Praise God from whom all blessings flow - Part 2

 A reflection in the June 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parish magazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise, was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken, Bishop of  Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Last month, I began to tell the story of creation in a new way, based on the findings of modern science. It does not conflict in any essential way with the old story we read in Exodus, in which we learn that God sees all he has made to be very good, and that we human beings are made in his image.

The God-given laws of nature are fine tuned to make possible the galaxies, stars and planets we observe. Through the continuing process of evolution, the same laws of nature have led to the bewildering diversity of life on our planet Earth, and quite possibly elsewhere in the universe. Evolution is the way our God continually creates diversity.

Evolution is not just a blind force of competition, in which the strong survive and the weak die – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. More important is the natural selection of cooperative behaviour. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, we see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Evolution favours cooperation between diverse creatures, building ecosystems: relationships and communities in which they flourish mutually. Consider, for example, the beautiful three-cornered dance between insects which pollinate plants in return for nectar and pollen, plants which produce fruit and seeds to feed animals, and animals which disperse seeds to make new plants.

Evolution also favours altruistic behaviour in social species. Sterile worker bees and ants tend and protect the eggs and larvae of their fertile sister the queen. Most birds and mammals will defend their babies even at the cost of their own lives.

Praise him all creatures here below!

So what about human beings like you and me? At our best we extend the altruism we see in other social species to our pets, to strangers, and to the rest of creation. This is the basis of the human emotion we call love. It is an echo of the self-giving love of God we discern in Jesus Christ. We are made in God’s image.

God has forged us through evolution from clever apes. Of all God’s creatures here on earth, we are the only ones who can imagine a future, make plans to achieve it, and act to do so. But for all our cleverness, our human plans do not always work out. Our future is always uncertain. We do well to remember that we are not masters of the universe: God is, and his laws don’t change.

Just as God has made us clever, so God has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. It is through our conscience that God’s Holy Spirit inspires us to make the right choices, so reaping a harvest of good which nourishes our souls.

We are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe. Our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. It is hard to be good. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul.

But like a loving father, God does not wish the consequences of our sins to poison our souls, to consign us to eternal death, cut off forever from his loving kindness. He has given us the example of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to show us how to escape that fate. If we repent of our sins, God will forgive them. And as St John tells us, Jesus prays to his loving Father for us, asking him to give us eternal life in him, ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).

Eternal life is not the same as everlasting life. Our lives are finite. They are like threads winding through the four dimension of space and time, interacting with the threads of other creatures. They begin at our conception and end at our death, after which all that makes us human is dispersed. But our God is outside the confines of space-time. He loves us unconditionally. He rejoices at the love we show for each other and for his other creatures summed over the whole of our life-thread, while he weeps over our failures to love as he does. Our resurrection to eternal life is not physical. It is to abide in the timeless presence of our loving God, who knows and loves us completely, from our first beginning to our very end.

Praise him above the angelic host!

So what of the future? We human beings are the product of an unfinished process. God continues to create the universe he loves, and our species, through evolution.

The French palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the biosphere of which we are part is evolving to become a noösphere. This consists of human minds and souls interacting with each other and with the rest of creation, moving toward a final point of unification with God. He named this the Omega point. He speculated that it resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is ‘God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, through him all things were made’.

If Teilhard de Chardin is right, then perhaps we imperfect human beings will evolve over countless eons towards the Omega point of unity with God. Perhaps our descendants in the far distant future will become the angelic host, perfected saints!

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost!

Forgiveness

Erica Kirk speaking at the memorial service of her husband Charlie Kirk

Article printed in the October 2025 issue of Grapevine, the news sheet of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I suspect few if any of us had heard of Charlie Kirk before his foul murder in America on 10^th September. Aged 18, he set up Turning Point USA to advocate for conservative values on school and university campuses around the USA. He became deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, cultivated friendship with many of its leaders, and is credited with encouraging many young people to vote for Trump in 2024. Since his assassination, MAGA is now trying to make him into a martyr for the MAGA cause, justifying persecution of their enemies.

