In Competition No. 3343 you were invited to submit a sermon on a subject of contemporary relevance in the style of a well-known writer.

This challenge drew a medium-sized entry, mostly of great merit, pronouncing on subjects that ranged from the evils of mobile phones to deep fakes and potholes.

Frank McDonald’s Alexander Pope – ‘Now when to mischief small men bend their will/ They soon decide the past is full of ill…’ – and Janine Beacham’s Geoffrey Willans were unlucky losers, but Chris O’Carroll’s preacher-poet John Donne leads the prizewinners below, who take £25 each.

If a Tik or a Tok be washed away

The entire ecosystem

Of online intercourse would be the less

As well as if an Apple were.

Each social media outlet

Is a part of the main,

A piece of the synergy.

No online presence

Is an enterprise fully actualised

In detached insularity.

Any loss of outreach capacity

Diminishes me

For I am involved in

A cyberspace communion.

Send not to know for whom the Tik Toks

It Toks for thee.

Chris O’Carroll/John Donne

So: this is how it shall be. The Corpse and the Snake Oil Man, slugging it out upon the exhausted ground, their words portentous as their blows rain, enfeebled from long decades of indigence and indulgence. As in some pasteboard carnival sideshow, there will be theatrics; falsified swagger, ketchup blood, braggart promises and dreams that are but the importunate shades of former, nobler dreams, as each pugilist, invoking God, claims righteousness and has none, while God, possessing it integrally, remains aloof as the inky vasts between the stars He shows nightly that man might experience humility. Congregants, who shall prevail? He who funds wars yet lacks heart to fight? He who would brick himself behind a wall that will not stand? Put from you the grunting, gouging upholders of an antique pantheon and cleave to God, whose ineffable silence, prevailing, will settle the dust in the coming Aftermath.

Adrian Fry/Cormac McCarthy

A pious child, I had only to mention the indivisible oneness of the Trinity for Mam to accuse me of sermonising. Her own homilies, less priggish and with an undue focus on recipes for Eccles cakes, ring as true now as then. Mam had Jesus earmarked as one of us: meek and thrifty, perfectly capable of mustering a chariot to Jerusalem but settling on a donkey – ass not being a word in Mam’s language – to show that disdain for ostentation of which she most approved. Untroubled by the ass, I find myself otherwise echoing many of her sentiments during the present cost-of-living crisis, caused this time by the Conservatives rather than Hitler. If my sermon today leans more heavily on Mam’s now disintegrating kitchen scrapbook of household tips than on the apocrypha, I hope you’ll forgive me later, having recreated Mam’s junket. After all, isn’t forgiveness the point?  

Russell Chamberlain/Alan Bennett

I don’t know how to begin on the subject of the gulf between rich and poor – whether the whole monstrous thing is inevitable, whether the misery is impossible to stem. But the damnable fact is, it exists. On the one hand, there are those too impoverished to keep themselves warm… yet there are fellows, elected it would seem, who throw out casual remarks, for instance that money earned from occasional writings is ‘chicken-feed’, despite their earning a quarter of a million a year. Anyhow, such men ignore the desperate sorrows of humanity. But there it is, an extraordinary matter. Well, I suppose you have the whole picture now. Such fellows are abominably selfish. And I believe they cause, at any rate, inordinate distress to those who want for the simplest things. One of these fortunate people was, how shall I put it, the saddest Tory I have ever heard.

Bill Greenwell/Ford Madox Ford

You know what? People have got God all wrong. I figure an existential God, struggling to control the miracle of his own creation, the universe. More left-field than we imagine. Sometimes a slugger, sometimes a bob-and-weave contestant, an Ali. But never a false prophet like Kennedy. This writer might be able to give Him some help. Take sex. Now I’m not going to napalm you with Genesis, but doesn’t it say ‘male and female He created them’? Suddenly it’s a war about pronouns, right? All the professors pitching in. Well, last time I looked there were existential differences, big-time. Try ignoring that. The powerful exchange of orgasmic energy between and man and a woman. That’s the dialectic politicians cannot solve. When the liberal centre surrenders a psychotic billionaire can sell the masses a cancerous Apocalypse. One final word, brethren: never masturbate. It kills the spirit.

Basil Ransome-Davies/Norman Mailer

Dearly Beloved Fellow-Fiends,

My text today is from that old bore Jeremiah, chapter two, where he talks of travelling ‘through a land of deserts and of pits’. By the way, I am amused that humans might still think it odd that I, Senior Tempter Screwtape, can quote the Bible, when we have been using it for millennia as a wonderful instigation for discord and war. But today I shall leave the politicians to Our Father Below and concentrate on the issue of potholes, one of our finest diabolical achievements following the invention of the motor-car. Young tempters should distract motorists, so that they drive into the holes so liberally left unfilled because their leaders have wasted repair money on ephemeral nonsense and are bankrupt. Driving into a pothole encourages at the very least blasphemy, and hopefully one of their so-called deadly sins, wrath, which we have repackaged as ‘road rage’.

Brian Murdoch/C.S. Lewis

No. 3346: Last words

You are invited to submit a poem or short story entitled ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’. Please email entries of up to 16 lines or 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by 17 April.