St. John Baptist Berkswell

08/09/2026

06/09/2026

Junior Church @ Berkswell Church is BACK! 🥳🥳🥳

It was lovely to see so many of you return after the summer holidays!

Today we were looking at Psalms - specifically Psalm 23.

The children discussed what a Psalm is, and what Psalm 23 is trying to tell us - how God makes peace, and how God loves us and protects us.

They then engaged with three different craft activities all to do with LOVE, PEACE and PROTECTION. Well done everyone - a fabulous effort by all 🙌⛪️🎉

05/09/2026

A little late but… JOIN US TOMORROW 🎉⛪️🙌

01/09/2026

A sermon preached at Berkswell church, Sunday 30th August 2026

Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. Year A

Jeremiah 15: 15 -21
Romans 12: 9 – end
Matthew 16: 21 – end

Get behind me Satan. You have set your mind on human things and not the things of God.
Let your love be genuine


One can’t help but feel a little sympathy for Peter. One minute Jesus is giving him the Keys to the Gates of Heaven itself, the next he is dismissed as the very embodiment all that is sinful. First he is given full authority in Heaven and on earth, to loose and to bind, to absolve sin and to impose penance, and then he himself is firmly put in his place, as the most sinning of sinners. One minute he is Peter the Rock, the human foundation upon which Jesus builds his church, and the next he is a different kind of stone altogether, one you trip over, a stumbling block, a hindrance that causes nothing but damage and disaster.

We are at Caesarea Philippi, in hill country to the north of the Sea of Galilee, on the slopes of Mount Hermon, in the Golan Heights, the border land between the modern states of Israel and Syria. At this spot, the fisherman then called Simon has openly recognised that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. He is blessed by Jesus, given a new name in Peter and a new identity as the Rock. He is granted the Keys to Heaven itself and invested with spiritual authority. That was our Gospel reading last Sunday. And no sooner does Peter offer his wholehearted support in the event of Jesus being ill-treated by the civil or religious authorities, than he is cursed and humiliated, rebuked for setting his mind on human concerns and not the things of heaven.

What should he have said or done instead? How should Peter have set aside human concerns and thought only of the divine? How could any of us? Does it mean simply that we should withdraw from human affairs, from political involvement, into a quiet form of contemplative spiritual life, a life in which we rise above the troubles of everyday life both great and small, local, national and international, and seek to live a life of quiet prayer? There are many Christians, very many, who have done this, and who still do. It is a good way of life.

But not the only way. Straight after this shocking castigation Jesus says that we are to take up the cross. And to take up the cross is to become no less than the body of Christ. It was the frail all-too-human body of Jesus, God-made-human, that before us carried that cross. The cross of Crucifixion, the cross of humiliation and ignominy, as well as of agony and of an excruciating death, was carried by Jesus, God-made-Man, carried literally on his all-too-human, frail, vulnerable body, publicly, through the streets of Jerusalem. When Jesus calls us to take up the cross he calls us to be his frail vulnerable, cross-carrying body, publicly in our streets today.

Just as Jesus was himself God in the very particular there and then of Galilee and Judaea of the early first century, Jesus asks us to be his cross-carrying body in the very particular here and now of Berkswell, Warwickshire, England, in the 2020s. To call ourselves the Body of Christ includes recognising two things: that we are to do the work of God in this place and at this time, and that we do so carrying the weight of the knowledge of our own frailty, our own vulnerability, our own weakness and fragility, both individually and even together as one body. To take up the cross and follow, to become the Body of Christ, is to show that human frailty to the powers of the world, a glorious frailty that shames brute force and domination. To take up the cross and to follow, to be the Body of Christ, to set our minds on heavenly things, does not mean withdrawing from the world, but rather it is to be in the world without acceding to the brute power of the world and without conforming to its false values. To be present, but different, and by being present and different to transform and convert, transform and convert others, yes, and to begin that process by transforming and converting our own selves. Paul tells it plainly in our second reading: To bless those who curse us, bless and not curse, to refrain from repaying evil with evil, never to avenge, but to refrain and withhold, to feed our enemies and give them something to drink, and to overcome evil, not with more evil but instead with goodness. Paul sums it up in the opening phrase of our reading: Let your love be genuine.

This is what conforming our minds to the mind of Christ himself means. This is what it is to set our minds not on human things but instead on things divine. Our Salvation includes the transformation of our minds and our hearts as preparation for our full participation in the Kingdom of God’s love. We are partners with God in the serious work of the conversion of our thinking, of the transformation of our minds, as well as our hearts, so that our minds do become set not on things human, but rather on things divine.

