Sermon for the 7th March 2021, St Matthew’s, Oxford
Readings: Exodus 20.1-17; 1 Corinthians 1.18-25 and
John 2.13-22
Today is the third Sunday in Lent. The Church of England’s website says: ‘Lent
may originally have
followed Epiphany, just as Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness
followed immediately on his baptism, but it soon became firmly attached to
Easter, as the principal occasion for baptism and for the reconciliation of
those who had been excluded from the Church’s fellowship for ..serious faults.
This history explains the characteristic notes of Lent – self-examination,
penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter…’ And this account of Lenten themes is
followed by a 12th poem about Lent
Now is the healing time decreed
for sins of heart and word and deed,
when we in humble fear record
the wrong that we have done the Lord.
So this morning I would like to focus on the Lenten theme of penitence. And that poem reminds us that penitence is or should be a ‘time of healing’: a positive rather than a negative experience.
But looking at the passages for today - the Lectionary
readings for the third Sunday in Lent – i.e. the set readings for today - it is
not very easy to see how they speak to this idea that Lent is for self-examination,
penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. I guess the three passages are linked
together in some way as the people who choose the Lectionary readings always
try to make sure they deal with related issues but I can’t see what connects
them.
I guess the reading that is most obviously connected with
Lent is the reading from Exodus where we hear, for the first time, God’s 10 Commandments.
The 10 Commandments are so well known that we might even be
able to recite them and lest we forget them they are even written behind our altar
over there. They are so well known in
fact that we can easily forget their importance: perhaps even treating them as
self-evident.
Some of them indeed embody moral ideals that are common to
many traditions such as: ‘You shall not steal’ but others seem less
self-evident such as: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy’. Nowadays you can still be put in gaol for theft
but not for forgetting it’s the Sabbath. These differences in the commandments remind
us that they are God’s revelation to the Israelites rather than a set of rules the
Israelites worked out for themselves for regulating their society. The book of Exodus
underlines this revelatory aspect to the 10 Commandments by having God give
them to the Israelites directly, rather than through Moses, God’s normal way of
communicating with the Israelites at the time.
The 10 Commandments form the basis of the Jewish Law as set out
thereafter in the rest of the book of Exodus, in the books of Leviticus and Numbers
and then repeated in the book called Deuteronomy. And since Jesus said that he had not come to abolish
the law but to fulfil it we can be sure that they apply as much to us today as
they did in Old Testament times. There
is a sense in which everything in the Bible that follows on from God’s giving
the Israelites the 10 Commandments, and that is about the rules we should live
by, are, at heart, just an elaboration of those commandments. For instance when Jesus famously discusses
the Jewish Law in his Sermon on the Mount, he directly mentions two of the
commandments: the 6th ,‘You shall not murder’ and the 7th, ‘You
shall not commit adultery’ and reinterprets them for his listeners of the day. But much of what else Jesus says about the
Jewish Law in that sermon indirectly refers back to the 10 Commandments or to
his summary of those commandments: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ and: ‘You shall love
your neighbour as yourself.
It is, I think, worthwhile exploring how each of the 10 Commandments
gets elaborated in the Old Testament and then the New. Not that there is time to do that today. But just as one example: the 9th commandment
is: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour’. In general, I have taken this to mean, ‘You shall
always tell the truth’ but, of course, it’s more specific (and limited) than
that. It’s recognising that lies that hurt
other people are a special kind of lie.
Exodus 23 verses 1-3 say: ‘You
shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to
act as a malicious witness. You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing; when
you bear witness in a lawsuit, you shall not side with the majority so as to
pervert justice; nor shall you be partial to the poor in a lawsuit’. The other Sunday we were talking about social
media and how it can easily it can be misused.
We might have usefully pondered on those verses when thinking about how
we should bear witness against our neighbour - i.e. talk about our friends -
when it comes to using social media.
Now some of the 10 Commandments seem relatively simple to
stick to such as the 6th Commandment: You shall not murder’. That is until you delve into what the Bible
says about them in more detail. Jesus
says in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘You have heard that it was said to those of
ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to
judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a
brother or sister you will be liable to judgement’. I think we can safely say that the 10
Commandments as understood by Jesus are almost impossible to follow.
I have gone on too long about rules for living by when I
really meant to talk about penitence: that is feeling and saying sorry for breaking
the rules, like the 10 Commandments. Breaking
what we see as the rules can make us feel guilty or ashamed. And here I want to make a distinction between
healthy guilt and unhealthy shame. The
main difference being healthy guilt leads to a change of heart and action. Unhealthy shame leads to demoralisation and
inaction.
Healthy or appropriate guilt is the recognition of how far
our behaviour, the way we live our lives, our economic systems, our social norms,
etc. fall short of what God wants for us.
Moreover it’s important to remember that this recognition should be a collective
act not just an individual responsibility.
