The End of the World: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Midnight Mass)

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”         

How would you react if a vicar, at Midnight Mass, in a medieval church, in a rather traditional village in the depths of Deep England, started preaching about the End of the World? Would you wonder if he had been teleported in from the American Bible Belt? Or perhaps, on hearing a certain accent, wonder if he was a friend of another Ulster preacher, whom some of you may remember, the man who liked to say “no” a lot?

A painting of Our Lady in a stable with the Baby Jesus in her arms; watched by St Joseph and the angels, who have halos, and shepherds and animals, who don't.

The Nativity by Giotto (1311-20), in the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi.

In fact, in the churches I go to I never hear anyone preaching on the end of the world. They’re far too moderate and sensible for that sort of thing. But lately, I’ve heard people talking about the end of the world on Radio 4 and in the pages of The Times.

That nice Matthew Syed, who won an Olympic medal in ping-pong, and makes those interesting radio programmes about quirky bits of modern history, had a column in The Times the other week saying our advancing technology meant that we might cause our own extinction. Then last Tuesday, when I was driving, Radio 4’s PM programme – not normally known for fire and brimstone sermons – had an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the man often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence”, warning of the risks that AI might pose to human existence within the next 5-20 years. And all that’s before we talk about climate change, or nuclear war.

The world might be entering a very dark era.

So far, so cheerful!

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Patience and Obedience: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Fourth Sunday in Advent)

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend (Benefice Service)

Readings – Romans 16. 25-27; Luke 1. 26-38

“Then Mary said, ‘Let it be with me according to your word…’”

Advent is a season about patience and obedience. If, as we do this morning, we follow the Church’s calendar obediently, and keep the season patiently to the end, Advent reminds us that God is always breaking into the world in ways that are little noticed and often among people who are held to be of little account by the conventional standards of the day.

A painting in realist style. Elizabeth, standing at the top of the steps of her house, is smiling with her arms outstretched, while Mary, at the foot of the steps, looks up at her.

The Meeting of Mary and Elisabeth (1866) by Carl Bloch – hangs in the place for which it was painted, the King’s Oratory at Frederiksborg Castle.

This morning’s Gospel reading is about how God launched His great rescue plan for the human race thanks to the obedience of two ordinary women, who lived in rural communities, as members of a people under foreign occupation, at a time when women were held to be inferior and were excluded from public life.

Elizabeth, who kept faith patiently through years of barrenness, is given a child she could never have expected; Mary is given a child earlier than she could ever have imagined, in circumstances that will be difficult, but her obedience is such that she accepts.

Neither patience nor obedience are exactly fashionable virtues at the moment. Consumer culture mitigates against patience, while we too easily get obedience confused with acceptance of authoritarianism—they aren’t the same thing at all. Like people in every time and every nation, the presumptions of our culture leave us with much to learn and to unlearn about what God requires of us. That learning requires patience.

In our epistle reading, St Paul writes that in Jesus Christ, “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages…is now disclosed”. Why was the mystery kept for all these long ages? Why could God have not just given people some simple rules for living well together?

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Waiting Patiently for Christmas: Sermon Preached on 17th December 2023 (Third Sunday of Advent)

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24; John 1. 6-8, 19-28

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”

The supermarkets have been keeping Christmas since October. The big firms’ Christmas TV adverts came out just before Remembrance Sunday. We like to tut at them for their indecent rush to start the festive season, yet by this stage, we ourselves have all been to about fifteen Christmas parties, sang about fifty carols, and eaten nine thousand eight hundred mince pies. Even St John’s is full to the brim with beautifully decorated Christmas trees.

A medieval altar triptych displaying a dramatic scene.

Triptych of the Virtue of Patience (1521), by Bernard van Orley. Commissioned by Margaret of Austria, the governor of the Low Countries. Hangs in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

Yet according to the Church it still isn’t Christmas. It’s Advent, which is supposed to be a time of waiting, a time of reflection and spiritual preparation before Christmas, sort of like the junior brother of Lent. It’s hard to preach about keeping Advent faithfully rather than jumping the gun with the secular world when the building is full of angels and stars. It’s harder still to keep any sense of this being at least something of a season of fasting when David Evans is offering you another hot mug of his delicious mulled wine, sourced directly from Germany.

I’m not in a position to give you a lecture from the pulpit about keeping Advent properly, because I haven’t been keeping it very well myself. Indeed, pretty much the whole Church, across denominational boundaries, celebrates Christmas with the secular world during Advent, then during the Twelve Days of Christmas, supposed to be the time of feasting, it joins everyone else in having a good slumber.

