Tag Archives: faith

Church House Westminster are legitimising the far-right

Posted on by symonhill

A prominent London conference centre linked to the Church of England has been hosting the far-right political party Reform UK.

This is Church House Westminster, previously known as the Church House Conference Centre.

If this sounds familiar, it is because this is the same Church House Westminster that drew protests over several years for hosting military conferences sponsored by arms companies. I was arrested outside Church House in 2017 as the Land Warfare Conference took place inside.

At that point, Church House Westminster came out with the disingenuous excuse that they are a separate legal entity from the Church of England. They are making the same assertion now when challenged about hosting Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party.

On 2nd March, the chief executive of Church House Corporation, Stephanie Maurel, said that Church House Westminster was “an independent commercial entity and is not part of the Church of England”.

This is a legal technicality. Church House Westminster is a wholly owned subsidiary company of the Church House Corporation. This legal technicality does not explain why the Christians who run it think they should operate by different ethics than they would bring to an entity that was officially part of the Church of England.

Church House Westminster’s own Lettings Policy seems to contradict their statement about being an independent entity. It states that they may “refuse any bookings which would be contrary to the witness and mission of the Church of England”.

After the controversy over the arms industry conferences, Church House Westminster took the bizarre and frankly ridiculous step of hiring Oliver O’Donovan to carry out a review of the ethics of their lettings policy. O’Donovan is Emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is one of Britain’s most prominent Christian ethicists.

The commissioning of O’Donovan’s review was not a sign of progress. It was a sign of the appalling attitudes of the people running Church House Westminster. Who needs a Professor of Ethics to determine whether a Christian conference centre should take money from companies that sell weapons to tyrants?

To add an extra level of absurdity, the results of O’Donovan’s review were not made public.

Church House Westminster have allowed Reform UK to use the building for their press conferences multiple times, including the recent announcement of the party’s “shadow cabinet”.

Farage and his cronies repeatedly claim that Reform is not a far-right party, despite their constant demonisation of refugees in particular and migrants in general, as well as attacks by many of their politicians on Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, benefit recipients and other minorities. The rich and powerful are almost the only minority that Reform UK don’t attack.

Church House has been urged not to host Reform UK by groups including Christians For a Welcoming Britain, Christians Against the Far Right, and Better Story.

Keith Brindle, a Church of England priest and co-ordinator of Christians Against the Far Right, has said, “By opening its doors to an agenda of hostility, Church House has provided a veneer of spiritual legitimacy to Reform’s anti-migrant and anti-Muslim politics, and their cynical scapegoating.”

He added, “As followers of Jesus, we must refuse to let the architecture of our faith be used to endorse the dehumanisation of our neighbours. The Church must be a sanctuary for the displaced, not a platform for their expulsion.”

Going on their past behaviour, it is likely that the authorities at Church House are planning simply to ignore the controversy and carry on. We need to make sure that that they can’t.

Jesus’s blessings turn the world upside-down

Posted on by symonhill

Last month (on Sunday 1st February 2026) I had the honour of preaching at Foleshill Road United Reformed Church in Coventry. They are always very welcoming.

Below is the text of my sermon (this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).

The sermon was based on two Bible readings, from the Lectionary for the day:

Matthew 5, 1-12

1st Corinthians 1, 18-31

The first reading that we heard today is perhaps one of the most famous passages in the New Testament: Jesus’ list of blessings. “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” and so on. Known as the beatitudes, they come at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Although they might be familiar to many of us, these statements of Jesus are really quite weird. Jesus announces that people who are suffering are blessed. Isn’t that a bit odd? The rich and powerful might feel that they are the ones who have been blessed.

Jesus lived in the Roman Empire. The emperor’s wealth and power were seen as an indication of his divine status. In many other cultures also, it has been assumed that the rich and powerful are blessed by God. Despite Jesus’ teaching, Christians are not immune from this attitude. Following Donald Trump’s election victory, there were Christians in the US saying that Trump had survived the recent assassination attempt because God had chosen him to lead America. Meanwhile, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, says that God has blessed the rule of Vladimir Putin.

So how can we make sense of Jesus’ words? Well, let’s look at where this passage fits. Here we are at the beginning of Chapter 5 in Matthew’s Gospel. Quite a lot has already happened in the first four chapters. Jesus has recruited disciples, started healing and talked a lot about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a major theme in Matthew’s Gospel.

Incidentally, “Kingdom of Heaven” in Matthew is the equivalent of “Kingdom of God” in other gospels. We could also call it the “Empire of Heaven”, as “kingdom” and “empire” are the same word in the original Greek of the New Testament.

Let’s remember that Jesus was speaking to people in a predominantly poor society that was facing ongoing exploitation by the Roman Empire. Historians estimate that many – perhaps most – of the population lived near or below subsistence level. Attempted resistance to Roman rule had been brutally suppressed.

In short, Jesus was speaking in a context of poverty and injustice.

Now we are not in first-century Palestine. We are in twenty-first century Britain. We have many things that they did not – economically, socially and politically. Many of these advances were gained by our ancestors struggling for them.

Nonetheless, now, according to Oxfam, the four richest people in Britain own as much as the poorest 20 million. With society still recovering from the Covid pandemic, mental health problems are extremely common. On a global level, the beginning of 2026 has seen fast and unpredictable changes in world politics, with peaceful protesters are being killed in Iran and even in the US, and it is hard to predict where the next war will begin.

Our context is different, but I want to suggest that Jesus still speaks to a world facing injustice, poverty and violence.

So here at the beginning of Matthew Chapter 5, Jesus lists 9 groups of people who he says are blessed.

We can get a bit confused with the word “blessed”. Today the word “blessed” gets used in lots of ways. We might say we feel blessed by what God has done for us, we might pray that God will bless someone or something. There are people who say “Oh, bless!” about a child, or occasionally an adult.

Sometimes the word “bless” is used to patronise people. I am reminded of the theologian John Hull, who used to teach at the University of Birmingham. John Hull was blind and on one occasion, he encountered a Hare Krishna group. One of them told John that because of his blindness he was blessed. When John asked him to explain, the man said, “Well, your teacher Jesus said that it’s wrong to think lustfully about women. And you can’t do that.” John replied, “Dream on, pal”.

The word translated “blessed” in this chapter is sometimes translated as “happy” or “fortunate”. At least one translation uses the word “congratulations”: “Congratulations to the poor in spirit!… Congratulations to those who mourn!”.

These are odd things to be congratulated for.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit”. That’s what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus simply blesses people who are “poor”. I don’t think these two things are very different. Poverty, oppression and humiliation were a daily experience for many of Jesus’ listeners. Many people’s spirits had been broken by such experiences. These people were materially poor, and they were poor in spirit.

Yet Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”.

Jesus does not say that the Kingdom of Heaven will be theirs. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a reality that is both now and not yet, breaking into our present even as we look for its complete fulfilment in the future.

Then we have, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”.

Anyone can be in mourning. The richest and most privileged person can be struck with grief. Jesus says they are blessed. However, in a land crushed through poverty and military occupation, it is the poor and oppressed who are most likely to be grieving, particularly to be grieving collectively. Grief can be not only an individual horror but a collective trauma.

So we come to the third beatitude: “Blessed are the meek”. We tend to think of “meek” as meaning quiet, shy, submissive. I am reminded of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which someone hearing the Sermon on the Mount says, “I’m glad there’s something for the meek – they have hell of a time”.

Because this can mislead us, some translators use words such as “powerless” or “crushed”. Psalm 37 repeatedly promises the meek that they will inherit the land. This is exactly the same thing that Jesus promises here: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land” – or “inherit the earth”. The allusion to Psalm 37 cannot have been lost on Jesus’ listeners, living under imperial control. 