From earliest days the teachers of the church understood this. We are, they affirmed, made in the image of God and we are being formed by God after his own likeness, a formation that continues all through our lives, until death and if necessary, beyond death, such is God’s unconditional love for us. Being made in the image of God we already possess, frail and vulnerable though we be, the capacity and desire for virtue, the capacity and desire for right and proper thinking, the capacity and desire to set our minds on the things of God. This is what being in the image of God means: having the capacity and desire for goodness. It is likewise axiomatic that we are still incomplete, still all sinners, that we all fall short, that we all set our minds on the wrong things. Each and every one of us. But being sinners does not mean that we are inherently bad. Quite the opposite. None of us is beyond redemption, as Mark explained powerfully last week, because all of us, each of us, is made in the image of God with the capacity and desire for virtue. Sin is not a character flaw, but rather a mistake in our judgement.

Now, I do not wish to to dismiss our sin as trivial and insignificant. It isn’t, it is a serious matter, a very serious matter. But it is rooted not in the design of human nature, but in a mistake that we make in our application, a mistake in our understanding, our thinking.

Those first great teachers of Christianity, knew this. Humans, they taught, do choose goodness. Sin lies in the mistake of choosing, the wrong goodness, choosing a lesser good instead of a greater good, in mistaking something that is partially good for something more fully good, never mind for that which is the best. Sin is rooted not in a lack of desire for goodness, rather sin is a mistake in our understanding of what goodness is. Like children we seek easy and transient pleasure, mistaking it for something that which is truly good and lasting. Sin is not a character flaw, but rather a mistake.

The ultimate good, that which we ought to prefer above all else is the Love that is God, the love of God and the love of our neighbours, each of whom, like us, is in the image of the God who is Love.

In our pride we mistake our own uniqueness for superiority, thinking ourselves better than our neighbours. In our envy we resent the happiness of our neighbours, thinking their happiness excludes ours. In our wrath we misdirect our anger, blaming others rather than examining our selves and our own actions and responsibility. In each of these we choose the lesser good of love for ourselves over the higher good of love for our neighbour. In our avarice we seek to find happiness in things rather than with people. In our gluttony we seek satisfaction in looking after ourselves rather than seeing to the needs of others. In our lust we separate s*x from the love of another person, use the person as a means and treat the s*x as an end in itself and not as an expression of love. In each of these, we choose the lesser good of our own satisfaction over the higher good of loving our neighbour. In the indifference of our sloth, we simply fail to choose goodness at all. This is thinking the way that men think, and not in the manner of God

Peter is emblematic of us all. Like Peter, we sin, not because we are wicked by nature, but because we mistake a lesser good for the greater good, the greatest good, that is the Love that itself is God. After this shocking rebuke, Peter continued to sin, most prominently in his three-fold denial on the night Jesus was betrayed. Like Peter, we too will continue to sin. Peter was redeemed and blessed after the Resurrection. Like Peter we shall be redeemed and we shall be blessed in the Resurrection. At Caesarea Philippi Jesus castigated Peter for his sin – but before that he had already chosen him and blessed him. Like Peter, though we sin and set our minds on human desires, though we too deserve castigation, we have already, all of us, been chosen, and already, all of us been blessed.

Version of 25th August 2026
As preached.

29/08/2026

T O M O R R O W 🎉🎉 Come along to our Sunday services and join our wonderful congregation! All are welcome 🤗

25/08/2026

Sermon delivered by the Rector on Sunday 23rd August 2026
Trinity 12A- Isaiah 51:1-6; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

There’s a saying, perhaps apocryphal, attributed to the flamboyant former Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood. He had gone to see the new Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and when he emerged, he was surrounded by journalists who asked what he had thought of it. “Not as good as the book, he said.

The musical presents Jesus as a radical revolutionary. But his heroic attempts to institute an ethic of love culminate in his ignoble death on the Cross. In Jesus Christ Superstar, there is no resurrection story. Jesus remains dead. He is no God. The contrast with that other great musical of the era, Godspell, couldn’t be starker. As Mary Magdalen declares in words beautifully sung in the original production by Yvonne Elliman, Jesus is “a man, just a man”.