I think it’s a great pity, because Advent is all about waiting patiently, sometimes in surroundings that are very dark, for the light of God’s eternal Word to enter into the world. And when that Light did enter the world, it didn’t do so in a blaze of glory, but almost entirely ignored, in the form of a tiny, vulnerable, baby. Given how dark the world has become over the last few years, we as Christians could do with preparing ourselves spiritually to be proficient at waiting patiently, and looking for where light is entering the world, vulnerable and much ignored. If we could be better at that, we could also be more of a blessing on our secular neighbours.

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November Churches…

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

November churches in Wiltshire, great and small… Salisbury Cathedral and St Peter’s, Poulshot.

Salisbury Cathedral, floodlit, but with still quite a bit of light in the "blue hour" sky; clouds, whose rapid motion is made clear by use of long exposure, are skidding past it.
Salisbury Cathedral in Twilight, 21 November 2023, © Gerry Lynch.
Brown leaves fallen on the ground, which is grassy, while in the background, a golden-leafed beech tree stands next to a medieval church.
St Peter’s, Poulshot, 19 November 2023, © Gerry Lynch.
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Destined for Salvation: Sermon Preached on 19th November 2023 (Second Sunday before Advent)

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

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

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.”

So, Jesus Christ will return like a thief in the night to judge the world, and He told a story about what that judgement would be like that ended with a poor servant of a harsh man being thrown out into the outer darkness—where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. I have to be honest, this morning’s readings make me uncomfortable, and I suspect they made most of you uncomfortable too.

Partly, I think, our discomfort come from not wanting to be like those Christians, you know, the ones who are very sure that they are going to be Jesus Christ’s personal hitmen when He returns, when they’ll happily help Him out as He casts a few wretches into the outer darkness. We’ve all met a few of them in our time. It is right that we don’t want to be like those Christians, far too certain for their own good that they have this Christianity business nailed down – and far too inclined to forget that Scripture is clear that judgement belongs to Christ and Christ alone, and not to them nor anyone else.

The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

But unless we ourselves are also too certain for our own good that we have this Christianity business nailed down, we should accept that if the Gospel is worth believing, it must be capable of disturbing our comfortable certainties. If Jesus Christ is going to actually come back in glory to judge the world – and He repeatedly stated that He would – that means He’s going to come back to judge us. And we all know that we aren’t quite the lovely people we like to pretend we are for public consumption – certainly, I know that I’m not. Quite apart from that, few of us could mount a case that we have made the spectacular 100% Return on Investment from the talents God has given us achieved by the profitable servants in this morning’s Gospel. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t solved many wars, ended many famines, or brought many people to Faith.

When I hear readings like these from the Bible, at first blush I can find myself thinking that God may be a being I need to fear, but He’s hard to love, and I even wonder sometimes if want to associate myself with this Jesus Christ fellow and His tales of mistreated servants.

But let’s dig a little deeper into the readings, because there are a few points that can be easy to miss, and which are far more hopeful.

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Remembering: Sermon Preached on 12th November 2023 (Remembrance Sunday)

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Micah 4: 1–5; Romans 8: 35–39

Henry Allingham, the last British survivor of those who fought in WW1 trenches, aged 110 in 2006. He is wearing medals, smiling, and shaking the hand of someone located off-camera.

Henry Allingham in 2006, when he was aged 110.

Henry Allingham died in the year 2009, at the age of a hundred and thirteen, as the oldest man in the world. An air mechanic, he was the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, and later served with the air reconnaissance units supporting the offensive at Passchendaele.

For eight long decades, Henry tried to forget what he’d seen on the Western Front. It was only towards the end of his life that he began to open up about what he remembered. Then, it was obvious why he’d wanted to forget. He once said that his Remembrance Day was the 22nd of September, when he lost three mates. He spoke of men standing in two feet of water in mud-filled trenches waiting to go over the top, knowing exactly what their likely fate was. He once spent a night in a shell hole. “It stank,” he said. “So did I when I fell into it. Arms and legs, dead rats, dead everything. Rotten flesh. Human guts.”

It is more comfortable, in some ways, to forget. So why do we remember? One reason is the sense of duty that we rightly feel to honour those who made the supreme sacrifice. Another important reason for remembering is because those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

But to remember also means something else. The word ‘member’ can mean a body part; indeed originally that was its only English meaning. Member is a word that came into English, via Norman French, from the Latin word membrum, which means limb. The word remember also has its root in this Latin word, membrum. So to re-member someone is literally to put their limbs together again. When we remember the dead, we bring them to life in our hearts and souls.

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Called to be Saints: Sermon Preached on 5th November 2023 (All Saints’)

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – 1 John 3.1-3; Matthew 5.1-12

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

This Sunday, we’re keeping All Saints’ Day, the day where the Church celebrates – you know – all the saints. That’s all very well and good, but you wouldn’t want to be too like a saint would you? If you’re being honest, you probably wouldn’t even want to get too close to one of them. In being so good at the whole Christianity business, they rather show the rest of us up. We’re just ordinary Christians – we believe and trust in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we try our best to live good lives and all that, but we also know we aren’t very good at it. With their constant praying, doing good, being pious, and staying away from all the naughty but fun things we enjoy – from booze to gossip – saints leave us feeling a bit inadequate. Just for example, you wouldn’t want a rector who’s too much of the saint, would you?