So in the first three beatitudes, Jesus has spoken of groups who overlap quite a lot – people who are oppressed, crushed, grieving and powerless.

Then Jesus changes tack slightly. He moves on from talking about people who are suffering and talks instead about how people respond to these realities.  

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Jesus promises that those who are hunger for things to be made right will be filled. Things will be made right. Justice will come about.

He goes to declare that the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers are also blessed.

All these phrases seem to refer to people who are going against conventional wisdom and living differently – by showing mercy, working for righteousness, building peace. Let’s note that peacemaking is about resolving conflict, not avoiding conflict! Indeed, building peace will put you into conflict with people who have an interest in pursuing violence. But Jesus shows a way of engaging in conflict. If you read on beyond this passage, you’ll find that shortly after announcing these blessings, Jesus encourages his listeners to love their enemies!

This is a reminder that while Jesus sides with the poor and marginalised, he shows his love for all people at the same time, while encouraging us all to repent of sin. While most of Jesus’ followers were probably poor, he also called the rich and powerful to repentance. Let’s not forget Zacchaeus who we find in Luke Chapter 19, a wealthy and exploitative man who after meeting Jesus gave half his wealth to the poor. He repented, and hungered for righteousness.

So Jesus says the oppressed are blessed. Then he says that those who try to change things are blessed. Then he changes tack slightly again.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

Jesus is realistic. He knows what often happens to people who challenge dominant values and side with the marginalised

This can be hard to relate to. In the UK today, Christians are not as a group persecuted. Yet Christians still face extreme persecution in countries including North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

As Christians in the UK we may nonetheless face negative reactions when our faith inspires us to live differently, to speak out, to campaign for a better world.

In the USA today, Christians who never expected persecution are finding the situation changed. Pastors in the US have spoken of being detained by ICE, Trump’s deportation enforcers known for snatching people off the streets with very little accountability. Following ICE’s killing of peaceful protesters, I was shocked to read that the Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire, Rob Hirschfield, has asked his clergy to make sure their wills are written. He said, “It may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”.

Jesus says the oppressed are blessed. He says those who try to live differently and change things are blessed. He finishes by saying that people who suffer lies and persecution because they live differently and try to change things – well, they’re blessed too.

But how on Earth can any of these people be blessed? Marginal, outcast, apparently irrelevant people? Isn’t it absurd?

Of course it’s absurd. That’s the point. Jesus is turning common assumptions on their head.

The Empire of Rome belongs to the Emperor, the Senate, the rich and powerful people in Rome and their puppets among local leaders who had sold out to them. But the Empire of Heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, the grieving, the powerless, the people who hunger for righteousness, the peacebuilders, the merciful, the persecuted and so on. As we heard earlier in the passage from 1st Corinthians, God makes foolish the wisdom of the world.

The world’s wisdom is turned upside-down by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Roman Empire thought they could execute a troublemaking Jewish peasant. But God sides with the poor and oppressed, so the troublemaking Jewish peasant rose from the dead and the powers of this world are put on notice that their days are numbered. Sin and death may look strong, but Jesus’ resurrection reveals that love and life will ultimately triumph.

As Paul writes in 1st Corinthians – in the passage we heard earlier – “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong”.

The change that comes with resurrection cannot be put off until we die. As Christians we believe in life after death, and we also believe in life before death. Resurrection means that the dead are raised and that the living can live differently. It also allows us to look at the effects of our actions beyond the time of our own lives. Jesus makes the world’s transformation possible.

Jesus calls us to live in loyalty to the Kingdom of Heaven, or Kingdom of God now, not just in the future.

Of course, we frequently fail. We are all entangled in sinful systems and unjust structures. We wrestle with difficult decisions and moral confusions. However often we fear to ask for forgiveness, God in God’s mercy never tires of forgiving us. And if the situation we face leads us to be crushed, powerless, poor in spirit? God reminds us he is on our side.

So when will the powerless inherit the land? When will those who hunger and thirst for righteousness be filled?

While the Kingdom of God can only reach its fulfilment with the return of Jesus, the New Testament makes clear that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into our world. When people are fed, when love appears, when injustice is challenged and kindness triumphs over cruelty, the Kingdom of God is breaking in.

It can be hard to keep faith in the worst times. As the hymn we sang earlier puts it, “It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back”. But the reality of the resurrection gives us hope. As Martin Luther King put it, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Challenging the arms trade at Birmingham NEC

Posted on by symonhill

Arms fairs are not called arms fairs by arms dealers. They have a wonderful array of nonsense names and elaborate euphemisms. The arms fair taking place in the West Midlands this week is called the Specialist Defence & Security Convention (SDSC).

The SDSC (arms fair) will be held at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) on the edge of Birmingham on Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th February.

One of the problems for arms companies is that wherever they gather, people tend to turn up and protest. That’s why arms industry events keep getting moved around.

It’s a reminder that resistance to the arms trade is not futile. When we protest, we often succeed in pushing it back – another step on the journey to the day when we are free of the arms trade altogether.

That’s why this arms fair – which used to take place in Malvern – is no longer there. Local people resisted every time it turned up. The locals had support from groups including the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), as well as from other people around the Midlands and the UK.

The local protesters chased the arms fair out of Malvern. It moved to Telford – and held on for even less time before moving again.

That’s why it’s at Birmingham NEC this week.

This is not an event on the scale of the massive DSEI arms fair that happens in London every two years. But it another part of the chain. Many of the world’s governments and armed forces will be sending representatives to the NEC this week.

There will be protests and other actions by people of several faiths and none on both days of the SDSC arms fair. You can find out more on the Stop SDSC website – a wide range of groups and individuals are involved.

A Peace Pilgrimage to the site has already taken place, with an interfaith group of pilgrims walking from central Birmingham to the NEC yesterday (pictured).

The protests will include a Christian act of worship and witness near the entrance to the arms fair on Wednesday morning. Please let me know if you want details!

I am just one of many people of good faith joining resistance to the arms fair this week. I’ll do my best to answer any questions – or pass them on to others if they are better placed to answer.

Preaching the Gospel means bringing good news

Posted on by symonhill

Just over two weeks ago (on Sunday 18th January 2026) I led worship at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry. Having preached there several times now, I am always honoured to be asked back!

Below is the text of my sermon (this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).

The sermon was based on two Bible readings, from the Lectionary for the day:

Isaiah 49, 1-7

John 1, 29-42

I used to work in Waterstone’s bookshop. It was over 20 years ago, but one of the memories that sticks with me is from a time when I was shelving books in the children’s section. A woman came into the shop with a small child. The child was holding a toy, which I think perhaps his mother had just bought for him. He was very excited about it. He ran up to me, although he’d never seen me before, and said, with great excitement, “Man, I’ve got – ”. And then he started to tell me enthusiastically about the toy.

He was so excited, he just wanted to tell the first person he saw. Even though he didn’t know me and just called me “man”.

I can’t remember what I said in response. I probably said, “That’s good”, or something like that. But I do remember feeling uplifted by a child being so delighted by something that he wanted to tell everyone. And I remember wondering if the world might be a better place if we all rushed around and told each other when something good happened to us.

If that did happen, on the one hand, we might be uplifted by each other’s good news. On the other hand, if you’re struggling with life, and things are tough, then hearing other people sounding cheerful is not always easy.

So how did Simon feel when his brother Andrew told him, “We’ve found the Messiah”? John’s Gospel gives the impression that Simon shared some of Andrew’s enthusiasm, for he readily went to meet Jesus, who gave him the name Peter.