I know that we are trashing the
planet, through eating too much meat, flying more than we need to, etc. but that is not just my fault, it’s everyone’s
fault. It also the fault of the institutions
in control: the international institutions such as the United Nations but also multinational
companies, national governments of both the left and the right. Moreover the Christian church has played no
small part in exacerbating the environmental crisis through its teachings on
our relationship with nature and we need to recognise its role in that.
The recognition of how far away we are from obeying the 10
Commandments indicates that we have a general relationship problem, with
ourselves, with other people, with nature and more fundamentally with God. We should feel guilty about this relationship
and we know that by recognising our dependency on God, God will restore that
relationship. We all, like sheep, have gone astray and we need to turn to the
Good Shepherd to lead us home.
This going astray (commonly called sin) and turning back to
God in consequence (repentance) play a big part in some versions of
Christianity. So much so that you might sometimes be led to
think it is the only important part of the good news that is the Gospel. In my youth the Preacher at the church I
attended would, virtually every week, remind us that there is an ‘I’ in
sin. Here’s the beginning of such a
sermon I found from a bit of quick Googling: ‘There’s a reason the word “sin”
has an “i” right smack in the middle—and a big “I” at that! Sin is all about
me. When my world revolves around me, with me at the center of everything, sin
is bound to result….’
Now I think there is hardly any biblical basis for this idea
that ‘Sin is all about me’. Sin is much more
complicated than that. There is a sin
called pride but pride is not the only sin and false modesty: to forget that we
are made in the image of God, is equally sinful. The notion that sin is all about me completely
ignores the story of the Fall in which Adam and Eve - the first humans – by
disobeying God – changed the nature of all our relationships and in particular
our relationship with God. It thereby ignores
the fact that we live in a sinful world that we are all embedded in a sinful
system. But, besides such sermons having
dubious authority, they can generate unhealthy shame rather than healthy guilt.
Unhealthy shame is unjustified feelings of guilt inflicted
on us by others. Jesus experienced such shame at his trial and crucifixion. Remember he was, amongst other things, spat
upon, stripped naked and whipped, and mocked by bystanders before he was
finally crucified. Human beings, throughout history, have
inflicted shame on one another from the mundane (now recognised as completely
unacceptable) bullying inflicted by children on one another to the truly
horrific such as that inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the Holocaust. But perhaps the most insidious forms of unhealthy
shame are religious or quasi-religious.
A big problem with ‘I in sin’ sermons and the like is that
they can make us feel hopeless rather than liberated. They can easily flip from encouraging healthy
guilt to inflicting unhealthy shame. It
is certainly impossible to live up to the rules that God would like us to live by
and we constantly fail to abide by those rules if we try. This should not be a cause for despair
because we know God forgives us (as we have been reminded today by our saying a
confession and Jon pronouncing an absolution during this service). But humans also have a tendency to feel guilty
about things we shouldn’t: about things we have no control over, such as our sexuality
or our appearance or even abuse by others.
And we can easily made to feel guilty about things we have little
control over such as addictions or relationships that have gone wrong in the
past. Our capacity for unhealthy shame
is extensive and preachers should urge us to guilt and repentance with caution.
I hope I have not fallen into a trap
today.
This is not to say that our unhealthy shame doesn’t need
healing. For some of us shame can be
chronic and toxic. Shame by its nature
is also often hidden. What we feel shameful of is difficult to share
even with those we love. Moreover the idea that God sees and knows everything
about us is for some a source of fear rather than comfort. Psalm
139 which begins: ‘O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I
sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away’ is for some
deeply troubling. Even our notions of
God can exacerbate shame rather than alleviate it.
While shame may often be hidden I think it is much more
common than we might tend to think.
Those of us who do suffer from shame can think we are the only one who
is and that is just not the case.
There is a similarity between healthy or guilt and unhealthy
shame in that both can be redeemed and potentially transformed by the death and
resurrection of Jesus. We know that whatever
we are guilty of, in the way we lead our lives, has been forgiven by God, once
and for all, through the cross. In this we
can be certain. We can also say that through
enduring shame of all kinds, Jesus opens the way to the defeat of shame as of
death and suffering. But it is often harder,
I think, to feel that shame can be defeated.
In my own experience the way of
healing shame is through sharing the experience with another in whom you trust
and who, after you have done so, will continue to accept you for what you are. The person who loves you more than any other
and who will not reject you whatever you are or whatever you have done is
God.
So yes Lent should be a time for self-examination and penitence
but for a purpose: preparation for Easter.
Yes Lent should be an occasion for seeking forgiveness for those things
we feel appropriately guilty about, but by God’s grace it might also be a time
to find healing and liberation from shame.
In both cases Lent, like spring, should be time of renewal as we once
again we prepare to remember all that God has done for us by his death on the
cross on that first Good Friday and his glorious resurrection on that first
Easter Sunday.