Ten status of twentieth century martyrs above the West Door of Westminster Abbey, on the exterior wall.

The Ten Modern Martyrs at Westminster Abbey. © CEPhoto, Uwe Aranas

That’s my instinctive reaction when I hear about saints, one that I suspect many of you share. But I think it’s also an incorrect reaction. Look at your Bibles! The people who were close to Jesus, and went on to build the Church, certainly weren’t perfect. The apostles did plenty of squabbling and bickering with one another – so much of it that you’d think they were just like today’s Christians. Nor did the apostles avoid the good things in life. That St Peter liked getting lavish hospitality from the congregations he visited, for himself and his wife – at least if you believe St Paul’s gossipy comments in his letters.

Saints aren’t perfect. Only God is perfect. We sometimes get a little confused about what a saint is. Saints aren’t just the famous people like Peter and Paul who get a special day in the Church’s calendar. The truth – the frightening truth – is that all followers of Jesus Christ are called to be saints.

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Render unto Caesar: Sermon Preached on 22nd October 2023 (20th Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 1. 1-10; Matthew 22.15-22

“Paul, Sylvanus and Timothy, to the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.”

Jan Lievens' 1629 painting of St Paul Writing to the Thessalonians; St Paul is depicted with a long white beard, and a thoughtful, almost mournful expression, holding a quill in his right hand with a ream of papyrus behind.

Jan Lievens, St Paul Writing to the Thessalonians, painted 1629, now hangs in the Kunsthalle Bremen.

“Paul, Sylvanus and Timothy, to the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.” These words may not seem very significant, but it is likely that they are the earliest written in all the New Testament. St Paul dictated them in the year 50 or 51 to the Church in Thessalonica. Thessalonica remains very much a part of today’s world, the second largest city in 21st Century Greece, roughly comparable in size with Bristol. In St Paul’s time, Thessalonica was also an important city, and a wealthy one, capital of the Roman province of Macedonia.

We are all used to hearing Paul telling off Churches in his letters for backsliding from his teachings. But there is no hint at all of this in today’s reading. Instead, the Thessalonians are praised for their faith, and the power with which they have received the Holy Spirit. It also seems obvious from the way Paul congratulates his readers on turning “to God from idols”, that this church comprises one of Paul’s first big successes in converting Gentiles to faith in Christ. In particular, Paul praises the Church in Thessalonica for its endurance, persisting in the faith “in spite of persecution”.

Why might these gentile converts, in a diverse Roman provincial capital, have faced persecution? Well, their faith in Christ would have meant that they no longer participated in important local pagan cults – for example, we know Thessalonica was the stronghold of devotion to Isis. Nor would they have participated in the cult of the Emperor. None of this would have endeared them to politically and economically powerful interests. When faced with a choice between Christ and Caesar, the Thessalonians chose Christ, and perhaps this most of all is why Paul is so fulsome in his praise of them.

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Return to the Gospel’s Core: Sermon Preached on 8th October 2023 (18th Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

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

Readings – Philippians 3.4-14 Matthew 21.33-46

“I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus…”

This morning’s readings give us an intensely personal and impassioned passage from St Paul coupled with one of the more difficult and judging of Jesus’ parables. I think this pair of readings is profoundly relevant to the times we are in and the state of our Church. Christ’s words judge the Church of our time forcefully, and St Paul points a way out.

Marten van Valckenborch, The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (ca. 1580-90). Hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Marten van Valckenborch, The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (ca. 1580-90). Hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Let’s start by looking at the gospel reading, the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen.

Most of our Sunday gospel readings this year come from Matthew, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that as we’re coming towards the end of the year, we’re coming towards the end of Jesus’s public ministry in the story. So although it’s October, this Gospel reading is set in the Temple in Jerusalem in the last few days of Jesus’ life.

This parable might explain why the religious hierarchy in Jerusalem had come to fear and hate Jesus so much. The story is a sort of fictional representation of the history of God’s prophets in Jerusalem – most of them were mistreated or even put to death, at the hands of people like them. The landowner represents God, and in the end sends his son, obviously representing Jesus, to try and sort out these unruly tenants and get them to give him some of their grapes as rent, as they agreed. But they kill the Son. Jesus’ audience assumes the landowner would rightly put the murderers of his son to death. Jesus doesn’t actually confirm that, but He makes it clear that, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the Kingdom.” Bear that in mind – we will come back to it.

