Can You Walk on Water?: Sermon Preached on 13th August 2023 (10th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s Devizes

Readings – Romans 10. 5–15; Matthew 14. 22–33

A painting of Jesus rescuing Peter after he fails to walk on water, a scene from the section of Matthew 14 the sermon is preached on. A dark ship is in the background.

Jesus and Peter on the Water by Gustave Brion, 1863. Now hangs in the Museum of Art, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Did you know that the next Rugby World Cup kicks off in less than four weeks’ time? When I was in my early teens, I briefly entertained thoughts of playing in a Rugby World Cup someday. I would be open-side flanker for Ireland, and in the final, I would burrow through the opposition pack using my low centre of gravity, and score the winning try, under the posts, as the dying seconds ticked away against England (of course against England).

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything goes the phrase. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. If God wanted me to play in the pack in international rugby, he may have made me bigger than five-foot-five. And given me better hand-eye co-ordination. God, presumably had plans for me that were different than having me put England to the sword in a Rugby World Cup final, although hopefully He has those plans for someone else in a green jersey.

We all have different gifts – and Peter’s gifts didn’t include walking on water, any more than my gifts included being able to play international rugby. I gave you that intro because the story of Peter trying, and failing to walk on water, is one of the most annoyingly misread passages of Scripture.

So let’s work our way through the story to look for things that are often missed.

The first thing to ask is when this took place—that is immediately after the feeding of the five thousand. So, before this morning’s reading starts, Jesus had sailed off on his own to a deserted place, but the crowds followed Him, like fans chasing a superstar. Although Jesus clearly needed some space, He spent  all day healing members of this crowd, then feeding them miraculously. This is the last sentence in Matthew’s Gospel before this morning’s reading starts—“those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Today’s Gospel begins, “Immediately, he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while immediately he dismissed the crowds.” Then Jesus goes up the mountain and spends all night there, then early in the morning, presumably refreshed, He walks out into the lake to meet the disciples – walking on the water – as their boat has drifted away from the shore overnight. When the disciples see Jesus, given that they, not unreasonably, don’t believe people can walk on water, they think He’s a ghost. And Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

So, Peter puts Jesus to the test. Peter demands that Jesus gives him the power to do what humans aren’t designed to do, all because he doesn’t really trust Jesus. And that is what this is what this story is all about.

I often hear it presented as if Peter’s problem was that he didn’t have enough faith, and if he did, he would have been water-skiing on his bare feet. Sometimes, the preacher then uses it in quite a manipulative way to harangue the congregation for not having enough faith themselves, saying that if they did, they would work miracles too. But if humans were meant to walk on water, God would have given us flippers.

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Wresting With Fragments: Sermon Preached on 6th August 2023 (9th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Genesis 32.22-31; Matthew 14.13-21          

“And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”

The vision of God whom Jacob encounters by the ford at Jabbok is different from the one depicted in some other Old Testament writings, where it is impossible to see the face of God and live; here, Jacob smells God’s breath and lays hands on His sweaty body.

An image of Margot Robbie playing Barbie is crudely superimposed on Gustav Doré's 1854 painting, Jacob Wrestles with the Angel.

Barbie meets Wrestling Jacob, courtesy of Gustav Doré’s 1854 painting.

Wrestling with God is an experience familiar to most of us. One thing that jumps out at us from this story is that God doesn’t mind having a good wrestle with Jacob – in fact, it is God who seeks Jacob out and begins the bout with him. God is not some sort of divine Kim Jong-Un; we aren’t called to live in terror of some cosmic tyrant who will punish us in fury if we ask difficult questions. Instead we are called to be God’s friends – deeply beloved friends. And friends are allowed to wrestle with one another, to challenge one another with their different perspectives. Like Jacob, we are called to smell God’s breath and lay hands on His body, to wrestle with Him being honest about what we think and feel, about Him and the world.

