Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Service Date:
7 February, 2010
Luke 5:1-11
I guess we start young learning what other people think of us. I know when I first had a godson, and I went to stay with his parents, I found myself saying, ‘Good boy!' and ‘Bad boy!' to this toddler who could hardly understand words at all. When he staggered over to me and handed me his toy to look at, his mother and I praised him for his generosity. When he started to play around with his food, and thought throwing it was much more fun than eating it, we told him gently but firmly where he was going wrong.
We start early. And all through our lives, other people tell us what they think of our bad behaviour. Just now, MPs must be regretting all over again fitting in with all the others and claiming too much money in expenses. But they're not the only ones. Papers sell when they tell us about people going wrong, whether it's a national footballer getting too close to his team-mate's girlfriend or a minister running off with the organist. As long as it's not us getting told off, we want to know all about it. It can give us a nice warm glow inside to hear about other people going wrong when we have not. And often people in churches are reported in the media as telling someone else off. Gay people who want to marry, single mothers, beggars, drug addicts - they can all find Christians queuing up to tell them how wrong they are.
But isn't that the point of being a Christian? To name and shame sinners, so they can see the error of their ways? Certainly through history, churches and ministers have taken this task on themselves. Maybe some of you have sat through hellfire and damnation sermons, intended to frighten people into being good and following God. But is this what Jesus does? Let's look at our Gospel reading this morning. Peter and his friends are in the middle of their work when Jesus strolls by, telling them, ‘I know how to do your job better than you do! Just do what I say!' Peter is actually very restrained when he replies, ‘Look, we've been at this all night and it's been no good. But I'll give it a go.' He calls Jesus Master, so they already know each other - but what can this carpenter, however wise he is, know about fishing? Well, we know the result: a huge catch of fish, almost sinking Peter's boat and another that comes to help them. And what's Peter's reaction to this amazing abundance? Does he thank God? Does he thank Jesus? Does he ask him to sign on and come fishing with them every night? No: Peter reckons he doesn't deserve having something so special happening to him. And what does Peter call himself? A sinner: someone not worthy to be in touch with God, who has sent this miracle.
Does Jesus agree with Peter? After all, he has shown a bit of doubt in the man who shows us God. Isn't Peter a sinner? Shouldn't Jesus be telling him off, just for his own good? Strangely, no. Jesus doesn't tell Peter he's not a sinner, that he's perfect and will never go wrong. Anyone who knows Peter knows he's guaranteed to put his foot in his mouth. That's the sort of person Peter is. But Jesus doesn't condemn Peter, or even tell him off. What does he say?
‘Cheer up: I'm going to show you how to catch people instead.'
If Jesus knows us that well and still wants us to come with him, I want to follow. How about you?
I guess we start young learning what other people think of us. I know when I first had a godson, and I went to stay with his parents, I found myself saying, ‘Good boy!' and ‘Bad boy!' to this toddler who could hardly understand words at all. When he staggered over to me and handed me his toy to look at, his mother and I praised him for his generosity. When he started to play around with his food, and thought throwing it was much more fun than eating it, we told him gently but firmly where he was going wrong.
We start early. And all through our lives, other people tell us what they think of our bad behaviour. Just now, MPs must be regretting all over again fitting in with all the others and claiming too much money in expenses. But they're not the only ones. Papers sell when they tell us about people going wrong, whether it's a national footballer getting too close to his team-mate's girlfriend or a minister running off with the organist. As long as it's not us getting told off, we want to know all about it. It can give us a nice warm glow inside to hear about other people going wrong when we have not. And often people in churches are reported in the media as telling someone else off. Gay people who want to marry, single mothers, beggars, drug addicts - they can all find Christians queuing up to tell them how wrong they are.
But isn't that the point of being a Christian? To name and shame sinners, so they can see the error of their ways? Certainly through history, churches and ministers have taken this task on themselves. Maybe some of you have sat through hellfire and damnation sermons, intended to frighten people into being good and following God. But is this what Jesus does? Let's look at our Gospel reading this morning. Peter and his friends are in the middle of their work when Jesus strolls by, telling them, ‘I know how to do your job better than you do! Just do what I say!' Peter is actually very restrained when he replies, ‘Look, we've been at this all night and it's been no good. But I'll give it a go.' He calls Jesus Master, so they already know each other - but what can this carpenter, however wise he is, know about fishing? Well, we know the result: a huge catch of fish, almost sinking Peter's boat and another that comes to help them. And what's Peter's reaction to this amazing abundance? Does he thank God? Does he thank Jesus? Does he ask him to sign on and come fishing with them every night? No: Peter reckons he doesn't deserve having something so special happening to him. And what does Peter call himself? A sinner: someone not worthy to be in touch with God, who has sent this miracle.