Like most if not all of us, I detest Donald Trump. He claims to be a Christian, but his words and actions make a mockery of it. He is an avowed enemy of the liberal, democratic views I espouse. He is making our world a much more dangerous place, and blighting the lives of millions, not least in his own country. But Trump is an old man, two years older even than me. His confused and rambling speech, and erratic decision making, suggest he may be developing dementia. He will not last forever. What really concerns me is the MAGA movement he has created, which looks set on establishing an amoral autarchy to perpetuate a US government where might is right, and the purpose of the state is to punish opponents and enrich a coterie of billionaires.

I don’t seek to disparage Charlie Kirk’s evangelical Christian faith, but I am disgusted by his political views. He facilitated Trump, espousing Christian nationalism, young earth creationism, climate change denial, and islamophobia.

Charlie’s wife Erika, however, seems to be made of different stuff. In an emotional eulogy for her dead husband at a memorial service in Arizona before a crowd of more than 100,000, she bravely offered forgiveness to the shooter who killed Charlie, saying,

"My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life..."

"On the cross, our Saviour said: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' That man - that young man - I forgive him. I forgive him because it's what Christ did. And it's what Charlie would do."

"The answer to hate is not hate. The answer - we know from the gospel - is love. Always love. Love for our enemies. Love for those who persecute us.”

It is well worth watching or reading her speech, which you can find by googling ‘erica kirk full speech’.

I am deeply moved by her words. It would have been so easy for her to express her grief through words of hate, riling up the crowd to seek revenge. But she did not, she spoke of love and forgiveness, truly Christian values. Unlike Trump himself, who spoke of hating his opponents. I think her words in that febrile atmosphere may have prevented an orgy of revenge attacks on people the MAGA crowd see as enemies. We shall see, but as the new leader of Turning Point USA, I pray that she will continue to speak words of love, not hatred, and help to bring a bitterly divided USA back to sanity, back to Christian values, back from the brink. May God bless her, may God bless America, and God bless every one of us.

Original Sin

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 9th March 2014, the 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Temptation and sin are strong themes running through the readings set for today.

This is no accident, because today is the 1^st Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally a ‘penitential’ season, a time when we are invited to reflect on our sinful natures, and to seek God’s forgiveness for actual sin.

The 1st reading (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7) is that old, familiar story of the Fall: how the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first sin – the original sin.

The 3^rd reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11) tells us how Jesus resisted the temptation of the devil in the wilderness. He did not sin.

In the Epistle reading from his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-19), Paul contrasts the sin of Adam with the righteousness of Jesus. This passage is very important historically for the development of Christian theology, because it’s a scriptural foundation for the theological doctrine that it is by God’s grace through Jesus Christ that original sin is overcome.

It’s this uncomfortable idea of original sin that I want to explore today.

First let’s look at the story of the Fall.

Surely this is just an old myth, with no relevance to sophisticated people like us today? Well, yes it is a myth, and a very ancient one. But like many an old myth I think it captures an essential truth.

We don’t need to believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first man and the first woman, the ancestors of us all - but they are typical men and women, very like you and me. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they did so, and became like God, able to distinguish good from evil. We can all tell good from evil, can’t we? We call that capacity conscience: it is part of what makes us human - we are moral creatures.

Adam and Eve could distinguish good from evil, and like us no doubt in their best moments they would prefer good to evil. But that doesn’t mean to say that they would always choose good over evil, any more than we do. Like us, they had free will. They were tempted by the serpent, and they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, because they desired it - because it was good to eat, because it was beautiful, and because it would make them wise. So many rationalisations for their bad choice! We don’t need to believe in a literal talking serpent, but we’ve all heard that little nagging voice in the head, haven’t we? Prompting us to do something we know in our heart of hearts is wrong, for what we pretend are jolly good reasons.

This is original sin – Adam’s sin, Eve’s sin, and our sin too: to know what is right, but to be tempted by our desires to do what is wrong, and all too often to give in to our desires. We all suffer from it, without exception. It is not so much a mysterious, theological doctrine as a truth about our psychological natures, derived from observation.

Matthew tells us how Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, but resisted his blandishments.

But how did Matthew get the story? Since Jesus was alone in the desert, I think the source must be Jesus himself, who told it to his disciples. They in turn passed it on to Matthew, the Gospel writer, and so to us.