A radical revolutionary. A great moral teacher. Mahatma Gandhi respected Jesus as such, and so do many people today. But not God Incarnate. Whether Jesus was just a man, albeit mightily blessed by God, was a vigorous debating point from the get-go of Christianity. The great Council of Nicaea was convoked 1700 years ago to determine precisely that question. Was Jesus just a man, though the firstborn of creation, as the theologian Arius thought, or was he, as the Council eventually determined, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father”?

Who did Jesus’ contemporaries think he was? The crowds seemed to assume that he was just a man, although a very special one. According to our Gospel reading, the people thought he might be John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. There is no suggestion that they thought he was actually God in human form. And it is not absolutely clear that even Peter, one of Jesus’ inner circle, whom Jesus here praises for his divinely inspired insight, made that connection. He declares that Jesus is the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. However, the figure of the Messiah and the language of divine sonship were already well established in the Jewish theological lexicon, and didn’t in and of themselves imply that Jesus was the pre-existent Word of God come to earth.

Contemporary Jews understood the Messiah to be a political figure who would restore Israel's national independence, as it had enjoyed under King David and King Solomon. And the language of divine sonship, used copiously in the Psalms, was traditionally associated with figures like David and Solomon who were especially blessed by God, and with whom God was present in a special way. So, to declare, as Peter does, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”, does not necessarily mean that Peter recognises Jesus as God. Indeed, in the very next passage, Jesus issues Peter a stinging rebuke for suggesting that the Messiah must suffer and die in Jerusalem. Peter may have grasped something of Jesus’ identity but badly misunderstood his vocation because he had not yet discerned who Jesus truly was.

Jesus’ identity as the living God in human form is a truth that only emerges gradually throughout the gospel. Neither Jesus nor the disciples explicitly say anything to confirm Jesus’ divine status in Matthew’s gospel. Nevertheless, throughout the gospel, Matthew continually uses what I call ‘the language of excess’. Jesus is greater than Moses, greater than Solomon, greater than John the Baptist. He exceeds these prototypical prophets, priests and kings in honour. He has the authority to reaffirm and redraw the shape of God’s law and covenant with Israel. “Moses said this…but I say to you.” Jesus is not just a man, but more than a man.

But is Jesus God? Matthew's answer is yes, though his approach is more subtle. The fullness of Jesus' identity is carefully woven into the fabric of the entire narrative. At the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus is declared to be Emmanuel – God with us. Jesus later promises to be with his disciples wherever two or more are gathered in his name. At the Gospel’s conclusion, Jesus declares that he will be with his disciples to the end of the age. Only for the living God would this be possible. As indeed would be the capacity to forgive sins, control the wind and the waves, to raise the dead, and, by an act of the Spirit’s power, to suffer, die and rise again. This is only possible for the living, present and sovereign God.

There are those who claim that the idea of a god in human form was a later development in Christian understanding. But Jesus was being treated as a being worthy of worship astonishingly early. Writing in the 50s, a mere 20 years after Jesus’ death, Paul quotes an already well-established hymn that declares that, though divine, Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but took the form of a servant. And the form of words we call the grace already contains a trinitarian structure that assumes that Jesus is someone to whom prayer can be addressed: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen.” From the earliest times, Christians have been praying to God the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.

And they were doing so because they had discovered through personal experience that Jesus was the one who saves us from our sins, who meets us in the pits of our darkest predicaments and our deepest fears and hauls us out. I have been deeply moved by the testimonies of two people who have recently declared themselves to be Christian: the Somali-born cultural commentator Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the British comedian Russell Brand.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has come to Christianity from a Muslim background and a spell as an atheist. She fell into addiction and deep depression when she discerned that her atheism was not working for her existentially. It was when her therapist told her he could not find anything physically or psychologically wrong with her, but was, he said, “spiritually bankrupt”, that she discovered she needed God, and when she surrendered to God, she sensed that “something was lifting”. Her atheism, she said, had led her into a “nihilistic vacuum” because it failed adequately to address the question of the meaning and purpose of life.

Russell Brand's conversion story is rather different to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s. was recently baptised in the River Thames with Bear Grylls present, after attending an Alpha course and attending Church. He has said that he had long been dissatisfied with the chaos of his life and his need for some kind of higher power to deliver him from his addictions. He said he needed God; he needed Christ; he needed to be changed. He saw his baptism as an opportunity to be reborn. He said he needed not mere self-improvement, but forgiveness and transformation. Only Christ could enable this, he said.

