Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)
2 Peter 1.16–21 ; John 8. 1-11
I don’t know about you, but I have a pile of books that I still haven’t read sitting on the little table next to my armchair in the living room. And I also, on the little table on the other side of the armchair, have another pile of books that I still haven’t read.
I suspect I’m not the only person here like that.
Still and all, when I was doing my weekly radio review column for the Church Times on Monday, I heard a doctor in Scotland being interviewed about his new book, which is about the mental health crisis, and how the way we categorise poor mental health might lead us to underestimate the resilience of the mind. It came out literally just last week and I wanted to be one of the first people to own a copy, so off I popped to Mr Amazon.
Will I have time to read it? Of course not! I just wanted it!
When do you know you have enough? Much of our lives are built on an unspoken illusion: that if we just had a little more, we would finally feel secure. No matter how much we have, most people always just seem to want just a little bit more. And the little bit more is always justifiable in its own terms: just a little bit more financial security for my retirement, just a slightly bigger car so I can help ferry the grandkids around, and that long haul flight would be so much easier in Premium Economy. One of my parishioners told me yesterday that I wasn’t well paid. When I think back to my memories of my maternal grandmother, who died when I was seven—I’m rich beyond her wildest dreams.
We’re all fantastically rich compared to most people who have ever lived. Even kings and emperors for most of human existence lived with a burden of disease and early death of loved ones that is hard to imagine from our standpoint.
That’s why I think it does us so much good to give a few things up for Lent. When I think back to the Ash Wednesdays of my primary school days, Lent was all about what you gave up. I don’t think any of my childhood attempts to give up sweets and crisps lasted more than about 48 hours. Yet although even these little child’s gestures were beyond my capacity, they started being considered as insufficiently sophisticated as we got older.
We started to be told Lent was about what you did, not what you gave up. And I hope you will, in the midst of busy lives, do a few things extra. If you say Morning and Evening prayer every day, make sure to go to Church every Sunday, and try across the season to get through a longer stretch of scripture day-by-day, you’ll be keeping a good Lent. But there’s something good about giving things up, about doing without some of the things we enjoy, in an economy where most of our material desires can be fulfilled by clicking a button. We don’t even need to leave the house – don’t even need to get out of our armchairs – anymore: my books were ordered on my phone.
Giving things up for a while frees us from the illusion that our deepest desires can ever be satisfied by material things. But material desires are not the most spiritually corrosive illusions we live with.
We all like to know that we’re in the right. And there’s no quicker way to that glowing sense of superiority that comes with knowing we’re right than finding someone we know to be wrong. And it’s precisely when we are most convinced we are right that we are most likely to do wrong, especially when we’ve convinced ourselves that God is on our side.
That’s what this classic Ash Wednesday Gospel reading is all about. The mob bring the woman caught in adultery before Jesus for two reasons. Firstly, the prospect of behaving cruelly gives them pleasure, something they can only justify in a really good cause, like enforcing God’s laws. Secondly, they suspect Jesus might want to be merciful and they want to show Him up as not really being faithful to Scripture. Jesus catches them out, for the Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly point out that there is no one who never sins.
The Bible can be a murder weapon in the wrong hands. Scripture is a gift to us from God and like all of God’s gifts, it can be abused. God can lead us to heaven through its words or we can use it to lose ourselves in hells of our own making. People have done horrible things with the Bible – it has been used to excuse slavery, ethnic cleansing, witch trials… and even the stoning of adulteresses.
We’re not saved by the Bible and certainly not by our interpretation of it. There is nothing we can’t, at our worst, manipulate for purposes directly opposed to those God wishes for our lives. We are saved only by God’s Grace – that’s one of the central themes of the work our first reading came from, Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Paul has lost many material things and been subject to all sorts of physical dangers and assaults to follow Christ – and considers it all worthwhile, because, by the Grace of God, he possesses everything that matters.
It is good to give material things up during Lent. But the things we need most desperately to give up are our illusions of our own goodness. We all have parts of our character that trouble us–things we like to hide from others, from ourselves, and even from God. We all have moments when we want to pick up some nice big stones and join the mob. The stones may not be literal, but a piece of nasty gossip, a social media post, or a cold refusal to forgive. But we know the weight of them in our hands. There is no sense trying to hide the hardest truths about ourselves from God—God already knows the worst there is to know about us and loves us just the same.
When we give up those illusions, and accept that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, we discover that God has already saved us; has already accomplished for us what we could never accomplish for ourselves.
Lent is a journey through the wilderness to the Cross. In the wilderness, our illusions about our own goodness must die so we can embrace the true depth of God’s love for us.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