Now we could spend a lot of time talking about whether this all happened in the way that John’s Gospel describes it. This account differs to the accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke, which tell us that Jesus called Andrew and Simon Peter while they were fishing.

Some people are keen to try to make these accounts fit in with the account in John’s Gospel. Perhaps these two things happened at different times, perhaps Jesus had already met the disciples before he called them while fishing and so on.

All these things are possible. But I can’t help thinking that if we put our energy into trying to make these different accounts fit together, we may be missing the point. It’s rather like responding to the parable of the Good Samaritan by asking whether the money the Samaritan left behind was really enough to pay for an inn. That’s not what the story of the Good Samaritan is about. It might be more helpful to ask what the writer of John’s Gospel is trying to tell us in this passage.

Andrew is excited. He says, “We have found the Messiah!”. In his excitement, like that small child in the bookshop, he wants to tell people. He tells his brother, Simon. And Simon’s instinct is to want to meet Jesus.

This is about how these people respond to Jesus: with excitement, with curiosity, with hope, with a desire to know Jesus, with enthusiasm for sharing the news. This is the response of people hearing good news. 

It seems to me that as Christians, we often forget that we are proclaiming good news. Several times a week, I walk between New Street station in Birmingham, and Aston University where I work as a chaplain. One day I was walking back to the station after quite a tiring day and I passed one of the Christian street preachers who can be found in central Birmingham. He was warning passers-by that they had been living with no regard to God or the future, enjoying themselves without thought of the consequences but that they would soon find that they had – as he put it – “maxed out the credit card” – and that they had a debt of sin that they were unable to pay.

I looked round at the people in the street. There were people like me, on the way home from work. There were parents with small children, some of them clearly struggling. There were homeless or semi-homeless people begging on the sides of the street or under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, slumped in corners. There were people going in and out of shops. On the whole they didn’t look like a group of people enjoying riotous lifestyles with no thought of the consequences.

I considered approaching the preacher and saying, “Have you got any good news?” Because he seemed to have forgotten that the word “gospel” translates the Greek word “evangelion”, which means something like “triumph” or “good news”. I wonder if preachers like this go round knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the bad news?”

The Bible makes clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Mark’s Gospel, the oldest of the gospels we find in the Bible, begins simply, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”.

Of course, the Gospel involves challenges. Sometimes Christ calls us to give things up, or to endure difficulties. But nonetheless, the message of the Gospel as a whole is overwhelmingly good news.

If we are not preaching good news, we are not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now there is lots of bad news in the world. We do not need to preach bad news. People already know the bad news. People know how horrible the world can be.

That’s why the gospel can never be cheap or easy good news. The good news that Jesus brings is much deeper than trite or shallow reassurances. When I became a Christian in the 1990s, there was a popular worship chorus that included the line, “In your presence, my problems disappear”. What nonsense. What blasphemy – to present Jesus as an individual problem-solving machine. Of course we are not likely always to feel as excited or uplifted as we may have done at the moment when we first encountered Jesus. But the presence of God does not depend on our feelings. God is there however we’re feeling. 

Proclaiming good news does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. It means proclaiming hope – not trite, shallow hope but deep, meaningful hope – in the midst of suffering.

This is the sort of hope that we see in Andrew and Simon Peter when they respond to Jesus. Their capacity for hope allows them to respond with excitement, with curiosity – and with faith.

Faith is more than an opinion. Faith is not simply signing up to a list of beliefs. Faith is not a naïve acceptance of things for no good reason.

Faith is a deliberate decision about where to put our trust, where to put our loyalty. It may include a decision to take a chance, to take risks. But it doesn’t mean pretending to believe things that we don’t, or to act one way on Sunday mornings and another way the rest of the week. Christian faith does not mean suppressing questions and uncertainties. It means facing the questions and uncertainties and in the midst of them choosing to make a commitment to trust and follow Jesus Christ.

Faith is not about thinking we’re always right or that we will always succeed in following Christ. We are all sinners and I know that I fail very, very often. Simon Peter himself denied Jesus three times. But because faith is about trust, commitment and loyalty, faith is about our starting-point – our starting-point for how we approach life.

John the Baptist makes that clear! Earlier in the passage we heard today, John the Baptist testifies that he saw the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove. Usually in Britain today, when we see a dove, we call it a pigeon. Thus God appears in everyday things, everyday creatures, everyday people – the extraordinary breaking in on the ordinary.

Accounts of Jesus’s baptism in the gospels refer to a voice in which Jesus is described as God’s son. This all happened of course in the Roman Empire. At the time, the empire was ruled by the Emperor Tiberius, whose titles included Divi Filius – son of a god. But here is Jesus being proclaimed Son of God. Jesus’s followers are offering their loyalty, their trust, their faith, not to the Roman emperor but to this apparently obscure Jewish peasant – Jesus, Son of God. Faith can be a dangerous decision.

Nonetheless, Andrew and Simon Peter clearly regard faith in this Messiah as a decision well worth making. The Messiah was expected as an alternative to the oppressive empire under which they lived, but in Jesus they found a Messiah offering salvation and liberation not only from Roman rule but from all forms of domination, injustice and sin.

And this is massive news. This comes through in the reading we heard from Isaiah. The book of Isaiah is a great read. It’s generally agreed that different parts of Isaiah were composed at different times across centuries. The part we heard today, Chapter 49 is from what’s generally called Second Isaiah, and it proclaims that the God who has chosen the Israelites as his people is using the Israelites to proclaim his salvation of the world. Isaiah quotes God saying that it is “too light a thing” that he should save only Israel and Judah. Instead God tells the Israelites, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth”.

It is too light a thing that God should save and liberate only one group of people – one nationality, one ethnic group, one religious group, one class. God’s salvation and liberation are offered to all. So if you ever think that God might not want to save you, remember: it is too light a thing for God to offer salvation that does not include you.

This offer of salvation, of liberation, is made because of God’s faith in us. God is faithful. The last pope, Francis, wrote that God never tires of forgiving us. Rather, we are afraid of asking for forgiveness so often. Yet the Gospel makes clear that God is so faithful, that God stands ready to offer forgiveness however many times we stumble, however weak our faith becomes. And God keeps calling us back to the journey of faith.

Faith is not about certainty or being pure. We are all entangled in sinful systems and unjust structures. We wrestle with difficult decisions and moral confusions. Faith is about our starting-point. For if faith in God is our starting-point, nothing else can command our ultimate loyalty.

Of course, we can be loyal to lots of things: our family, our friends, our community, our country, the Warwickshire Cricket Team, the Sky Blues, a political party, a trade union – and so on. But once we are committed to Jesus Christ, we can never give our ultimate loyalty to any government, nation, army or organisation – or even to a church! We are called to start with God as revealed in Christ, the God of Love, who loves every one of our fellow humans and loves the world.

Of course, Christ calls each of us to different things. Christ may call us to unexpected places. Earlier this month, Christian pastors in the US spoke of being detained by ICE, Trump’s deportation enforcers who are known for snatching people off the streets with very little accountability. ICE’s recent killing of Renee Good, a woman protesting against ICE’s deportations, has made headlines. I was shocked to read that the Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire, Rob Hirschfield, has asked his clergy to make sure their wills are written because he fears where the situation may be heading. He said, “It may be that now is on longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”.

I hope of course that such things will not come to pass. I pray that none of us here will find ourselves called to be martyrs. Many who live out faith in Jesus do so far more quietly – but no less valuably. For every big-name speaker, there are hundreds of people behind the scenes, for every prominent activist, there are hundreds more stuffing envelopes – and so on. The world doesn’t see or notice everyone’s faith – but God sees and notices us all. What has God called you to, I wonder? Where and how is God calling you today?