The devil tempted Jesus, we are told, just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. Jesus was human like us - he could hear that nagging little voice in his head too, but he had the strength to resist it. This should be no surprise, since we believe Jesus to be fully God as well as fully human.

Notice how the devil quotes scripture as he tempts Jesus: “He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone” – it is a quotation from Psalm 91. We should be on our guard, I think, when we hear someone use scripture as a weapon against an opponent in argument – it just might be the voice of the devil tempting us.

Notice also how Jesus quotes scripture too to rebuke the devil and to resist temptation. Perhaps we might do the same when we are tempted. Scripture can also be a tool to help us resist temptation. Now that’s a thought that might help us keep our Lenten resolutions!

So we come to Paul, and his contrast between the sin of Adam and the righteousness of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I find his argument convoluted and difficult to understand. But he ends up crystallizing matters in these words:

‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience - Adam’s -  the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience - Christ’s - the many will be made righteous’.

Paul seems to believe that Adam’s original sin causes our own, rather than being a consequence of our common humanity, as I do. But Paul sees the reality of original sin only too clearly: all human beings, like Adam, are inevitably sinners; like Eve too for that matter, though Paul leaves her out.

Later on in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul expresses the human dilemma perfectly:

‘I do not understand my own actions… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

What a mess we are all in! Our sins convict us; they cut us off from God; and we inevitably suffer spiritual death. Or to put it another way, in the language of psychology:

I feel shame for the bad things I do; the shame destroys my self-esteem; and I plunge into deep depression.

But Paul also sees another reality: the reality that God offers us a way out of the mess. The way out is God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. By following Jesus’s path of obedience to God, our sins will be forgiven and we will be made righteous. Again, to put it in the language of psychology:

When I am truly sorry for the bad things I’ve done, I will change for the better, seek to make amends and cease to feel corrosive guilt, coming to accept myself for who I  am whatever my flaws.

So to sum up

Every one of us, without exception, should feel uncomfortable about original sin, because it is a reality: we all share the innate tendency of human beings to sin, which leads every one of us to be a sinner.

But as St Paul saw so clearly, that is not the end of the matter. God offers us the free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. If we follow his way and repent, our sins will be forgiven.

And a final comforting thought for Lent: ‘Remember, I am with you always’, says Jesus. The essence of original sin is the nagging little voice of temptation, which we personify as the serpent or the devil. But if we trust in Jesus and listen for it, we can also hear his confident, comforting voice: he encourages us to resist temptation, and offers us forgiveness when we succumb to it, if we come to him in penitence.

Let’s try to listen for Jesus’s voice, really listen, as we travel with him on the way to Jerusalem this Lent, to Calvary and on to Resurrection!

Guilty Conscience

I preached this sermon for children (of all ages!) at Templederry and Nenagh, and a variant for adults at Killodiernan, on the 5th Sunday after Trinity, 12th July 2009.

Children, today I’m going to talk especially to you, so I hope you will listen, or at least please try to! And those of you who are grown up can listen in, but I’m sure you already know everything I’m going to say!

I’m going to let you in on a guilty secret – I'm a thief! Or at least I used to be...

When I was about 6 years old, in the village where I lived with my parents, I used to go to Mrs Pullan’s shop with my pocket money to buy sweets. And sometimes, when I thought she wasn’t looking, when her back was turned, I would take a few extra and put them in my pocket. I stole them! I knew it was wrong, but I just couldn’t stop myself. I felt awful, so that I didn’t enjoy them as much as I thought I would, but I still went on doing it. I tried my best not to think about it, and I didn’t want anybody to know, because I didn’t want to admit to myself or to anyone else what a bold, naughty boy I was. That’s the first time I can remember having a guilty conscience - but I’ve felt guilty about much worse things since then.

We all know what a guilty conscience is, don’t we? It’s when we know we have done something bad, or not done something good that we should have done, and we just can’t stop thinking and worrying about it. It’s a horrid feeling. And we all suffer from it, no matter how young or old we are, because try as we might to be perfect - or even just ordinarily good - every one of us does what we know is wrong more often than we care to admit. That’s just as true for me as it is for you.