God doesn’t demand that Jacob submit and acknowledge defeat. God has no need to end this bout by dominating Jacob to prove His superiority. Nor does Jacob run away, as presumably he could have done—but instead remains engaged in an exhausting contest right through the night. What God asks of us is not fearful obedience; nor even a childlike dependency; but instead the sort of deep and loving friendship that can cope with a healthy degree of struggle. Our strongest human friendships are ones that can survive wrestling with one another, indeed our deepest friendships are often those that actively thrive on difference and debate. God should be our most deeply loved friend of all, with whom we can wrestle as we change and grow throughout our lives.

All of our lives contain enough experiences of day-to-day suffering, whether our own or that of others we encounter, to make any sane person wrestle with the gap between a world created by a God of love and goodness, and the suffering and pain that we all suffer and witness afflicting our loved ones. As St Theresa of Avila once prayed, “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” That’s before we start thinking about the state of the world, or the unresolvable tragedy of the human condition.

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The Impossible Becomes Real: Sermon Preached on 30th July 2023 (8th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Matthew’s, Rowde (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – 1 Kings 6. 1–11, 23–38; Acts 12. 1–17      

“[Rhoda] ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, ‘Thou art mad.’”

Our New Testament reading this evening is one of the most familiar stories from the earliest years of the Church. Peter has been imprisoned during a bout of persecution in Jerusalem, and faces being executed just as like James, the brother of John, had been shortly before. In the dead of night, he finds his chains suddenly falling off and an angel leading him into freedom. At first, Peter doesn’t believe the incident himself. He assumes it must be a dream.

Next to a sleeping guard in plate mail, St Peter, wearing a blue top and looking surprised, looks up at a glowing angel flying above him in a glow of clouds. This is the painting The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, by Baltasar Beschey, painted in 1769. It now hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.

Baltasar Beschey. The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, (1769). Hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.

Peter’s fellow Christians in Jerusalem, who have been fervently praying for him, also refuse to believe this miracle at first. They told Rhoda, the domestic servant who came to the gate when Peter first knocked, that she must be mad. Interestingly, as with the Resurrection, the first witness of this emergence into new life is a woman of low social status. God continually upends our expectations—not only of who is important and trustworthy, but of what is possible at all.

This miraculous experience does not make the persecution of the Jerusalem Church vanish. Indeed, persecution remained a dominant them of the Church’s life in its first centuries.

It is all a long way from the scene at Solomon’s Temple in our Old Testament reading. Sometimes the Church has been able to follow in the footsteps of Solomon, building great places of worship to the glory of God; at other times, it has had to meet in secret and in hiding. Both extremes can be found in the world today.

Leading up to the year 2000, the Vatican established a commission to examine those who had died for their faith in recent generations; it concluded that there had been twice as many Christian martyrs in the 20th Century as in the previous nineteen combined. Our own Westminster Abbey had ten statues of martyrs carved above its west door in the 1990s, representing Christians of every continent and many denominations who died for their faith in the 20th Century, from Martin Luther King to Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia.

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The Bright Field: Sermon Preached on 30th July 2023 (8th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 8: 26-39; Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field … someone … sells all that he has and buys that field.”

I have a photograph which I have named The Bright Field. It is taken from the top of Black Mountain, the highest of the chain of hills that erupts immediately to the west of Belfast, looking not towards the city, but the rich grasslands to the west. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in these islands, lies immediately behind. It was taken on a stereotypically gloomy Irish summer evening – this disappointingly dull and breezy summer in Wiltshire, with the jet stream parked further south than usual, is just like a normal summer in Belfast.

A single gap in the clouds had opened up to cast lovely golden light on a single small hill, covered in fields, a couple of miles away, while all around and behind it remained deep in shadow.

In the foreground, lush fields of grass on a cloudy day, among which a small hill is lit up by a sunray. In the middle distance a lake with an island, all in shadow, and amove them some clouds backlit by the sun.

View west from Black Mountain, 3 August 2018,
© Gerry Lynch

It called to mind perhaps the finest of the poems by the Welsh Anglican priest, RS Thomas, itself a surprising shaft of light amid what is otherwise a gloomy literary output. It begins:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it

In that spirit, let me give you a little something to ponder at a time of year when many of us are about to go on holiday.