We may not always feel the excitement that we felt on becoming Christians. We may find it hard to feel hope in the midst of sadness. I pray that God will give each of us faith to see the glimmers of God’s love in the darkest times, to remember that Christ in his resurrection has triumphed over the forces of sin and death and that God is faithful to us.

May we keep putting our faith in the God of Jesus. In the midst of the world’s uncertainties and injustices, let’s have the faith to declare, like Andrew and Simon Peter, “We have found the Messiah!”.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

Don’t let the far-right steal Christmas

Posted on by symonhill

I wrote an article for yesterday’s Morning Star, encouraging readers of all faiths and none to challenge the far-right’s attempts to co-opt Christmas and Christianity to promote values that are utterly at odds with the teachings and example of Jesus.

You can read the article on the Morning Star website, but it is also reproduced below.


Britain’s best-known fascist is angry about Christmas trees.

Tommy Robinson, also known by his original name of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has denounced Tesco for selling plastic trees as “evergreen trees.” He insists they should use the word “Christmas.”

Robinson and his followers have been ridiculed by people suggesting that the far right are too stupid to recognise Christmas tree unless they are labelled. But while Robinson is a nasty racist bigot, he’s not stupid. He’s clever, manipulative, and knows exactly what he is doing.

In this case, he is jumping into the annual Christmas culture wars. Every year, there are people who complain about local councils using expressions such as “winter lights” or “festive markets” without the word “Christmas.”

Speaking as a Christian, I think the birth of Jesus is more important than the name that corporations give to plastic trees. Many Christians find the controversy ridiculous. Sadly some other Christians get swept up in the outrage.

These are the people who the far right are trying to recruit. They insist that Britain is a “Christian country” and that British people must observe Christmas.

In reality, nobody is trying to stop them putting up Christmas trees (a German tradition), promoting Santa Claus (based on a Turkish bishop) or celebrating the birth of Jesus (a Middle Eastern refugee).

While the British far right often claim to defend “Christian Britain,” there has been a significant shift recently. At least three things have changed.

Firstly, far-right figures are focusing more on Christianity. This may be due to Robinson’s reported conversion in prison. I can’t read his mind, so have no idea whether he genuinely had a conversion experience. It seems, however, that he doesn’t think that turning to Christ requires him to repent of racism and violence.

Secondly, a handful of far-right clergy are making themselves more visible in working with Robinson at anti-migration protests.

Thirdly, it is increasingly clear that far-right groups are not only nominally pro-Christian but that a minority of their members are active churchgoers, some in mainstream denominations.

Far-right leaders hope to see movement in the other direction also. They want to draw Christians to their cause. Some are using slick, subtle and deceptive advertising to try to draw them in.

This Saturday, an event will take place in Whitehall called “Putting Christ Back Into Christmas.” It will involve carols and prayers and is organised by “Unite the Kingdom.”

It was Unite the Kingdom – whose aim is to divide the kingdom – who organised the far-right rally in London back in September, with speakers including Tommy Robinson, along with Elon Musk by video link. Musk – who is funding Robinson’s legal fees – said “violence is coming” and urged his listeners to “fight back.”

Other speakers included Brian Tamaki, a right-wing Christian preacher who called for all non-Christian religions to be banned.

None of this would be apparent to the casual observer of the carefully constructed video made to promote this supposedly innocuous Christmas carol event on Saturday.

The video begins with a cheery hello from Christian minister Rikki Doolan, who witnessed Robinson’s conversion in prison. The video does not mention that Doolan is an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who belongs to the far-right Advance UK party.

A homely scene features a smiling Canon Phil Harris in a jumper and clerical collar. Many viewers will have no idea that Harris is an out-and-out racist who claims that Britain is being “overrun” by migrants who “seek to subdue us.” During the racist riots of 2024, Harris described the rioters as “concerned citizens.”

Only after a succession of people with crosses and clerical collars does Tommy Robinson appear. His name is not given.

The first hint that this is about nationalism is when far-right Pentecostal pastor Chris Wickland declares that this is “a moment for believers, families and patriots.” It is then stated that the event is organised by “Unite the Kingdom” – but not everyone will know what this means. It is quite possible for someone to watch this video without realising that this will be a far-right event.

It is vital that we expose the reality.

Thankfully, a number of left-wing Christians are committed to being present in central London on Saturday to make sure that a very different message is heard.

There will be various nonviolent events to challenge fascism, involving people of many faiths and none.

It is likely, however, that local far-right groups in various parts of Britain will try to misuse Christmas and Christianity to push their vile agenda. If your local anti-racist group, or union branch, or student society or other group is resisting this sort of thing, I suggest contacting local churches – and other faith groups – and asking them to join you in speaking out against it.

Whatever you make of Christianity, the New Testament tells the story of Jesus, who became a refugee as a child, who grew up to side with the marginalised, challenge the powerful, proclaim love for all and get executed as a rebel by the brutal Roman empire. Whether or not you believe he was resurrected, it is clear that his life and message are the opposite of the far-right’s pseudo-gospel of hate. Now is the time to say so. 

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

Make sure no-one’s fooled by the far-right’s Christmas event

Posted on by symonhill

Well done to the Church of England, who have sharply criticised Tommy Robinson’s far-right Christmas-themed event planned for London this coming Saturday.

I was getting a bit frustrated with the CofE for their failure to condemn the event sooner, but I’ll happily put that aside and focus on the fact that they have done so now. In the case of some CofE leaders, they have done so more strongly than I had dared to hope.

The Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church had already condemned Robinson’s plans, along with various other churches and Christian groups.

Some Christians would prefer just to ignore the far right. I understand about denying them the “oxygen of publicity”. The problem is that if they’re already getting publicity for the lies they tell, we need publicise the truth.

Robinson’s and his band of far-right clergy have put out a slick and sophisticated video and social media posts. The video includes a handful of racist and homophobic clergy, mostly from tiny right-wing denominations. They claim that this event is “not political”. They clearly want to give the impression that this is an innocuous Christmas carol event.

Their propaganda seems to be working. I have been saddened and disturbed to read posts in Christian Facebooks groups from people either approving of Robinson’s rally or urging people not to condemn it. Some of these are not from out-and-out racists; some are even from people who might be considered theologically progressive.

The far right event is called “Putting Christ Back Into Christmas” and involves carols and worship in Whitehall on Saturday. It is organised by “Unite the Kingdom” (UTK), whose aim is to divide the kingdom. This is the group who organised the racist rally in London in September, which included violent assaults on people of colour and peaceful counter-protesters.

For resisting the far-right’s narrative, and for reaching out to people who are taken in by UTK’s claims about the nature of the event, there are some helpful resources out there:

  • The Centre for the Study of the Bible and Violence have collated a range of resources – from artworks to writings to discussion materials.
  • The Joint Public Issues Team – who represent the Baptist Union, Methodist Church and United Reformed Church – have links to various resources on their website.
  • Jon Kuhrt has written a helpful article contrasting the organisers’ claims about the event with Robinson’s description of it to his own supporters.
  • There will be some alternative acts of worship on the day, not all of which can be publicised in advance. Please let me know if you are interested in details (although I don’t know about all of them!).
  • There is a counter-demonstration for people of all faiths and none at Downing Street from 1pm on Saturday.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The above image of the Bus Stop Nativity is produced by Andrew Gadd, who is kindly allowing it to be reproduced for free.

