Sermon: Mattins Lent 5

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 17th March 2013

Service:

Choral Mattins

There is therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.

Paul to the Romans, chapter 8 verse 1

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.

Isaiah chapter 35, verse 1

There is a parallel between our reading from Isaiah and our reading from Paul. Both readings are about returns and recoveries, about restoration and redemption. In the case of Isaiah the wilderness and the desert are converted into fertile places, the parched earth becomes a pool, and the ransomed of the Lord return to their homeland with everlasting joy. In the case of Paul we are exiles to ourselves, inwardly divided and colonised by guilt and sin. Nature can be reclaimed and our sinful natures can be redeemed. We want to return to our better selves but there is a baser self, a ‘law in our members’ that drags us downwards and is contrary to the law of God. We are in a quite literal sense incarcerated, imprisoned by carnal desires, turned inward away from God, and paralysed by sin. The two readings taken together proclaim release: we may be paralysed but by the grace of God ‘the lame shall leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb shall sing’.  That is why Jesus at the beginning of his ministry quoted from the promises of Isaiah to proclaim relief to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind. Redemption is outward and inward. Reclamation is comprehensive: hope springs eternal.

I want to say something about the sense of sin and the reality of evil because both are very obvious and yet we do not want to acknowledge their power over us. My daughter takes adult confirmation classes and finds some of her confirmands very resistant to the idea of sin. They claim they have no sense of sin, so that biblical and liturgical confessions recognising that we ‘have sinned against thee and done evil in thy sight’ have no purchase for them. They are reasonably decent citizens who keep their noses clean and could sustain an audit of the course of their lives without shame. To borrow a notion from statistics their lives are lived safely within the standard deviation and have not explored either heroic goodness or dramatic evil doing. They may aspire to modest improvements and a somewhat better moral bank balance but they are not chronically in debt. They do not require redemption.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the vocabulary of sin and redemption.  My son-in-law, Francis Spufford, has recently published a book called ‘Unapologetic’ which claims that Christianity ‘makes surprising emotional sense’. It begins just here, not with talk of sin and redemption but with the chronic human tendency to mess things up to the point where one feels that thing are out of joint. Things should fit together but they don’t. It is not so much moral disease as moral unease, the first stirrings of dissatisfaction. St. Paul may be helpful here because he speaks of missing the mark. Our reach exceeds our grasp, we aspire and we fall short. Paul claims that we all ‘fall short’.

But that is just the beginning: if we scrutinise ourselves with honesty and care, as we are asked to do in Lent, we become aware of a morass of difficult feeling and a built in defensiveness. We want to feel justified and justification lies at the heart of Paul’s vocabulary. Moreover as we look around us and listen to public debate we find that it includes not just the standard deviation but the whole range from heroism to complete disgrace. We observe a moral drama that is not confined to mild and understandable failures but includes overweening pride and ambition and dramatic falls from grace. The lexicon of public debate is rife with corruption, hypocrisy, a need for transparency, for openness and for confession. There are demands for apology so that moral outrage can achieve some closure. This is the vocabulary of faith writ large in the public domain. It affects everybody; there is no immunity. The cardinal archbishop of Edinburgh and St.Andrews is admired for many contributions to the public good but at the same time his moral integrity and authority is compromised, and he felt the need to apologise and ask for forgiveness from any whom he might have wronged.   We may tell ourselves that his is an exceptional case but in watching his moral tragedy we observe the mirror of our own.  

Often a dramatic fall begins with a hairline crack that slowly widens until the whole moral fabric is undermined. I suppose we have watched the fall of Chris Huhne with mixed emotions because it all began with a speeding offence that almost everybody has committed. But then the hairline crack began to widen with one untruth after another and an attempt to get away with it. Untruthfulness has a way of upping the ante because each reassertion increases the cost of coming clean. Untruth ramifies. When the truth is finally out the fall is complete. Moreover, Huhne’s downfall was brought about by one of the most destructive of emotions: revenge. I saw the Greek tragedy Medea set by Marc-Antoine Charpentier at the ENO last week and it threw on to a large screen the cost exacted by revenge. Steaming emotions rose quite literally from the pit of hell. Revenge wills mortally to wound itself to get its own back. The newspapers quoted a Chinese proverb warning us that when we seek revenge we should dig two graves. That is the moral truth about our minor delinquencies writ large and the whole story of the Passion illustrates how treachery, faithlessness, the doctrine that it is expedient one die for the people, ends in the death of the innocent. The web of evil catches the innocent in its net and God in Christ freely bears the consequences.  In Paul’s terms the death of Christ placards the consequences of sin. The costs of sin and guilt are paraded for all to see. Yet Paul in his eighth chapter to the Romans affirms that we are not only incarcerated by sin and rendered helpless and hopeless by debts we can never redeem. The debts are comprehensively cancelled. We are accepted. The writing against us is blotted out by a gift of pure grace. Wesley writes that his soul was ‘once an offering made for every soul of man’. The offer is unconditional. ‘There is therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus’.

Let us pray some words from St Anselm’s Meditation on Human Redemption.

'Christian soul, brought to life again out of the heaviness of death, redeemed and set free by the blood of God, rouse yourself and remember that you are risen, realise that you have been redeemed and set free.... Christ has brought you back to life.... by laying down his life for you. He is the Good Samaritan who has healed you. So your strength is the strength of Christ. Amen.