Does Jesus agree with Peter? After all, he has shown a bit of doubt in the man who shows us God. Isn't Peter a sinner? Shouldn't Jesus be telling him off, just for his own good? Strangely, no. Jesus doesn't tell Peter he's not a sinner, that he's perfect and will never go wrong. Anyone who knows Peter knows he's guaranteed to put his foot in his mouth. That's the sort of person Peter is. But Jesus doesn't condemn Peter, or even tell him off. What does he say?
‘Cheer up: I'm going to show you how to catch people instead.'
If Jesus knows us that well and still wants us to come with him, I want to follow. How about you?
Hymns:
R&S 103 was written by the Victorian Anglican turned Catholic John Henry Newman, as part of his larger work The Dream of Gerontius, to be sung by angelic choirs, praising the work of God, as a counterpoint to the main drama of the work: the deathbed and eternal destiny of Gerontius. The tune Chorus Angelorum was written by Arthur Somervell to fit these words.R&S 558 is a twentieth-century hymn by John Bell and Graham Maule of the Iona Community in which most of the verses, until the last, put words of invitation and warning into God's mouth. The last verse, offering human response and commitment, is not to be sung lightly. The tune Kelvingrove is a Scottish traditional melody.
R&S 447 is also a twentieth-century hymn, this time by the URC minister Brian Wren, now retired. Unlike many devotional hymns for communion, it firmly links the believer's relationship with God to our relationship with the community of Christians. The tune St Botolph refers to St Botolph's Parish Church in Boston, Lincs, where the composer Gordon Slater was parish organist.
R&S 366 is one of Charles Wesley's best-known hymns, written within a day or two of his and John's experiences of conversion. According to the Companion to Rejoice and Sing it is ‘packed with New Testament images of the Atonement, in which each one makes up for limitations of the others'. The tune Sagina is often associated with this hymn; the way phrases within the tune are repeated calls to mind the original tune for ‘While Shepherds Watched', better known as the folksong Ilkley Moor.
Sermon:
Luke 5:1-11; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11Sarah: Our reading from Paul's first letter to Corinth this morning gives us a lot to think about. To start with, what is the good news he proclaims?
Ann [standing up and moving to front]: You whited sepulchre!
Sarah: Excuse me? Who are you, please?
Ann: Who am I, indeed? I'm Richard Dawkins, of course, the famous evolutionary biologist and champion of atheism. A week ago I wrote an article in the Times about people like you, and I see you're at it again - ‘befrocked and bleating in your pulpit', just as I wrote.
Sarah: I'm sorry you feel like that about me. I'd better come down so we're at least standing on the same level. [Sarah descends]
Ann: Don't talk to me about standing on the same level. You were preaching about Haiti recently, weren't you?
Sarah: Yes: when something that terrible happens in the world, I believe Christians need to ask themselves: where is God in this?
Ann: That's simple. There is no God. We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, unpremeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery. But you teach that Haiti's tragedy must be payback for human sin.
Sarah: As I said in my sermon, I believe there was sin involved: the sin of those of us in powerful nations who chose to forget about Haiti's poverty, so they had no chance to protect themselves against the earthquake.
Ann: Don't give me that! Pat Robertson, the infamous American televangelist, says the Haitians are still paying for a pact with the Devil in 1791 to help to rid them of their French masters.
Sarah: I can assure you, that's not what most Christians believe.
Ann: Isn't it in your Bible? "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".
Sarah: Yes, but that's more a description of heredity: people passing on the damage caused by their own bad choices to the generations to come. Freedom and nationhood weren't bad choices for the people of Haiti, though maybe for their slave masters who lost income when Haiti became independent.
Ann: What hypocrisy! Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. If you see suffering as an intractable mystery, if you see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) if you claim to see God "suffering on the cross" in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, you're denying the centrepiece of your own theology.