Father forgive us, we don’t know what we’re doing

Posted on by symonhill

Yesterday (Sunday 23rd November 2025) I led worship at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry. It is always an honour to be asked to do so. Below is the text of my sermon.

To be clear: this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a couple of extra comments. However, the substance is much the same.

The sermon followed two Bible readings:

Luke 23, 33-43

Colossians 1, 11-20

There was nothing remarkable about the crucifixion of Jesus. That is to say, from the point of view of the Roman soldiers assigned to the job, there was nothing remarkable about the crucifixion of Jesus. The Roman authorities crucified people all the time.

It was a common form of execution for criminals, particularly for rebels and troublemakers. Revolutionaries were crucified, if they tried to rise up against Roman rule. Slaves were crucified, if they resisted their supposed owners. In the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a method of execution for people who defied authority, who did not accept their place in the order of things. It says something about the brutality of the Roman Empire that they used crucifixion to punish such people. And it was commonplace. For the Roman soldiers, it was, perhaps, all in a day’s work.

Jesus wasn’t even the only person they were crucifying that day. As we heard earlier, Luke tells us, “They crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left”.

I wonder if and when the soldiers realised that there was something very different about this particular victim. Perhaps it was when he told one of the other people being crucified that he would shortly be in paradise. Or perhaps it was earlier, when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”.

“Father, forgive them”.

Forgiveness is not easy. Many of us do not find it easy to forgive people who have hurt us. How much harder would it be to forgive people as they are literally killing us? Could you forgive someone as they killed you? Could I? As I’ve never been in that situation, I honestly don’t know. I can only pray that God would give me the strength to do so.

Now in Coventry, of course, we’re used to seeing the words “Father, Forgive” displayed prominently. They’re written in the ruins of the old cathedral, destroyed by German bombing 85 years ago this month. I praise God that anyone in Coventry was able to think of forgiveness at the time of that bombing. There were others, I’m sure, who found it difficult or impossible to do so. But the story is well known. After the war, volunteers from Germany helped to rebuild Coventry Cathedral, just as volunteers from Britain helped to rebuild the cathedral in Dresden, where the old cathedral had been destroyed by British bombing. It’s a remarkable story of forgiveness and reconciliation, and a noble part of Coventry’s history.

So why were there people in Coventry and Dresden who were prepared to forgive the bombers? Because they were following Jesus’ example, perhaps? And that leads to another question. Why did Jesus ask his Father to forgive his killers? He wasn’t forgiving people because they were repenting. He wasn’t offering forgiveness to people confessing their sins. He was offering forgiveness to people who were continuing to sin in the most extreme way possible – they were literally murdering him! What did he mean when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they now not what they do”? Or to put it in more contemporary English, “Father forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing”?

Some people say it’s because the soldiers didn’t realise who Jesus was, they didn’t realise they were killing the Son of God. And of course that’s true. But at the same they knew they were killing someone. They knew they were crucifying someone. And crucifixion is one of the most painful forms of death that human cruelty has ever invented. So surely they knew some of what they were doing? 

Perhaps we’ll understand more if we ask why these soldiers were killing Jesus. As Christians, of course, we believe that Jesus’ death has significance for the whole world, and for all time. But I think we can understand how and why it does so if we think more about why Jesus was killed, why Jesus was executed, in the first place.

So who killed Jesus? These Roman soldiers, who we’ve just been talking about, who nailed him to a cross, who cast lots for his clothes, who mocked him and put up a sarcastic sign describing him as “king of the Jews”. They killed Jesus. Why did these soldiers kill him? Well, they were obeying orders. The death sentence had been passed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea.

Despite this, for centuries, many churches have taught that Jesus was killed by “the Jews”. It is still quite common to hear this. Like me, you’ve probably heard it said that “the Jews killed Jesus”. Indeed, I heard a street preacher in Birmingham say this only a few months ago. But it makes no sense.

Jesus was a Jew. Jesus’ first followers were Jews. His arguments with Pharisees and Sadducees were arguments among Jews. The gospels – particularly Matthew and John – draw our attention to the role of Jewish leaders in persecuting Jesus. But these were the Jewish leaders kept in place by the Romans, not chosen by the Jewish people. The High Priest of the time could keep his job only as long as he kept the Romans happy. These leaders were part of the influential Sadducee faction, resented and opposed by many other Jews for their collaboration with Roman rule.

I dare say that many of these people genuinely believed they could get a better deal for the Jewish people by co-operating with the Romans. John’s Gospel tells us that the High Priest, Caiaphas, feared that the Roman authorities would become so scared of Jesus’ preaching that they would brutally suppress the Jewish people as a whole. According to John’s Gospel, the High Priest supported the execution of Jesus because he thought it was better “to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (that’s John 11,50). Perhaps all of us, at times, can convince ourselves that colluding with injustice will serve a greater good. Father, forgive us, because we don’t know what we’re doing.

But Jesus was sentenced to death by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and killed by the Roman soldiers obeying Pilate’s orders. One of the oldest surviving Roman references to Christians, written by Tacitus in the early second century, says little about them other than that Christ has been executed by Pontius Pilate.

So why have churches for centuries claimed that Jesus was killed by “the Jews”? Well, it’s partly down to anti-Semitism. But also, blaming “the Jews” helps to ignore another awkward truth about the death of Jesus.

At times over the last few centuries, church leaders have been very powerful. They have shared an interest in preserving the status quo. To acknowledge that Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire would mean recognising that the Romans executed revolutionaries, troublemakers, slaves – people who got above themselves. It has always been awkward for some people to accept that Jesus not only sided with outcasts but defied authority and challenged the rich and powerful. Much easier to put the blame on “the Jews”.

Of course, Jesus’ resistance to authority went way beyond a simple political programme for the moment. He challenged all sin, all systems that divide people, all attempts to dismiss some people as less important than others. Love for all is a subversive message. Jesus proclaimed the “Kingdom of God”. In the Greek of the New Testament, this can also be translated as the “Empire of God”. No wonder the authorities of the Roman Empire considered this alternative empire to be a threat. As we heard earlier in the reading from Colossians, God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transfers us to the kingdom of his beloved son.

When we heard from Luke’s Gospel, we saw the soldiers mocking Jesus and saying, “Let him save himself if he is the Messiah!”. They imagined that if Jesus were really powerful, he would use force to bring about his will. To them, power was about violence and coercion. They were not used to the power of love that Jesus embodied.

“Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing”. Well, the Roman soldiers knew they were torturing a man to death, even if they did not understand who that man was. But we might well consider them less guilty that Pontius Pilate and the other leading Romans who gave the orders. Similarly, when we think of the Luftwaffe bombing Coventry, the bombers surely knew they were killing innocent people, even if they did not understand the full impact, but we might want to put more blame on the Nazi leaders who sent them to drop the bombs.

Powerful leaders who give orders, however, are powerful only when people obey their orders. At the same time, to refuse those orders can take almost unimaginable courage unless others do so at the same time. Members of Hitler’s armed forces who did refuse orders were executed almost immediately. Amazingly, some refused and accepted death. But it is hard to judge those who didn’t. So the cycle of sin goes round and round, at times appearing like it can never be broken.

Some years ago, I sat in a café in Jerusalem interviewing an Israeli ex-soldier who had decided to refuse his call-up to the reserves. He had wanted to follow his conscience by treating Palestinians with respect when he was manning checkpoints. But he had come to the conclusion that by serving in the army at all, he was helping to uphold an unjust occupation. He said something which has stuck with me. He said, “You cannot live morally in an immoral system”.