These are powerful testimonies. In their different ways, they embody an understanding that no mere man, programme of self-help, or philosophy of life could rescue them from what oppressed them. They needed a power above and beyond themselves to lift them from the ‘slough of despond’ and mire into which they had descended each in their different way. They needed Jesus Christ, because Christ is God, who alone can rescue us in our times of trouble.

This is the truth that the Church recognised and enshrined in its worship, prayer and doctrine. Jesus Christ is both fully God and wholly Man, and only the one who is both fully God and wholly Man can rescue us from the shackles of sin and transform us from one level of glory to another. God had to become what we are, so that we could become what God is; God had to assume our humanity so that he could heal what afflicts us.

The apostle Peter was making good progress when he declared Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But he was yet to learn, through his own failures and experiences of restoration, what Jesus had come to earth to do and what that revealed about his true nature – Jesus was not just a man, or merely more than a man, but Peter’s Lord and God.

How will you reply to Jesus’ question: Who do you say that I am? For you, is Jesus just a failed revolutionary, or a good moral teacher? Or is he your Lord and God?

Are you mired in the depths of chaos, disorder or depression? Then come to Jesus and, like Hirsi Ali, experience that sense of lifting. For he is not just a man, or more of a man, but your Lord and God too.

And for that, thanks be to God.

16/08/2026

Sermon preached on Sunday, 16th August 2026
Trinity 11A
Readings: Isaiah 56:1. 6-8; Romans 11: 1-2IaI, 29-32; Matthew 15:10-28

A few decades ago, there was a billboard advert for a dog food called ‘Pedigree Winalot’ with the caption, “Surely generations of dogs can’t be wrong”. Could the same be said for Christians and the truth of Christianity? “Surely generations of Christan’s can’t be wrong”. Of course, the mere fact that Christianity has been around for 2000 years isn’t itself a robust argument for its metaphysical truth. After all, Christian claims throughout its long history could just be a tenacious falsehood. But at a time when the Church seems to be declining in numerical strength, at least in the major denominations, with shrinking congregations, fewer clergy, and the closure of Church buildings, it is worth reminding ourselves that we have been here before, and that Church history is littered with the evidences of remarkable historical surprises, with unexpected religious revivals, from unforeseen\ quarters, which not only created new Christian denominations, but reanimated traditional forms of Christianity which had seemingly lapsed into obsolescence.

The same was true for the earliest Church, at the time that the Apostle Paul was writing, and the gospels were being written. It is easy to forget that Christianity was in its origins a movement within Judaism. The earliest disciples were observant Jews, who profoundly believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, called by the Jewish God, to fulfil Israel’s story – which had begun with the patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - and had continued with the Jewish prophets – such as Isaiah and Jeremiah – under the tutelage of kings like David and Solomon. Many early Christians passionately believed that the role of the Messiah was to restore the Kingdom of Israel to the political independence that it had enjoyed in the glory days of those heroic early Israelite monarchs. Just before his Ascension, Jesus’ disciples ask him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’(Acts 1:6). For the earliest Christians, Jesus was incontrovertibly a Jewish Messiah who had returned for the sake of the Jewish people, and the sake of the Jewish nation.

Yet the brute reality faced by the early Christian mission was the conspicuous lack of success in persuading its Jewish audience of its claims about the Jewish Messiah. Instead, the gospel message was met with extreme hostility by its Jewish interlocutors, which serendipitously drove the Christian mission outwards beyond its Jewish borders into the Roman Imperial hinterland where it met, completely unexpectedly, with astonishing success. Time and again, when Paul and his companions engage Jewish synagogues in Gentile lands, they are stringently rebuffed, only to find, on the rebound, a much more receptive, supportive, and enthusiastic Gentile audience. And this poses the first great critical dilemma in the early Christian movement: how do we make sense practically and theologically of this astonishing historical surprise? How do we make sense of Israel’s story in the context of the undeniable fact that many more Gentiles are responding positively to the Gospel message than the Jews are?

Are the new gentile converts simply to be absorbed into Judaism? Is the Gentile mission, God’s Plan B, the discontinuous alternative to the failure of a positive domestic response? Or, as I maintain, with the benefit of hindsight, is the gentile mission the wholly intelligible development of God’s plan and purposes for the world, already evident in the deepest layers of the biblical tradition?

