Fame and Truth: Sermon Preached on 12th May 2024 (The Sunday After Ascension)

Posted on May 18, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“…and the lot fell on Matthias.”

The singer Bambie Thug, in heavy makeup, looks at the camera at Eurovision 2024.

Seeking El Dorado? Eurovision 2024, © Arkland, Used under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On the morning after the Eurovision Song Contest, it seems appropriate to reflect that fame and celebrity seems to be the El Dorado of the present age. It isn’t new, of course – even in the 19th Century, artists with a worldwide reputation like the singer Nellie Melba or the pianist-conductor Franz Liszt could often arrive in a new city to crowds of screaming fans, much as the Beatles and the Stones would a century later. The ancient Romans and Persians also had their celebrities. But this ancient human trait seems to have intensified since the turn of this century. Reality TV and talent shows began to crowd out more interesting forms of programme-making, while the Internet facilitated new forms of celebrity entrepreneur, willing to say, do, or sell anything to harvest attention from their own little world of fans.

People can make a good living from this. You’ve probably never heard of Charli d’Amelio. Charli is a social media influencer, someone who’s famous on social media because she’s famous on social media, and therefore attractive to people wanting to advertise and promote brands. Charli has 44 million followers on Instagram and a whopping 154 million followers on TikTok. Her most recent TikTok video, posted on Wednesday, shows Charli and a friend dancing to music while washing their hair with Garnier shampoo.

Compare this with the situation in our epistle reading. The 120 people Peter speaks to seem to comprise all the remaining Christians in the entire world. Even I have more social media followers than this. About twice that number came to church on Easter morning in our little country benefice.

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Of Vines and Eunuchs: Sermon Preached on 28st April 2024 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 28, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 8: 28-40; John 15: 1-11

“I am the vine – you are the branches.”

Just as it is today, the Holy Land of Biblical times was great winegrowing country. The terminology of winegrowing is a frequent part of Jesus’ parables and teaching, and indeed large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the grapevine was often a metaphor for the Jewish people.

The eunuch, very African in appearance, dressed in opulent appearance, and accompanied by a dog, bends down to be blessed by St Philip. Five retainers, one holding the Scriptures watch from the eunuch's horse and carriage.

The Baptism Of The Eunuch (1626), by Rembrandt. Hangs in the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.

The language of the vine and the branches in the Gospel reading is so rich, that it is easy to ignore our reading from Acts this morning – and nobody wants to preach about eunuchs in case children in the congregation ask awkward questions. But Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch is tremendously important to the revolution in thought that clearly affected the apostles in the years after the Resurrection. This shift in mindset is all about who could be considered one of God’s chosen people. Acts records it as being clearly directed by the Holy Spirit.

The “Ethiopian” is, of course, a foreigner from a long way away; in fact, he’s described as a court official of the Candace, who was the ruler of the great city of Meroë, located in the present day Sudan. He was probably much darker-skinned than the people in the Holy Land, but that will have mattered much less in the Ancient world, which was much less race-obsessed than we are.

Although we often hear that to be a Jew, you have to be born a Jew, this isn’t actually the case. People from Gentile backgrounds can and did convert to Judaism in Biblical times, and they do so today. As this Ethiopian “had come to Jerusalem to worship”, he was clearly interested in the God of the Jews. The thing that ensured that he could never convert to Judaism wasn’t that he was a foreigner, but that he was a eunuch. That prohibition dated back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Ethiopian was reading from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah when Philip approached him, and shortly after the section quoted here, it contained a brief reference to a future time when God would give eunuchs something “better than sons and daughters… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”. (The reference to things being cut off is, almost certainly in this context, meant to be funny.) Yet writings from contemporary Jewish writers made it clear that prejudice against eunuchs was still very much alive in Judaism at the time of the apostles and that Isaiah’s prophecy was yet to be fulfilled.

So something revolutionary happens when the Ethiopian says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me being baptised.” The apostles by this stage have no sense of themselves as being anything other than Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. When Philip baptises the Ethiopian, it is a powerful sign that the followers of Jesus Christwill come not just from the Jewish people but from a myriad of ethnicities and nationalities, and will come even from people who had been forbidden from becoming Jews because of their state in life. This isn’t, for the apostles, a rejection of Judaism, but a clear fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.

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The Good Shepherd: Sermon Preached on 21st April 2024 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 26, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 4: 5-13; John 10: 11-18

“…he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.”

The Good Shepherd is one of the most familiar Bible passages, and the imagery is so beautiful, that we can fall into using it as twee spiritual wallpaper. When we look at the text more closely, it has a harder and more interesting edge, especially if we consider the different lives of the shepherd and the hireling.

Liz Truss on Easter Day, outside a Norfolk church with a round tower, holding a lamb as if she were Jesus in a twee American piece of religious kitsch.