The problem of course is that all of us, to one extent or another, are part of immoral systems. Sometimes, the Kingdom of God breaks through, witnessed in moments of kindness, acts of love, and campaigns for justice. But all of us, nonetheless, are complicit even in the sins that we seek to resist. For example, however ethical you try to be, it is almost impossible not to buy at least some products that have been produced unethically. This is not a reason just to give up and not think about ethics when you buy things! Nor is it a reason to beat yourself up and become obsessive so that you never buy anything unethical, as if that were possible. It is a reason for humility, to recognise that we are all broken people in a broken world, that we commit the very sins against which we protest, that we will constantly mess up even as we pray that God will help us to improve the way we live and to change the world around us.

Sometimes in our confusion, all we can do is to turn to God and say, “Father, forgive us, because we don’t know what we are doing”. And we pray that God will transform us, transform each other, transform our communities and our world.

This is where the historical details of Jesus’ death point to its meaning for all time. To the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails, perhaps it was just another day at work. To the Roman authorities, this was just another troublemaking Jewish peasant who could easily be killed off. Perhaps to the High Priest and his colleagues, this was just another necessary compromise.

But it didn’t work. Crucifixion was supposed to crush people who resisted authority. But resurrection is the ultimate example of resistance to authority: when you’re executed by the state, you’re supposed to stay dead. Jesus, the sinless human being, defeated sin. The divine human being defeated death.

Jesus rose from the dead, because the forces of sin and violence could not hold him. Yes, sin and injustice still have much power in the world. We are still compromised by them and entangled with them. But with Jesus’ resurrection, the forces of sin, oppression and empire are put on notice: the final victory of love and justice is assured, the salvation that comes through grace and forgiveness has begun. As Colossians puts it, in Christ we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. All the power of a mighty empire, all the mockery of armed men, all the cynicism of casual violence, are no match for the power of love embodied by the Christ who in the midst of unbelievable horror says simply “Father, forgive”. 

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

I’m a Christian, and I don’t give a toss what Tesco call their trees

Posted on by symonhill

Some people are getting very angry with Tesco for calling their Christmas trees “evergreen trees”. The usual claims of “they’re banning Christmas” are especially loud this year, backed not only by the usual culture warriors but by full-on violent far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson.

In a year that has seen the far-right advance further in the UK than at any time for decades, they’re making big claims about defending Christianity. They are backed by a handful of far-right clergy, mostly in tiny denominations, and unintentionally helped along by a greater number of clergy and churches who are dithering about how to respond.

As well as talking endlessly on social media about Christmas trees, the far-right are trying to drum up Christian support by getting angry about Christmas markets being called “festive markets” and local councils putting up “winter lights”.

Culture warriors and right-wing nationalists say that people are trying to “ban” Christmas. In reality, nobody is doing anything to stop them using Christmas Trees (derived from a German practice) or traditions of Santa Claus (based on a Turkish saint) to celebrate the birth of Jesus (a Middle Eastern refugee). With no sense of irony, they will do all this to show how British they are.

It is not the name changes, but the people who jump to criticise them, who are trivialising Christmas.

I celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is about things far more important, exciting and life-changing than what what a corporation call their plastic trees.

There will be hundreds of people sleeping rough in unbearably cold weather on Christmas night. There will be many, many more freezing indoors because they can’t afford the heating, while others remain on seemingly endless waiting lists for physical and mental health needs. And that’s just in the UK. Might Jesus not be more concerned about meeting these people’s needs than about whether celebratory trees bear his name?

If you go on Twitter (or “X”), it quickly becomes clear that the far-right’s love of Christmas trees is less about supporting Christians and more about attacking people of other faiths, particularly Muslims. They claim that Tesco and local councils are avoiding the word “Christmas” so as not to “offend” Muslims. I don’t know how many Muslims these people actually speak to, because in reality it would be quite hard to find many – or any – Muslims in the UK who are offended by Christians celebrating Christmas, let alone people who want to “ban” them from doing so.

It is easy to laugh at the far-right’s absurdity. Indeed, sometimes I do. But we are in danger of overlooking a serious threat. Far-right rhetoric has become mainstream in the last year in ways that some of us could not have imagined. With Reform UK leading in the opinion polls and a Labour government pandering to their rhetoric, this is not the time for churches to faff about.

Neutrality in the face of injustice is no part of the calling of a Christian. We must speak out firmly against the far-right’s claim to be defending “Christian” Britain. We must uphold the value and dignity of all human beings as central to what the New Testament, and Christian discipleship, are all about.

If churches don’t act clearly and strongly against the threat, the far-right will advance further. And they will advance in British churches.

There is a lot of talk about “listening” to the concerns of far-right protesters and so on. Of course Christians should listen to everyone. That does not mean we should be neutral about them. We need to listen and challenge. We should be open to challenge ourselves of course. That is no excuse for inaction.

Ironically, it is within Christian teaching that we find the very means to resist people while also listening to them and not hating them. Jesus taught the love of enemies. Paul and other New Testament writers also taught the love of enemies. The love of enemies is central to Christian ethics. It is odd how rarely we talk about it in most churches.

The love of enemies does not mean having no enemies.

Racists are our enemies. Fascists are our enemies. We are called to love them. We are called to see the image of God in them and recognise them as equal human beings. And we are called to stand against them, oppose and speak out against all that they stand for. Love is not neutrality. Love is not passivity. Love is a refusal to descend to the level of those who preach hatred.

Middle class Christians sometimes talk unhelpfully about far-right protesters’ “legitimate concerns”. They often mean concerns around housing, NHS funding and so on, which the far-right blame on migrants. Of course it is right to be concerned about such things. It is not remotely legitimate to blame migrants for them. We need not only to listen to the concerns but to challenge the narrative that the concerns are misused to justify.

I suspect that many far-right leaders know that migration is not the cause of these problems, even if their foot-soldiers have been fooled. Instead of legitimising the far-right’s arguments, we need to put forward a bold alternative vision that champions the rights of migrants and people born in Britain to decent housing and healthcare and public services. These problems are caused not by migration but by inequality and sinful economic structures.

As Christians, let us speak up for the Christ who championed the poor and marginalised, urged the rich to repent, resisted unjust systems and broke down barriers that divided people based on nationality or prejudice.

This is the Christ we need to proclaim loudly at Christmas. This call for love and justice is what Christmas should be about – not the names of commercial trees.

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

The Gospel of Hope on Remembrance Sunday

Posted on by symonhill

On Remembrance Sunday a week ago (9th November 2025), I had the honour of preaching at Renew Inclusive Church, a Baptist church in Cambridge. They are very hospitable and made me very welcome. Below is the text of my sermon.

Although this is the text that I wrote beforehand, I deviated from the wording slightly in practice. However, the substance is the same.

The sermon followed two Bible readings:

What does the word “Remembrance” mean to you?

It seems that the meaning of the word “remembrance” isn’t quite the same as the meaning of the word “memory”. They sound like they should mean the same thing. But we use them differently. “Remembrance” isn’t just something we happen to remember. It’s something we choose to remember. And we’re used to this in Christian worship. When we take Holy Communion later, we’ll hear Jesus’ words: “Do this in remembrance of me”.

So remembrance involves choice: choosing to remember. And often, that isn’t easy. When we remember Jesus being killed, we remember a crucifixion – a human being killed. It’s not easy to think about. Sometimes, when we think about death and suffering, it is easier to forget. Or at least, it can feel easier in the moment to bury painful memories, to ignore difficult feelings, though of course that often turns out to be more difficult in the long run.

On Remembrance Sunday, we are invited to remember war. that is difficult. It is unimaginably difficult for people who have experienced war directly. Those of who have not experienced war directly, or who have only witnessed it from the margins, can be tempted to sanitise war. Instead of listening to the experiences of those who have gone through war, we may talk of honouring them – and then quickly move on.