Often, when I go to church while on holiday, my irreligious friends will ask me afterwards if the service was “uplifting”, hoping to be kind and supportive, nodding and expecting an answer in the affirmative. Sometimes it was, but sometimes I tell them it wasn’t. Sometimes that was my fault, because my mind was miles away. But sometimes I tell them that the prayers were anodyne, or the worship sloppy, or the sermon insipid. And then I tell them that, even though the service wasn’t “uplifting”, I was still glad that I went.

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The Glory to be Revealed: Sermon Preached on 23nd July 2023 (7th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8: 12–25; Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43

“I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

On Friday evening, I was out walking near North Wilts Golf Course, when I stumbled across a field full of poppies in rich evening light. I wandered along the field margin entranced by magical scenes, like the single sunflower, presumably the result of a stray seed, adding a dash of yellow to the reds and greens. Overhead, the larks sang.

A lone sunflower amid a field of poppies, near Bishops Cannings in Wiltshire.

21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

At times, I was quite overwhelmed by beauty. I found myself thinking of the struggles I’d had in life – the very unlikely and occasionally painful path that led me to being a country parson in Wiltshire, which I could never have planned for myself and which nobody could have predicted. I thanked God volubly, moved almost to tears with joy.

Of course, life isn’t always like this. To turn on the news is to be confronted with catastrophes, from a heatwave in southern Europe that seems to intimate environmental disaster to a war in Ukraine that seems to be locked into a deadly stalemate in the trenches.

Still harder to bear than these terrifying but systemic problems is our own suffering and the suffering of those we love. I was reading an article in The Tablet yesterday by the Oxford-based Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe. Timothy is to my mind the best popular theologian in Britain today, capable of explaining difficult concepts in understandable language to ordinary Christians. He revealed that, last year, he had survived a terrifying and risky 36-hour operation for jaw cancer. Although initially it seemed to have been a complete success, recently his consultants had picked up signs of fresh pre-cancerous cells in his jaw. The random operation of fate can sometimes be terribly cruel.

If all there were to the world were the stories of humanity’s struggles to survive and struggles with one another, the world would be a grim place. Yet we see signs everywhere, like the beauty of a field of poppies, that our existence is much greater and more magnificent than the hardest parts of life would indicate.

Some poppies on top of a hill, surrounded by lush green grass, looking down to a flat plain below with a long stand of deciduous trees in the distance.

21 July 2023, © Gerry Lynch.

For example, if I am capable of being overwhelmed by the beauty of a field of poppies on a gorgeous summer evening, it begs the question why human beings have a sense of beauty. It isn’t necessary for evolutionary purposes: we can survive and produce the next generation of humans without it. In a similar vein, why do we have the capacity to feel awe? Why does love seem to be the single most transformative aspect of human existence?

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I Do What I Hate: Sermon Preached on 9th July 2023 (5th Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 7: 15–25a; Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

I wonder how familiar you are with quantum computing?

I ask, because the last interesting episode of my recent trip to North America happened on the bus out to Montreal airport to catch my flight to Heathrow. There was conversation between a man in his fifties from the United States, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities, who was asking him all sorts of intelligent questions.

It’s much more difficult to make quantum computers to work in practice than the digital computers we’re familiar with, the man explained, but experimental prototypes work increasingly well, and it’s possible that we’re within a few years of them becoming practical. There are many wonderful things they might make much easier, like finding new vaccines. He said, however, that the first thing that will happen is that every encryption scheme in the world will become obsolete overnight. Encryption means the codes that are used to keep your debit card payments secure, your e-mails private, and the suchlike. Even the encryption used by the world’s militaries and secret services will become worthless, he explained, possibly not too far in the future. The first thing that quantum computers will do, apparently, is to force all of these vital pieces of code to be rewritten using quantum computers.

The young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”

Nowadays we’re no longer talking about swords, but things like cluster munitions. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of what how terrible long conventional wars between well-equipped large countries are. We’d almost forgotten.

Necessity, as the old saying goes, is the mother of invention, and countries fighting for their survival have needs that are acute. So war drives technological advancement. The last big international war finished with the invention of nuclear weapons. For the first time, human beings had the power to destroy ourselves entirely. In the 17 months since Russia invaded Ukraine, there has already been a revolution in some military technologies, such as the use of drones.