We can fall into using the story of the Good Shepherd as twee spiritual wallpaper.

The shepherd owns the sheep; they are both his savings account and his working capital. They are how he earns his living, and also where he stores his wealth. To others, his flock may seem modest, but for him it is the fruit of a lifetime’s hard graft. Indeed, it may even have been handed down to him by his forefathers, the result of generations of sleeping out alone on cold mountaintops as wolves howled in the darkness.

The hired man, who works for the shepherd, is in a different position; he has no capital, no savings, he lives from payday to payday. He may have no particular reason to show loyalty to the shepherd, whose wealth may seem modest to people like the fancy Temple clergy in Jerusalem, but still like a king’s ransom to the man whose wages he pays. The shepherd may have started out with advantages in life that seem extraordinary and even unfair to the hireling. The hireling may be a hard worker, he may be loyal to and genuinely friendly with his boss, but things get really tough, like when a pack of wolves attacks on a bitter winter night, he has no skin in the game when it comes to the flock. Looking after these sheep is just another job, and not one that comes with the sort of pay-cheque that’s worth risking your life for.

Now, St Peter may have started out life as a fisherman, but by the time Jesus said “I am the good shepherd”, Peter fancied himself very much as Jesus’ co-shepherd. He was Jesus’ best mate and self-styled Second-in-Command. When Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep”, Peter was going to try to emulate him. So, at the Last Supper, Peter told Christ, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.” But Jesus knew Peter better than he knew himself, and told him that before daybreak, he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus, obviously, was right. When it came down to it, when the metaphorical wolves of the Temple were circling, Peter turned out not to be Jesus’ fellow shepherd, but just a hireling there for the payday he thought the Messiah would bring him.

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Forgiving Ourselves for Being Imperfect: Sermon Preached on 7th April 2024 (Second Sunday of Easter)

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 4: 32-35; John 20: 19-31

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.”

Why can’t you lot be like those Christians in our first reading? They were “of one heart and soul”. They held all their possessions in common—even selling their houses and sharing the proceeds, so “[t]here was not a needy person among them”.

Painting, oil on canvas, in a style derived from Raphael. Ananias is dead - and has a terrible skin tone - and Sapphira is in mid-collapse, about to join him. A crowd of several dozen looks on.

Ananias and Sapphira, Sir James Thornhill (1729-31). Hangs in the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Now, I could go from here to say that while it was a pity that few of us seemed to be able to be really live like these first Christians, but if were even a little more like them, the world would be a better place; and afterwards you would say “What a nice sermon, Rector.”

As I preached it, I would also know that there wasn’t a cat’s chance in Hell of me giving my savings to a common fund, still less selling my retirement flat. I mean, who would control this fund? The Church of England’s central bureaucracy? No thanks. My PCCs? I love you all dearly, but, also, no thanks. I’d also know you weren’t going to sell your possessions, and if you were to sell your house and give the proceeds to a common fund, some of your children would have very angry conversations with you.

Now, this vision of the Church at its foundation has inspired some Christians in every generation since the dawn of the Church to live totally different lives from most people, and sometimes great things have resulted. And, I don’t know about you, but sometimes that leaves me feeling pretty inadequate. Then I also remember that some of the Christians inspired by this vision end up going a little crazy.

So with all that in mind, let’s return to this story and not over-romanticise it. Yes, it’s a wonderful vision, probably a time in the life of the early Christians when they experienced, here on Earth, a foretaste of Heaven. But let’s be clear, the apostles and their companions didn’t manage to live that way for very long.

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Wilderness and the Garden: Sermon Preached on 31st March 2024 (Easter Day)

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-18

“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).”

When we get to the end of a journey, it’s sometimes helpful to remind ourselves where it started.

Painting of a garden, in which Mary Magdalen, in a red dress and bending down, is trying to touch Jesus cloak - he is walking away from her, but looking back at her, and putting his palm out in admonishment.

Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere (1440-2), in the Basilica di San Marco, Florence.

Jesus’ public ministry started with His baptism by John the Baptist, then immediately being taken out into the wilderness for forty days. His public ministry ended with His crucifixion, or so it seemed. Because on the first Easter morning, a few of His closest followers encountered Him risen from the dead. They were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.

The season of Lent consists of forty days of fasting that are intentionally modelled on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Lent also ends on Easter morning—in other words, it too ends in Resurrection.

So travelling through the wilderness seems to be an essential part of experiencing Resurrection. In the wilderness we are confronted by the sheer scale of God’s creation, and how much of that creation lies outside our normal day-to-day experience. In the wilderness, our illusions of being in control die, and we learn just how limited the power of human beings is.