But suffering isn’t easy to talk about. You might have experienced this if you’ve been bereaved, and well-intentioned people have – understandably – tried to say reassuring things when perhaps what you really need is someone to recognise just how terrible you feel. 

But whether we have experienced war directly, whatever we believe about the rights and wrongs of this war or that war or war generally, we all know that war is indescribably horrific. And if we are serious about remembering war, we have to face reality with honesty.

We do ourselves no favours if we pretend that remembrance is straightforward, easy or uncontroversial. Let’s have the honesty to acknowledge that remembrance is a painful – and often controversial – subject. In the first few years after World War One ended, wealthy people marked the anniversary of the Armistice on 11th November each year by holding a Victory Ball to celebrate. Veterans, struggling with poverty, demonstrated outside the Victory Balls in protest. My own great-grandfather, who fought at the Somme and won five medals in World War One, had to pawn all five of his medals after the war to feed his family. Gradually, the anniversary was marked in a more sombre way. But in 1921, veterans protested against their ongoing poverty by marching past the Cenotaph with pawn tickets pinned to their lapels instead of medals. It was an embarrassment for the government.

Remembrance continues to throw up difficult questions. What should we remember? How should we remember? Who should we remember? Many of us understandably want to remember those with whom we have a personal connection, perhaps people who we know or knew, perhaps those from our own area or who consider to have been on our own side. At the same time, let’s recognise the truth that most people who suffer in war, even most people who fight in war, have limited choice even as to which side they are on. I mentioned that my grand-grandfather fought at the Battle of the Somme. I’m very aware that if he had been born in Berlin instead of Birmingham, he would have fought on the other side at the Battle of the Somme. I’m sure many of you can think of similar examples from your own lives or your own families.

I suggest that the demands of truth, and the Gospel’s call to love our neighbour, mean that we should seek to remember victims of war of all nationalities on Remembrance Sunday. To remember the past is to learn from it. I dare say there are various views in this room about what lessons we should learn from war and about how we build peace. But the good news of Christianity is not about pretending that everything’s okay or that we have all the answers. The Gospel is not a trite reassurance. It’s about hope amidst horror. We have no business proclaiming the hope of the gospel if we do not recognise that we are broken people in a broken world, if we do not recognise the depth of the suffering into which we proclaim good news. We do not have all the answers. We look to God to guide us as we search for them.

Earlier we heard from Matthew’s Gospel, from a passage about unfathomable violence – about a massacre of children. Can any of us imagine anything more horrific? In the world today, civilians make up as much as 90% of war casualties, and the killing of children is – appallingly – not a rare event. Yet Matthew describes this horror right in the middle of the story that proclaims the hope that comes with the birth of Jesus and the failure of Herod to defeat him. Jesus brings hope amidst the horrors of violence, death and war.

I’m sure there are varied views in this room about what lessons we should learn from war, and about how we build peace. I suspect many of us do more to build peace than we realise. I have the privilege of working in a multifaith chaplaincy at Aston University in Birmingham. Every week, I see students reach across divides to build understanding with people who are different to themselves. In Welcome Week in September, I saw students of varied nationalities, faiths, personalities, cultures and sub-cultures simply start chatting, eating and playing games together in the Chaplaincy. It was just after there had been a spate of far-right protests outside accommodation for asylum-seekers, just as parts of the media were stirring up anti-migrant feelings and dividing people against each other, yet here at the grassroots in a university campus, ordinary 18-year-olds were unconsciously defying the hatemongers with their everyday reactions. In the Chaplaincy, I have sat and drunk tea with the President of the student Palestine Society and one of our university’s most pro-Israeli students, simply because they both happened to wander into the Chaplaincy at the same time. I thank God that that they did. I sometimes think our students could do a better job of sorting out the world’s problems than the politicians and diplomats. They restore my faith that God can lead “ordinary” people to achieve reconciliation and resolve differences; to build peace.

Martin Luther King spoke of two forms of peace: a “negative” peace, which is only the absence of conflict, and a “positive” peace, which involves the presence of justice. He insisted that building peace does not mean avoiding conflict. Indeed, building peace might put us in conflict with those who uphold injustice. But King encouraged people to engage in conflict nonviolently, with love for enemies and with a hope of reconciliation.

These two forms of peace – negative and positive – are very much on show in the New Testament.

The Roman Empire claimed to bring peace to the places they conquered. The Roman authorities said they offered conquered peoples “peace and security”. This supposed peace consisted of an absence of conflict. And there was no visible conflict because it was violently suppressed. With their enemies killed, there was no-one to disturb the “peace”! The apostle Paul mocked the Roman Empire’s claims about peace. In his first Letter to Thessalonian Christians, he wrote, “Just as they are saying, ‘There is peace and security’, sudden destruction will come upon them” (that’s 1st Thessalonians 5,3). To his original readers, it would have been obvious that the people saying, ‘There is peace and security’ were the Roman authorities. Paul and his readers knew that that the Empire had not brought any real peace or security.

In contrast to the fake and brutal peace of the Roman Empire, the New Testament offers us the just and lasting peace of Jesus Christ. “My peace I give to you,” says Jesus to his followers at John 14,27. “I do not give as the world gives”. This is a different peace to the imperial stifling of conflict or dissent. This is the peace demonstrated by Jesus in the nonviolent defiance of turning the other cheek. This is the peace of the upside-down Kingdom of God in which the last are first, the poor are blessed, the weak are strong and power is found in love.

Let us remember war with honesty to recognise its horrors and moral confusions. Let us remember war with humility to learn from those who have experienced it differently or more directly than us. Let us pray that God will guide us in learning as we remember, so that we may work with others to build peace – not the peace of trite reassurance, or the avoidance of conflict, or the suppression of dissent, but peace built on the justice of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus. So that as we learn from the realities of war, God will give us the hope, and show us the tools, with which to beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning-hooks.

If we’re not preaching good news, we’re not preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Posted on by symonhill

On Sunday 11th October this year, I had the honour of preaching at Kingshill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire (pictured). The village of Little Kingshill is a more rural location than I am used to preaching in, but they challenged my assumptions about rural churches by being a very lively, active and welcoming congregation. Below is the text of my sermon.

Although this is the text that I wrote beforehand, I deviated from the wording slightly in practice. However, the substance is the same (the content overlaps partially with my sermon in Oxford the previous week, which you can see in my previous post).

The sermon followed two Bible readings:

Several times a week, I walk between New Street station in Birmingham, and Aston University where I work as a chaplain. One day I was walking back to the station after quite a tiring day and I passed one of the numerous Christian street preachers who can be found in central Birmingham. He was telling passers-by that they were in danger. He was warning them that they had been living with no regard to God or the future, enjoying themselves without thought of the consequences but that they would soon find that they had – as he put it – “maxed out the credit card” – and that they had a debt that they were unable to pay.

I looked round at the people in the street. There were people like me, on the way home from work. There were parents with small children, some of them clearly struggling. There were homeless or semi-homeless people begging on the sides of the street or under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, slumped in corners. There were people seeming harassed and stressed as they went in and out of shops. A few people seemed cheerful. A lot didn’t. But on the whole they didn’t look like a group of people enjoying riotous lifestyles with no thought of the consequences. But the preacher continued regardless, warning them of the punishment they would face.

I considered approaching the preacher and saying, “Have you got any good news?” Because all he seemed to be offering was warnings, judgement and condemnation. He perhaps had forgotten that the word “gospel” translates the Greek word “evangelion”, which means something like “triumph,” “victory” or “good news”. I do wonder sometimes if preachers like this go round knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the bad news?”