Well, in the reading we’ve just listened to, we heard about how King Herod had a really, really guilty conscience. He had done something very wicked indeed – he had ordered his soldiers to cut off John the Baptists head. And he had done this even though he thought John was a good and holy man and knew he didn’t deserve to die. So later, when Herod heard people talking about Jesus, he thought that Jesus must be John the Baptist come back from the dead as a ghost to haunt him.

Let’s remind ourselves again of the story about how Herod came to do this wicked thing.

King Herod had married a new wife, who was called Queen Herodias. And the trouble was that she was already married to Herod’s brother. It wasn’t right for Herod to take her from his brother and marry her himself. But John the Baptist, bravely, told Herod that what he had done was very wrong – it was against the law. Herod didn’t want John going about making trouble for him by telling everyone this, so he had John arrested and put him in prison.

How do you think Queen Herodias felt about John? She hated him; she really, really hated him! She wanted very badly to have him killed. But she couldn’t do that, because she knew Herod liked listening to John and respected him, even if Herod didn’t always like what John said.

Then at last came the perfect time for Queen Herodias to get her own way. It was Herod’s birthday, and there was a big party, with lots of important people there. Now Herodias had a daughter who was called Salome. And after Herod and all the important people had finished eating Salome came in to dance for Herod and his guests. She must have been a pretty good dancer because when she finished, everybody clapped. Herod was so pleased with her dancing that he did a very silly thing. Can you remember what he did? He told Salome that she could have anything she asked for – even half the kingdom! And all the important guests heard him say it! Salome didn’t know what to ask for, so she went to Herodias her mother, and asked her, ‘What should I ask the King to give me?’ Can you guess what Herodias answered? She said to her daughter, ‘Ask for the head of John the Baptist!’

King Herod was very sad and quite upset, because he really didn’t want to have John killed. But he had just told Salome she could have anything she asked for – absolutely anything - and he did not want to look weak or silly in front of all the important people he had invited to his party. So he gave the order, and the soldiers chopped off John’s head. They brought it on a big serving plate and gave it to Salome, who gave it to her mother Herodias.

It’s a horrid story, isn’t it? All the characters are pretty nasty! Except John the Baptist, who was brave.

Herodias wasn’t nice at all to use her daughter to take such an awful revenge. Salome asked for a truly yucky present - a bloody severed head - though perhaps she was too young to be blamed for doing what her mother told her. But it was Herod who gave that wicked order to behead John the Baptist, even though he knew it was wrong. Let’s think about him to see what lessons we can learn.

What do you think he should have done differently that day?

Well, one thing would have been not to make that silly promise! If Herod hadn’t promised to give Salome anything she asked for, she couldn’t have asked for John’s head, and everything would have been different.

This is the first lesson: we must always be very careful what we promise!

But even after Herod had made that silly promise, he didn't have to give that wicked order! Herod was a coward, wasn’t he? He knew it would be wrong to give Salome what Herodias had told her to ask for. But he was afraid – afraid that his important guests would think he was weak or silly if he didn’t – so he did it anyway. If Herod had been a braver man, as John was, not a coward, he would have listened to his conscience – that's the little voice inside each one of us which tells us what is right and what is wrong. He would simply have said, ‘No, that would be wrong, ask for something else’, and John would have been saved.

The second lesson is this: we must always be brave and do what we know is right no matter what.

So Herod did that wicked thing, and he suffered from a guilty conscience.

We are not told if he ever felt sorry for what he had done. But if Herod had listened to Jesus, he would have known what to do when he felt guilty for doing such a bad thing. Because Jesus tells us that if we own up to doing wrong, if we say we are sorry and really mean it, and if we try our very best to be better in future - then God, our loving Father in Heaven, will forgive us. In other words, if we repent of our sins, God will forgive us. We will no longer feel bad, and we can be happy living a new and better life.

So what about my own guilty conscience over stealing sweets when I was a child? Years later, when I was a student and thought I was grown up, I went back to the village and called on Mrs Pullan in her shop. She invited me in for tea and a chat, and when I came to leave, do you know what she did? She took a brown paper bag and filled it with all kinds of sweets, and gave it to me, to take away! Suddenly I was 6 again, and I felt really badly about stealing her sweets long ago. So I told her what I had done and said I was sorry. Then, with a laugh, she said, ‘You don’t think you were the only little boy who nicked sweets, do you? Of course I knew what you were doing. And of course I forgive you!’