It seems to me that the Western world is entering a wilderness. The financial crisis of 2008, and the very slow recovery from it, was perhaps first warning signthat the existing political and economic order might be in trouble. Other signs include the ever widening gap between the rich and the rest, the fact that it’s often easier to make money by speculation than doing something worthwhile, and the increasing difficulties even relatively well-off young people have in finding security. All these have been warning signs, throughout history, of civilisations in trouble.

A gathering sense of crisis became acute after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One thing the two years since have told us is that the Western world is weaker than is thought by our pundits, our politicians, and the lobbyists and campaignerswho try to influence them. Western attempts to hobble the Russian economy through sanctions have, regrettably, been at best partially effective, and have been ignored by the rising powers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Western fantasies of power and control lie in tatters, and we seem to have entered a geopolitical wilderness.

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Reflection on ‘Winning’ for Holy Week: Wednesday 27th March 2024

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Romans 8. 31-39

A mosaic of a Roman soldier, carrying a cross over his shoulder, and a book that says "I am the way, the truth, and the life" in Latin.

A mosaic of Christ victorious, holding a book that says “I am the way, the truth, and the life” in Latin. From the Archbishops’ Chapel in Ravenna. Date, c. 425.

More than conquerors? What does it mean to win at life? Surrounded as we are by advertising, we are constantly bombarded with images and words aimed at convincing us that we can be winners if only we have a new kitchen, a new phone, or a successful fifty quid flutter on the Grand National. This taps into an instinct that most of us seem to have that success comes from imitating the things we associate with people who are obviously more ‘successful’ than us.

Sky – the Sky of the TV channels and the broadband – spends about a quarter of a billion pounds every year on advertising in the UK. They would not do so if it were not effective. Yet, we and they know that faster broadband is nice but hardly ‘winning at life’. True victory must lie somewhere else.

Two English authors, born two generations apart, contrasted their own lives, ones of literary and financial success with those of student friends at Oxford who had gone on to be ordained.

In his autobiographical prose poem, ‘Summoned by Bells’, Sir John Betjeman, wrote of fellow students who worshipped at Pusey House, who, he felt who had truly lived out the faith they shared:

Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not ‘got on’
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop’s broidery cope.

Writing in the early years of this century, the author A N Wilson, who attended the same theological college as I, but did not go on to be ordained, wrote of meeting one of his colleagues many years later at a book reading in a Northern town. By then, Wilson was a prosperous and prominent figure, while his former colleague, who had been a handsome, rather camp, young man rejoicing in the nickname ‘Plum Tart’ had given decades of unselfish service in working-class parishes for a modest financial reward.

Then in the throes of an atheism which would be followed by a more recent return to the Church, Wilson wrote:

“When…I had parted from Plum Tart, I went out, and like Peter in the Gospels, I wept bitterly.

“My life had been supposedly a success. I had written books, and newspaper articles. I had made, by the standards of an Anglican clergyman, lots of money. … I wept after meeting Plum Tart, because I thought, and think, that his life has been so much more useful, so much better in every way than my own.”

In my experience, those who have succeeded in material terms are sometimes happy, and sometimes not. They can avoid, of course, many of the problems that make poorer people unhappy, but they can’t really influence the world much more than the rest of us, and at best all their wealth might add a year or two to their lives.

For us as Christians to win is to pattern our lives on Christ’s, as best we can given our temperaments and limitations, something that we know will not be a matter of single moment of conversion, but a lifetime’s journey of ups and downs, some dramatic moves forward but also backward steps.

Jesus didn’t promise to make us good, but to forgive us our sins. Nor did He promise that we would always be successful or comfortable, but to be with us in our darkest moments—which He knows all about, not least from the Cross.

From tomorrow, the intensity of Holy Week picks up a little. May you be able to journey with Christ to the Cross, and then through it to the Resurrection that through the Cross, he opened up to you and to all humanity. The Resurrection is the true victory, for us here and for everyone alive. Amen.

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Reflection on ‘New Life’ for Holy Week: Tuesday 26th March 2024

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Given at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 6. 3-11

Some gravestones in a churchyard, covered in lichen, surrounded by daisies and violets.

Death and New Life on Good Friday in the churchyard of Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch, 7 April 2023.

I have a short address which I give at every baptism, where I explain the symbolism for any attendees who may have had minimal contact with the Church. I always get a few raised eyebrows when I explain that baptism is a symbolic drowning—a dying to sin, followed by a rising to new life. This is something particularly obvious in the case of a total immersion baptism, but it is implicit in a sprinkling as well.

In tonight’s reading, St Paul is quite explicit that in baptism, we share in Christ’s death—and it’s because we share in Christ’s death, that we are able to share in His Resurrection.

This works on two levels: baptism marks our symbolic rebirth as a Christian in this life, called to live differently from then on. On another level, Baptism is a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of what God is doing for us inwardly and spiritually through Grace. So no mere matter of symbolism, but an actual washing away of our sins that fits us for eternal life.