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Fear the Devil: Sermon Preached on 25th June 2023 (3rd Sunday After Trinity)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 6.1b-11; Matthew 10.24-39

“fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Do you think about hell and the Devil much?

Al Pacino playing the Devil in the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate. He is smiling towards the camera, Keanu Reeves, his "son" is standing with his back to the camera. They are in a New York subway car.

The Devil as the coolest dude in town… Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997).

I thought that would be a good way to start a sermon on a glorious summer evening in an adorable little village like Bulkington!

We can scoff at talk of the Devil as ridiculous and primitive nonsense, and I have no doubt that some of you here tonight do. I did for a long time. We can even find ourselves glamorising the Devil – you know, the cool bloke who lets you drink and tells you dirty jokes, instead of making you sit on a cloud playing a harp forever like God (that boring old fart!) Yet whatever we think about an actual personification of evil in the form of the Devil, none of us can escape the reality of evil, obvious every time we hear a news bulletin.

If we believe that we have a soul, then we also need to consider seriously the possibility that it might be damaged or corrupted by evil. More than this, if we take the Gospels seriously as a record of what Jesus taught, then we need to embrace the reality that Jesus taught his followers about the Devil: among other places, in this evening’s Gospel reading. Satan is a recurring theme throughout the New Testament, where we are presented with a picture of Christians in a running battle with forces of evil that, without the grace of God, would be beyond our powers to resist or break.

The Devil is real, taunting us over the battlefields of Ukraine and our indifference to hungry children in a world of plenty. The Devil taunts us over every Saturday night stabbing, over every carefully nursed family feud, and every intentionally bitter dispute over the custody of the children. The Devil taunts us when we scream at the TV that we wish someone would shoot one of our least favourite politicians and when we lash out at the people who love us most because they’re the people we know we can hurt without fearing retaliation.

Most people in this country, unlike Jesus Christ, think the Devil is a silly fictional character that, at best, distracts us from dealing with the world’s real problems. That suits Satan fine; if we think he doesn’t exist it makes it so much easier to worm his way into people’s souls.

A cheerful picture, eh?                                     

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Dare We Risk it All?: Sermon Preached on Sunday 25th June 2023 (The Birth of John the Baptist, Patronal Festival)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Acts 13.14b-26; Luke 1.57-66, 80

“What then will this child become?”

That’s what the neighbours asked when confronted by the strange circumstances of the birth of St John the Baptist. His father, Zechariah, had been struck dumb by God for refusing to believe he had fathered a child at his advanced age. Then he and his wife, Elizabeth, broke all custom by giving their son a name, John, not already used in their family. Immediately after that break with custom, Zechariah’s speech was suddenly restored. Elizabeth and Zechariah were delighted with their bonny boy whose name means ‘God is gracious’, but the neighbours found these weird experiences frightening.

“What will this child become?”, they asked, in their fear.

The painting depicts a Bible story from Luke 1:5-80, in which Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, are too old to have children. One day the angel Gabriel appears to tell Zacharias that he and Elizabeth will have a son named John. Zacharias is literally dumbfounded and loses his ability to speak.

The Birth of St John the Baptist by Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1635), now in the Prado Museum, Madrid.

He became a great man, a man who changed history, but not one who enjoyed success in his life by conventional standards. He lived a wild life, eating insects and wild honey, and dressing in animal hides. Yet more than a thousand years after his death the Norman conquerors who had recently set up a castle thousands of miles away in Devizes named their church after him, and almost a thousand years after that, we meet in the same church and commemorate John as our patron saint today.

Although he was later celebrated by conquerors, John was far from a conqueror during his life. Instead, he came to the attention of the authorities as someone who refused to collude in their lies, was imprisoned, and later brutally executed. The régime that put him to death remained in power. On the surface, he achieved nothing in his life.

We can’t reduce Christianity to a formula for a successful life by the conventional standards of the world. Worldly success may be a blessing that God grants us; but equally, to live a godly life may require us to renounce comfort and instead live a life of deprivation and physical risk. Not just in Christianity: a deep ambivalence about worldly success was also present in the Jewish thoughtworld which remains part of our scriptural inheritance.