The Bible makes clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Mark’s Gospel, the oldest of the gospels we find in the Bible, begins simply, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”. Paul, when writing in the midst of persecution and sufferings emphasises that the message he preaches is good news.

In the reading we heard earlier, from Luke Chapter 4, we saw Jesus going into the Nazareth synagogue and reading from Isaiah’s declaration of “good news to the poor” and making clear that he had come to fulfill that prophecy. The gospel is particularly good news to the poor. Jesus proclaims freedom to the oppressed. But even for those who are rich and powerful, Jesus has good news. Later in Luke’s Gospel, we see the rich man Zacchaeus giving away half his wealth and finding joy in joining Jesus’ community of equals.

If we are not preaching good news, we are not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now there is lots of bad news in the world. We do not need to preach bad news. People already know the bad news. People know how horrible the world can be. You have only to switch on the radio or open a social media platform to be reminded. In the last fortnight alone, we have seen the horrendous anti-semitic murders at a Manchester synagogue, to be followed only two days later by an arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven in Sussex. As we hold our breath to see if the deal to end fighting in Gaza is successful, we can barely imagine the suffering that continues there – to say nothing of Ukraine and elsewhere. In a world that has enough food to feed everyone in it, if only we organised it differently, people die every day from preventable hunger. Can there be any bigger sin in the world? 

That’s why the gospel can never be cheap or easy good news. The good news that Jesus brings is much deeper than trite or shallow reassurances. When I became a Christian in the 1990s, there was a popular worship chorus that included the line, “In your presence, my problems disappear”. What nonsense. What blasphemy – to present Jesus as an individual problem-solving machine. Telling someone that their problems will be over if they put their faith in Jesus will ring hollow if they are shivering in the cold because they cannot afford both heating or food, or because they are frightened of leaving their house because the far right have been marching in their street.

And this leads me to the other Bible reading we heard earlier – from Lamentations.

If you ask people to choose their favourite books in the Bible, I doubt that Lamentations would feature in many people’s answers. The content of Lamentations can be roughly summed up as follows:

Chapter 1: Everything’s dreadful.
Chapter 2: Everything’s still dreadful.
Chapter 3: Yes, everything’s still dreadful. But there are, possibly, some glimmers of hope.

And so it goes on. Most of the book is lamenting suffering and injustice. It was probably written in the fourth century BCE following the fall of Jerusalem, admist all the poverty and oppression that followed that event. But as the Book of Lamentations goes on, glimmers of hope appear. They are never more than glimmers. There is no triumphant finale or happy ending. But sometimes, this is how life feels. Sometimes, this is how life is. This is a book that recognises the reality of suffering while beginning to find hope. 

Those who preach bad news like the street preacher I mentioned, and those who preach a trite positivity with no depth to it, both make the same mistake. They both overlook the reality and extent of suffering that many people are already experiencing in their lives.

Proclaiming good news does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. It means proclaiming hope – not trite, shallow hope but deep, meaningful hope – in the midst of suffering.

And this takes us back to that reading from Luke. We saw Jesus returning to his home town, where no doubt some people remembered him from childhood. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they ask. But now he’s standing up in the synagogue, reading Isaiah and proclaiming “good news for the poor” and “freedom for the oppressed”.

Then Jesus tells his audience that the scripture is fulfilled now in their hearing. How absurd that must have sounded. The Roman imperial forces were in control. Many historians suggest that Galilee was struggling with severe poverty. The people who heard Jesus knew that he had lived with them in Nazareth. He had endured the Roman oppression. He had lived through the poverty and injustices that at least some of them were experiencing.

It is difficult to know why they became so angry. Perhaps they thought he was arrogant. Perhaps they feared the Romans’ response. Proclaiming the Gospel sometimes leads to hostility. Nonetheless, it is good news offered in the midst of bad news, a deep hope despite the horrors around it.

The God of Jesus Christ is not a god who causes suffering but a god who suffers with us. He endured one of the most unimaginably painful forms of death that human cruelty has ever invented. He was sentenced to death by the forces of the Roman Empire that were occupying Palestine.

The Roman authorities may have thought that they could easily get rid of a troublemaking Jewish peasant. They were wrong. When God raised Jesus from the dead, the victory of love over evil was assured. The forces of sin, oppression and empire were put on notice that their defeat had begun. With the resurrection, the triumph of the good news was assured.

This does not mean that we should simply sit back, accept things as they are, and wait for God to intervene in the future. Jesus promised his followers that the Holy Spirit would be with them now. The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, breaking into our mundane and often unjust realities even as we await its total fulfilment in the future.

For as we’ve watched the news in recent weeks, it can be hard to believe that, as Martin Luther King said, “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”. The gospel we proclaim is not a naïve or shallow hope that things might get better one day. It is rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We glimpse the Kingdom of God in small moments of kindness and in global campaigns for justice. The Kingdom of God flashes into our presence when people reach across boundaries and recognise their common humanity. Just over a week ago, we saw the reality of sin with the vile murders at the Manchester synagogue. And we glimpsed the Kingdom of God when people of many faiths and none declared their solidarity with Manchester’s Jews. Working at a university chaplaincy, one of the most memorable moments of the day for me was when a Muslim member of staff used the chaplaincy prayer room to pray for the victims and for British Jews in general. In the midst of horror, let us keep our eyes open for the flashes of light.

There are times when I want to ignore the bad news. Sometimes I want to pretend I haven’t heard it – whether it’s global, national or personal news. But of course some of us can ignore bad news more easily than others. You can ignore war – unless you’re in the war zone. You can ignore news of starvation – unless you’re starving.

So let’s be prepared to recognise the reality of bad news, to listen to people who are hurting, to allow ourselves to be challenged or confused, to show solidarity perhaps to people under attack – whether that be Jewish worshippers in Manchester, children bombed in Gaza, or the many groups frequently scapegoated by parts of the media – whether that be Muslims, Jews, trans people, benefit recipients or refugees crossing the Channel in small boats.

Let’s also recognise our own role in the sins of the world. The world cannot be divided simplistically into goodies and baddies. In recent days for example I have been very conscious of the times that I have failed to challenge anti-Semitism. Recognising our sins does not mean we should spend time beating ourselves up. Rather it means that we can rejoice in God’s forgiveness, pray for God’s forgiveness for others and ask God to guide us in the present and the future.

Because in the midst of the horrors that we experience, we can cling onto, and gently point others to, the good news that we find in Jesus. This is not a shallow hope that comes only when we’re feeling good. God loves us however we’re feeling. It is not a calculated optimism based on an analysis of probabilities. It is a hope found in Jesus Christ. A hope, a faith, that the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus is ultimately stronger than the all the might and power and violence of the kingdoms and empires and armies of this world.

Jesus showed the way in the passage that we heard earlier, from Luke’s Gospel. He declared, quoting Isaiah, that God had anointed him to bring good news. And this is true for all of us. For me, for you, for every one of us! Every one of can say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release from suffering,” and so on. God has anointed you and me to share the good news in our lives – while recognising that some people may understandably find it hard to believe.

We are all broken people in a broken world, and we are compromised by the sins against which we protest. Yet however often we fail, God will not tire of forgiving us. So when our focus weakens or wanders, let’s ask God to keep us focused on the Kingdom of God, on the Christ whose love and justice are triumphing over the sins and evils that see us divided and mistreating each other.

Hatred and injustice will not win. Love will triumph. This is the Gospel we proclaim. And it is good news.  

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.