Baptism is thus both a new beginning to our earthly lives and the beginning of our journey towards our eternal lives.

It would be nice to think that we only needed one new beginning. But, that’s not how life works. There is the natural and healthy need for new beginnings when a particular phase of our life has run its natural course. But also, we can’t escape our tendency to commit sins. This is why there is space for us to confess our sins privately to God at the start of every Communion service, and for the priest to pronounce God’s absolution of those sins. Every time we come to a service of Holy Communion, we have the opportunity of a new beginning—if we take the time to examine our consciences and bring our sins sincerely to God in our hearts. God’s Grace is as abundant as we need it to be.

Like Baptism, Resurrection works on two levels. It is something we should be experiencing continually throughout our lives as Christians, and it is something we look forward to in the life to come. Indeed, new life after death is written into the very fabric of the universe – that is something very obvious in a climate like ours at this time of year. But also, look at how new stars are born from the remains of exploded stars; look also at how the elements that make up our human bodies are only created in the depths of stars, and scattered through the universe when they explode as supernovas.

The hoary old argument about whether Christ’s Resurrection was ‘physical’ or ‘spiritual’ misses the point: it was both. Our spirituality and physicality aren’t things we can simply decouple from one another. They are both essential parts of who we are, and so it will remain in the life to come. We tend to assume that Resurrection means the loss of our bodies. But the Gospel Resurrection accounts depict Christ’s body clearly changed profoundly in nature, but also visibly carrying the wounds from the Crucifixion.

Of course, when we die, much dies with us. Remember, as in the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, there are good and wicked things growing in our souls. Some of what will die, inevitably, will be good things that have run their natural course; but much will also die that hinders us from entering eternal life. The process of killing these hindrances first began at our baptism. May we have the Grace to follow that process through to our rebirth in God’s eternal presence. Amen.

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Reflection on ‘Suffering’ for Holy Week: Monday 25th March 2024

Posted on March 25, 2024 by Gerry Lynch

Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8. 18-25

A painting of a greatly distorted image of a human face in fleshy colours, staring at the observer.

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1969). Sold at auction last year for US$34.6 million.

Most of us stoically accept our own suffering as part of life. It’s usually the suffering of those we love that makes us angry, and which can lead us to be very angry at God.

Most of us ask God why we were made in a way that leaves us subject to suffering. There are good answers to that question, but at our darkest moments they can all sound a little trite.

I can’t justify the existence suffering because on the basis of it being character forming or even redemptive. I mean, it can be, but equally it can be very embittering. There is a bad history of this idea being used to justify all sorts of needless or preventable cruelties: surely God can do better than that? And those arguing God’s case must do better!

For me, it has always been convincing, although uncomfortable, that we can’t have a universe without suffering unless God has us on remote controls, like robots. We’ve all met earthly fathers who dominate and control their children to ensure they’re always ‘well behaved’; they aren’t people we admire or aspire to being. Heaven forfend that we should worship a God that was like one of these hard cases for social services. So, our heavenly Father gives us freedom to make our own mistakes and to work our own wonders, and He gives that freedom to the whole of His creation—including, strange as it sounds, viruses and bacteria, and the rocks and tectonic plates that make up the Earth, and other seemingly insentient causes of human suffering.

None of that necessarily helps when we’re watching the suffering of innocents on our screens, or seeing someone we love racked with cancer, or addiction, or collapsed mental health. But it does make clear that to imagine a world without suffering is to imagine a world that is one of two things—either frightening and inhuman, or else where reality is fundamentally different what we know. Perhaps to imagine a world without suffering is to imagine heaven.

St Paul has a few interesting thoughts on this subject in tonight’s reading. Again, they can sound trite if they catch us at the wrong moment, but to give Paul his due, he wrote them as someone who endured a lot of suffering himself.

Keep that in mind when you hear him say “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us”— heaven is something that is so much more significant than the sufferings of our lives that we can’t even meaningfully compare them.

In that light, here’s another interesting phrase—creation is in “bondage to decay”; this is one of those places where you realise ancient thinkers had many intuitions that would much later be confirmed by science. Some of you will have learned Second Law of Thermodynamics in school. Entropy is a fundamental law of the universe; every material thing, certainly including our bodies, will eventually decay. Even the atoms that make up matter will do so, on a long enough timescale.

So here’s another interesting phrase from St Paul to leave you with—He says that we await “the redemption of our bodies”. We so often think that eternal life is about the abandonment of our bodies. Yet, remember that after the Resurrection, while Christ clearly had different physical properties from those of a mortal human, He also still displayed His wounds. So our bodies will in some sense remain with us in heaven where, a place into which, as St Paul reminds us, the whole of creation groans to be reborn.

If we were capable of understanding what exactly that meant, it wouldn’t be worth believing in. Amen.

Top image—Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). Hangs in the Guggenheim, New York.

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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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