Our epistle comes from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and recalls his faith as a young man, and how he came to believe Jesus Christ was the son of God.  The young Paul was proud of his Jewish heritage and that he had always remained the staunch Jew he was brought up to be. Except for one problem: Paul was so convinced he God’s man that he forgot that God in the Hebrew Bible was clear that He wanted mercy rather than sacrifice and love of neighbour. Paul, however, thought his faith gave him the right to duff up the people he considered God’s enemies, foremost among those being the Church in its first years.

Thinking he was an expert on pleasing God, Paul found instead that God had to hit him with a bolt from the blue to put him on the right path. Writing with the benefit of several decades’ hindsight, Paul was glad that his preconceptions had been shattered. Paul had lost everything considered valuable by ordinary standards, but he willingly paid that price to gain his faith in Jesus Christ.

In trying to meet God’s standards through his own efforts, Paul found out that he didn’t even know really what God’s standards were. Instead, in following Jesus Christ, he learnt that he could never meet God’s standards, but instead had to throw himself on God’s grace – and in abandoning his self-will, he found true liberation.

So what does all this have to do with our situation today? Well I think the church lost its way in the middle of the 20th century, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the young Paul. Paul was, in his own words, confident in the flesh – confident in his heritage, his intellect, and his faithfulness. The churches of the Western countries, very much including the Church of England, became overconfident in its brain. As we entered a world of nuclear power and television, the Church thought it was much too advanced for these hoary old Hebrew fairy stories, and started thinking the idea that Jesus rose from the dead was primitive. It told itself it had “matured” beyond this, that the rest of society had matured beyond it too, and that for the Church to survive it would have to abandon belief in anything supernatural.

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The Paradox of Christianity: Sermon Preached on 1st October 2023 (17th Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 20.1-16

“And they argued with one another…”

If you’ve been paying attention to the readings in Church on recent Sundays, you’ll have noticed that we haven’t had the Palm Sunday Gospel – unsurprisingly in early autumn. So it’s a little startling to find this week’s Gospel catapulting us into the middle of Holy Week. We don’t read Matthew’s Gospel entirely in sequence during the year, so we’ve skipped over Christ’s final journey through Judaea and Jericho, and find Jesus in the Temple arguing with the chief priests and elders.

Jesus Christ stands on a pedestal in The Temple, with Corinthian columns behind, surrounded by listeners dressed in sumptuous Renaissance clothing.

Paolo Veronese, Christ Among the Doctors (ca. 1560). Hangs in the Prado, Madrid.

The religious leaders are playing what they think are clever word games. But although they present themselves as having power and authority over the Jewish people, what this debate exposes is how afraid they are of public opinion. We also know that they rightly fear the Romans. So they’re performing little verbal dances, determined to get one over on Jesus, but also aware that saying the wrong thing could enrage either the Empire, or the crowds who admire this popular, if strange, preacher, as the admired John the Baptist.

By the time Matthew’s Gospel was written down in this form, perhaps forty years after Holy Week, the pointlessness of these games of had been brutally exposed. In the year 70 the Romans destroyed the Temple, halfway through a brutal eight-year Jewish revolt which ended, inevitably, with a Roman victory. The chief priests and elders in Jerusalem were absolutely not capable of managing the relationship between an all-powerful Empire demanding obedience and a fractious and resentful Jewish Palestinian society.

I’m afraid the word games and meaningless hair-splitting remind me rather of the politics of our own time. While it’s easy to blame our leaders for that, like the Jerusalem Temple authorities of Jesus’ time, they live in fear of fickle public opinion—the opinion of us and people like us—and the evident enjoyment the population takes in a bit of mob anger, albeit mostly expressed on the phone-in shows and on social media. At the same time, the long-term mega trends of the modern world, be it galloping technology, migration, climate change, or whatever, seem as beyond our leaders as the ever-rising tensions between Roman power and Jewish resentment were for the clerical gentlemen at the Temple. Perhaps it’s an inevitable part of the human condition that rulers spend much effort on irrelevancies they can control while ignoring the real problems that they possibly can’t.

Now, here’s a point that’s easy to miss in all this. It is very obvious from this exchange that Jesus can play these political word games like a pro. He puts the chief priests and elders in their box with a calculatedly sharp answer, as He does so often. But Jesus isn’t interested in playing these games for too long. While the religious authorities are desperate to stay on the right side of public opinion, Jesus already seems to be aware that it will turn against Him, and soon.

This is where we see the magnificent paradox that sits at the heart of the Christian faith. Christ has already warned His followers, in Matthew chapter 16, so not all that long before these events, that anyone who tried to save their life would lose it, but anyone who lost their life for His sake would save it. When we lose our lives for Christ’s sake we save them; it’s only because Christ died on the Cross that eternal life is open to us.

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