Sarah: And according to you, what's that?
Ann: Sin and punishment, of course. Why, according to your Bible, did Noah's flood destroy people and animals over the whole world? Punishment for sin. Where was God in Sodom and Gomorrah? Barbecuing the citizenry, lock, stock and barrel, as punishment for "sin".
Sarah: It's true, we have some terrible stories in the Bible, and some of them have been misused to punish innocent people. But the story of the relationship between people and God has developed over millennia and is still developing.
Ann: I hope you're not going to say that the New Testament is all about love.
Sarah: Why, what will you say if I do?
Ann: Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated, gentle Christian, you cannot be serious. Your entire religion is founded on an obsession with "sin", with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson? You've signed up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus's incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the "sins" of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the "sin" of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never existed.
Sarah: Quite apart from the question of Adam, and the evident difference between story and history in the Bible, I don't recognise what you're describing as Christianity.
Ann: Is it the word ‘scapegoat' you object to? The only respect in which "scapegoat" falls short as a perfect epitome of Christian theology is that the Christian atonement is even more unpleasant. The goat of Jewish tradition was merely driven into the wilderness with its cargo of symbolic sin. Jesus was supposedly tortured and executed to atone for sins that, any rational person might protest, he had it in his power simply to forgive, without the agony.
Sarah: Now I must protest. Do you know what the word ‘atonement' means?
Ann: Your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for "sin" - or suffering as "atonement" for it.
Sarah: Atonement means ‘at-one-ment' - how to restore the relationship of trust and love between God and people; the relationship which breaks down when someone treats God or other people as objects to be manipulated, not lives to be respected - in other words, when someone sins. And Christians believe that restoration of the relationship between God and us has come about through Jesus, as our New Testament reading describes.
Ann: The god-man who - as you tell your congregation, even if you don't believe it yourself - "cast out devils"? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but isn't he being honest and true to your New Testament to use that language, even if you disown him? Robertson holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology; he may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that game, compared with educated apologists like you.
Sarah: There are powers of destruction at work in the world which it would not be too strong to call demonic. For instance, when you point out the hypocrisy and hatred you find in Christians, Mr Dawkins, you are naming devils, or to put it another way, you are describing our sins, and we should be grateful to you, however painful it is for us to hear. You're right to say that we believe Jesus died for our sins. But you're wrong to think that means God chose to torture and execute him, chose to punish him rather than forgive us. If that had been what it was about, you'd be correct in your comment that the Christian "atonement" would win a prize for pointless futility as well as moral depravity.
Ann: So what is atonement about, then, according to you? How did Jesus persuade God to forgive your sins?
Sarah: Jesus doesn't need to persuade God to forgive us. God loves everyone - not just Christians. God wants all the broken relationships between us to be mended. But we human beings have to be convinced this good news is true. We've often been brought up with our parents teaching us right from wrong by giving or withholding affection from us according to our behaviour - just think of the ‘naughty step'. So rather than God's unconditional love for us, it's much easier for us to believe, like Peter in our Gospel reading this morning, that we are so sinful a good God won't want to have anything to do with us. Then it's just one more step to looking around for other people God must hate even more, calling them sinners, and punishing them accordingly. That's how we end up with people like you calling us Christians hypocrites. But if we understand Jesus' self-giving death, the death we will shortly be remembering in our communion service, as the only way he could convince us that God's love for us and for all cannot fail, whatever happens to us, then we can realise at-one-ment really is possible, even for us. And that is good news. Maybe for you too, Mr Dawkins. Oh, by the way, do you know where that phrase ‘whited sepulchre' comes from, that you used to end your article?
Ann: From the New Testament, of course! I can recognise good ammunition when I see it.
Sarah: It's a phrase Jesus used to describe his opponents, people who were so sure about the sins of others that they didn't bother about behaving with integrity themselves. It's a vivid picture, of tombs well-painted without but rotting within; one all of us with strong opinions about the rights and wrongs of others' ways should bear in mind. So while I doubt I've yet convinced you of my case, I do hope I have given a fair account of your views this morning. Thank you for the challenge they pose to those of us faithheads who don't want to leave our brains at the door when we enter church.
Ann: You're welcome! [sits]