That’s clear when we listen to this morning’s first reading, from Acts. This is part of St Paul’s speech at the synagogue in Antioch. Here, Paul locates John the Baptist in the long sweep of Jewish history. So, he says that God “made the people great” – isn’t that a phrase to conjure with in our time – God “made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt.” So, God made the Hebrew people great when they were living as slaves in a foreign land ruled over by often despotic pharaohs. Isn’t that a strange idea – whatever it means to be great here, it isn’t greatness in the eyes of the world.

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Lest We Forget: Sermon Preached on 7th May 2023 (Coronation Sunday)

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Joshua 1: 1–9; Romans 13: 1–10

“For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the high-water mark of British imperialist triumphalism. Seventeen carriages, let by Victoria’s open-air affair, processed from Buckingham Palace through to St Paul’s Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Eleven colonial prime ministers and the representatives of more than a dozen overseas monarchies were present, from as far away as Iran, Japan, and Thailand. But the spirit of the day was incarnated by the partying throngs on the streets, enjoying a celebratory special Bank Holiday at a time when workers’ rights were much fewer than they are today. Edward Elgar’s wonderful Cockaigne Overture is perhaps that day’s most enduring legacy, with its rambunctious major-key crescendos capturing the boisterous fun of Cockney celebrations.

A black and white photo taken in 1897 as an escort of Indian Cavalry passes the Houses of Parliament in London watched by crowds for the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, on 22 June 1897

The “pomp of yesterday” – an escort of Indian Cavalry passes Parliament during the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, 22 June 1897.

One cultural figure we might have expected to join in the mood of artistic imperialist triumphalism was the chief propagandist of Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Yet he only wrote towards the end of the festivities, and even then solely in the form of a poetic commentary on them, sounding a warning note that was particularly surprising from a man only marginally religious.

“God of our fathers, known of old, 
  Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
  Dominion over palm and pine —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

[…]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
  On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”

All of our blessings as individuals, as nations, as the human race, flow only from God. All of us forget this from time to time. Certainly the policy-makers of Victorian imperialism at their worst often forgot in whose name they held that dominion over palm and pine, forgetting too often also the care for the outsider and the poor that He commanded His followers to bear always in mind.

We should not damn the Victorians entirely for their worst faults, which were real but not the whole story. From the factory acts to universal free schooling to the final suppression of the slave trade, they sincerely believed in bettering the lot of all. Yet it is hard to see the spirit of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth in the deliberate suffocation of indigenous leadership in the emerging Church of Black Africa, or the many famines of Victorian India, or the big famine in Victorian Ireland.

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Answers in Genesis?

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Gerry Lynch

This article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of the St John with St Mary, Devizes Parish Magazine.

Recently, the Rector put me onto a conversation on YouTube between Tom Holland, the popular historian, and Paul Kingsnorth, the environmentalist and former Newbury Bypass protestor who converted to Christianity two years ago. Kingsnorth was raised in Buckinghamshire without any particular faith, while Holland grew up attending a village church in South Wiltshire with his devoutly Anglican mother, and recently returned to churchgoing after a gap of decades. 

A 1916 American pen drawing of the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve.

John H. Coates, Eve, and the Serpent, in the Garden, of Eden; REAL PEN WORK (1916). Kept in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.

One exchange between them struck me powerfully. Both aged in their fifties, they recalled growing up with a sense that the Church was telling stories about God that nobody much believed in anymore — including the Church itself. The Church was attempting to tell a different story, a “post-Enlightenment myth” presenting itself primarily as a doer of good works and intended to appeal to the sensibilities of a rationalist age. The net result, in a memorable phrase by Holland, was “simultaneously rebarbative and dull”. 

Kingsnorth felt the Churches had produced a “version [of Christianity] designed to appeal to the masses, that didn’t really appeal to anyone.” In contrast, as he became overwhelmed by the scale of the environmental crisis and the possibility that humans had already permanently damaged the planet’s capacity to sustain them, it was some of the more visionary and mystical parts of the Bible that began drawing him, to his own initial reluctance, towards Christianity. Firstly, the visions of the end times in the Revelation seemed frighteningly plausible to him, but then he found himself particularly drawn to the creation myths in Genesis. 

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