That truth is implicit in our gospel reading, which I think reflects something of the tension between the Jewish and Gentile missions the earliest Christian evangelists encountered. Jesus and his disciples have ventured into the distinctly gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, in modern-day Lebanon. There, they encounter a desperate woman who is sufficiently aware of Jesus’ reputation as a Jewish miracle worker to approach him to heal and revivify her moribund daughter. Very significantly, Matthew emphasises the hostility of her gentile pedigree by calling her a Canaanite, in contrast to Mark’s Syrophoenician woman. Matthew is emphasising that this woman lies symbolically and firmly outside the scope of biblical hope and God’s blessings. Indeed, in apparent harmony with the rejectionism of his own disciples, Jesus declares that his mission is for the Jews alone, “I have only come for the lost sheep of Israel”.

But the story subverts the logic of Jesus’ apparently uncompromising declaration. The apparent religious chauvinism underpinning Jesus’ appeal to fairness, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (the standard pejorative euphemism for pagan Gentiles), is undone by the woman’s brilliant riposte, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. For that, and for the only time in the Gospel anywhere, Jesus declares a person, this Canaanite woman, to have great faith, and her daughter is healed instantly. The blessings of God do not come with an ascriptive restriction, based on ethnicity, s*x or socioeconomic status. There is a wideness in God’s mercy.

But this radical inclusivity of Jesus is not an arbitrary, gracious exception, an ad hominem favour Jesus does this woman, but the development of a principle that lies embedded in the very deepest layers of the Jewish tradition. Recall Elijah’s similar miracle at the request of the widow of Zarephath, also in Syro-Phoenicia. But more deeply and expansively consider our reading from Isaiah. The numbers of those who hold to God’s covenant will not be restricted to the outcasts of Israel but extend to the foreigners who will join themselves to the Lord and hold fast to God’s covenant. God’s house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples. God will gather to the outcasts, others besides those already gathered.

For good reason, Isaiah is sometimes referred to as ‘the Fifth Gospel ’. This passage is a presentiment, an intuitive anticipation, of a truth that was always implicit in Israel’s story but becomes fully realised in the life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and spirit of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus Christ. Recall Abraham, the father of all patriarchs. God declares that he is to be father, not of a nation, but of nations. And in Isaiah and Micah’s great end-time vision, every family under heaven will gather together at the house of prayer in God’s restored city – the new Jerusalem. Jesus is the Son of Abraham, and, as the Canaanite women recognised, the Son of David.

The success of the Gentile mission in early Christianity was the fruition of the deepest streams of biblical principle. But it posed a dilemma that caused Paul’s greatest theological struggle in Romans 9-11, one he does not quite resolve to his satisfaction. In the face of the fact that many ethnic Jews have rejected the message, is the answer to turn these gentile Christians into new-fangled Jews, superseding ethnic Israel? By no means, for in Jesus Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. Does this mean then that Christianity is the new universal, generic religion, floating free of its Jewish heritage? By no means, Paul says. Gentiles have no basis for boasting. Indeed, they are like a wild shoot, grafted into the Jewish stem rooted in Israel’s whole history. So how can we account for the widespread Jewish rejection of the gospel? Paul says this was so that mercy could be extended to the Gentiles through the gospel message. But that’s all very well for the Gentiles, but that doesn’t do the Jews much good. The best answer Paul can advance is his conviction that with the Gentile influx, the Jews who had rejected the gospel message would be moved to jealousy and return to the Messiah’s fold. Paul ends, “And all Israel will be saved.”

The gospel reading provides the story of God’s radical inclusion; Paul provides the theology. Isaiah provides the soil in which the principle of God’s radical inclusion is embedded.

We do not know what form the next astonishing historical surprise for the Church and for Christianity will take. As is the nature of surprises, we have to wait for it, and respond to it appropriately with all the practical and theological skill God has bestowed on us. But whatever form it takes, it will involve on our part an invitation to enter into God’s story, to which the Jewish people, and the story of Israel, will always be central. For the Jews are the people of the law, and of the covenant, of the patriarchs, the prophets, and kings. However, it was God’s intention from the beginning that this story was to be a source of blessing, not for the Jews alone, but for all nations under heaven, indeed the whole of creation. The Bible story is the story of a God who repeatedly reaffirms and redraws the covenant, widening its scope to embrace the world he loves and has blessed.

As Christians, we do not offer the world a generic religion, but a story, rooted in the history of a particular people, but with branches in every domain of humankind, testifying to the God who so loved the world that he came amongst us as one of us, inaugurating a kingdom of mercy, justice and peace, which is both now and not yet. And for that, thanks be to God.

Amen.