firmly rooted in people’s heads, the slogan presents the exact opposite message. Not only was this memorable for the charity, but it also presents an image of Christianity that is positive and wants to get things done for people, rather than always saying no and wanting to forbid things.

So why do I think Lent should be primarily about giving things up? Well, while good works are indeed good, we lose much of the richness of the Christian faith if we reduce it to a religion of good works.

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The Transfiguration of Technology: Sermon Preached on 11th February 2024 (Sunday Before Lent)

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and Holy Cross, Seend

2 Corinthians 4. 3-6; Mark 9. 2-9

“He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Carol Beer from Little Britain, and her computer which always says no.
Computer says… yes…?

We seem to be hardwired to giving more credibility to information that comes from a screen than things we hear in-person from other people, or even things we see directly with our own eyes. Last month, after falling for a so-called Deep Fake, an employee of a large multinational firm in Hong Kong transferred twenty million pounds to fraudsters. Police in the territory think that the criminals faked an entire video conference, with perhaps fifteen computer-simulated participants, using Artificial Intelligence to add made-up dialogue to real recordings. Because the people in the video conference looked and sounded just like people the victim knew from the real world, she fell for it. Would she have fallen for a similar con attempted in the flesh by a troupe of actors?

And so to our first reading, from St Paul, writing another of his letters to those perpetually troublesome Corinthians. “The god of this world”, he warns them, “has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel.” The “god of this world” is, fairly obviously, a reference to the Devil. But the quote sets off all sorts of reflections about what the actual god or gods of today’s society are. We seem particularly prone to worshipping our own supposed cleverness, and the products of it. Above all, technology seems to be the Zeus or Jupiter of our 21st Century gods, the solver of problems and the bringer of enlightenment. That’s why we are at risk of falling for scams delivered via a screen, in a way we never would for a real-life cold caller at the door.

I’m hardly opposed to technology. I make quite heavy use of social media and the Internet and all sorts of gizmos and software for my photography. Technology is a morally neutral thing, neither good nor evil – at the end of the day, a computer is just a fancy tool. Difficulties start when we forget that humans are supposed to use tools and not the other way around. Technology often seems to be our master rather than our tool.

The Church seems besotted with technology as a sort of magic bullet to appeal to young people and reverse Church decline. In particular, during the pandemic, we tried to convince ourselves that Zoom services were the future of the Church rather than an emergency response to an unprecedented situation. By the end of all those lockdowns, however, I think we all knew that being on a videoconference call with people was emphatically not the same as being in a room or a Church with them. Electronic presence is not the same as physical presence; and, as already noted, experiencing things through a screen can make it harder, not easier, to discern the truth.

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