This is the third lesson: if we are truly sorry for the bad things we do, God will forgive us when we ask him to - just as Mrs Pullan forgave me!

I shall finish with a little prayer:

O God our loving Father,
we thank you for the courage of people like John
the Baptist,
who do what is right even when it puts their lives in danger.
Give us the courage to always try to do what is right;
and when we fail
show us how to truly repent, and forgive us.
We ask you in Jesus’s name.
Amen

Make straight the way!

An address for Advent 2, preached at Templederry & St Mary's Nenagh on 7 Dec 2008

1. Lets listen again to the prophet Isaiah’s beautiful, poetic words in the 1st reading (Isa 40 1:11):

A voice cries out:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.

Of course we know a lot about making highways here in North Tipperary – just think of the new Nenagh to Limerick motorway. Isaiah’s words could almost be an anthem for the National Roads Authority! Great cuttings have been blasted through the hills. Giant machines have moved the spoil to make embankments. Bridges have been built over rivers. All to make the road as gentle and smooth as possible. Workers will continue to labour hard and long to complete it by 2010. I must say though, that I am very disturbed to read how many subcontractors have not been paid what is owed them for their work. I think the authorities have a moral obligation to ensure they are paid as soon as possible - before Christmas I hope.

Roads were not so vast in Isaiah’s time, but it would still have been a gigantic community enterprise to make the roads through the rugged Judean hill country to allow farmers to transport their produce on pack-mules to market in Jerusalem, and to allow pilgrims to travel to the temple on Zion. The roads knit together the Jewish people in the cities of Judah to Jerusalem, to their holy mountain of Zion, not just in a material way, but also in metaphor as a worshiping community.

I feel sure that for Isaiah the way of the Lord was not a road for God to travel to his people, but a road for his people to travel to God.

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

2. In our 2nd reading, in the very first words of his Gospel (Mark 1:1-8), St Mark recycles this road building metaphor.

John the Baptist is a wild man, wandering about the Judean desert, clothed in camel’s hair, with only a leather bag at his waist, who ate locusts and wild honey, we are told – the very image of an Old Testament prophet! Mark quotes Isaiah to identify him as: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’

John proclaims ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. And he is very successful to judge by the crowds he gathers. But John is also the self-effacing herald of the coming of another. Claiming no special position for himself, he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’ He means Jesus of course. And John continues ‘I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’

3. Why did the compilers of the Lectionary - the people who selected the readings we use each Sunday - choose this reading for today?

John’s message of repentance and forgiveness for sin might seem at first sight out of place in this joyful Advent season. In Advent we look forward to Christmas and the great gift that God has given us. God comes to us. He comes in the form of a little child. His parents Mary and Joseph name him Jesus. We rejoice with them at the miracle of his birth. With angels and shepherds and kings we adore him. And we believe he grows up to lead us to God through his loving self-sacrifice. So why spoil the joy with dismal repentance for sin? I think the answer lies in the metaphor of road building.

Yes, God makes the first move. Yes, God comes to us as Jesus. But he does not force himself on us. He does not compel us accept his love. He made us with free will, and we are free to refuse him. But we cannot share in his kingdom unless we make a move in response. That essential move is like building a road to travel to God on. Each one of us must ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ and ‘make his paths straight’. And to do so we must accept John’s baptism for ourselves, by admitting our own sins, by repenting, and by seeking God’s forgiveness.

4. So to conclude:

By the readings they have chosen for us, I think the people who compiled the Lectionary have tried to correct any tendency we may have to be over sentimental in our anticipation of Christmas.

Yes of course we should look forward with joy to Christmas. Let us wonder at the miracle of Mary’s tiny helpless baby. Let us enjoy the stories of the shepherds and the three kings. And let us sing our hearts out with the angels in the beautiful carols we all love so much.

But let us also reflect that the love God shows us at Christmas is no use to us, no use at all, unless we choose to act in response, unless we build a good smooth road on which we may travel to God. John the Baptist has shown us the way by proclaiming his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All we have to do is to work at it!