adultery | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong on 16th June 2024

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

On Friday night I was nearly on the wireless. On BBC Radio 4. Completely by chance I had heard, when I was listening to the news in the morning, that Any Questions, which is not to be confused with the TV programme Question Time, and is much more venerable – it is apparently the oldest continuously running radio programme anywhere in the world, 76 years old, so it’s even older than me – that Any Questions was coming that same night to Newport to Newport Cathedral, to Saint Woolos’. There were a few places still available in the audience. I quickly booked a ticket and went over there. When you arrive, you are given a card to complete and hand in, with any suggested questions which you might have for the panel. Some of you may well have listened to the programme on Friday night or possibly when it was repeated at lunchtime yesterday.

The panel was a distinguished group, mostly Welsh people, two socialists, one Plaid Cymru and the other, less socialist, Labour; Boris Johnson’s press spokesman (who actually had had a long and distinguished career as political correspondent for the BBC before working for the Conservatives), a champion of industry with a strange name, and the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who had apparently had a career as an amateur boxer, fighting under the name the Tory Tornado. It was all chaired by Victoria Derbyshire.

It came out that all the panel had gone to Oxford, except, of course, for the ‘Tornado’. Presumably most of them had gone to Jesus College, so there was a high degree of courtesy and comity between them, despite some very different views. Shortly before the programme began the producer appeared and called out eight names of people who had been selected to put their questions to the panel. I was very excited to learn that my question had been chosen, and I was number six. So we sat at the front clutching little bits of paper on which our questions had been nicely re-typed by the BBC; but alas, by the time they had dealt properly with question number five, the hour was up and I, together with the last two questioners, was left on the bench.

Before my turn there had been some very interesting questions, one involving bets on the likelihood of a conservative victory and the willingness of the panel members to ‘have a flutter’; on whether the allegedly inferior performance of the NHS in Wales was to be attributed to underfunding from Westminster or to mismanagement, by the party of Nye Bevan; about the potential effects of imposing VAT on private school fees; about which party’s manifesto would provide growth and stability; and finally, before my turn, there was this question.

A lady called Julie Pearce asked, ‘Where have honesty truth and integrity gone in politics, and do you think politics has deteriorated as a result?’The politicians on the panel predictably danced on pinheads, and perhaps the apologist for the most egregious immoralist in recent politics, Boris Johnson, produced the most ingenious evasion, when he turned immediately to discussing the merits and demerits of Lloyd George 100 years ago, whom he praised as the greatest Welsh prime minister, even though he was at the same time spectacularly immoral, he said.

Interestingly, none of the panel identified either themselves or other members as exhibiting any tendencies towards vice. Exceptionally, they were all as pure as the driven snow, we were asked to believe. As I sat there in the cathedral, I pondered what we as Christians at All Saints might have said in response to this question. Our Bible readings today are very relevant. The passage from Jeremiah is a prophecy in which God puts words into the mouth of the prophet chastising the men of Judah for their immoral behaviour. Although they went to worship in the temple, they still needed to mend their ways and their doings, the Lord said. Deal fairly with one another, do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, shed no innocent blood, and do not chase after false gods.

That could be very relevant even today. Deal fairly with one another: don’t just go for the cheapest thing on the internet and do our local shops out of business.

Don’t oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow: surely refugees – aliens – ought to be welcome and we should recognise that immigration is a good thing; after all, quite apart from whether we should offer safety and sanctuary, immigrants supply much-needed skills in industry, in the NHS and in our social services.

Does the policy of a ‘hostile environment’ and sending people to Rwanda in breach of the Refugee Convention amount to ‘oppressing the alien’? What do we do for orphans and widows? How does the two-child benefit cap fit in? What about social care and nurseries?

God isn’t having any. This is what he says: ‘You steal, you murder, you commit adultery and perjury, you burn sacrifices to Baal, you run after other gods whom you have not known; then you come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’; safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations.’ And he says he will ‘fling them away out of his sight’ as he previously thrown away the people of Ephraim. No prayers would avail to save them.

That was the fierce prescription in the Old Testament. Did things become softer and more understanding after the coming of Jesus? St Paul’s letter to the Romans suggests not. But Paul comes at it from a different angle. Does God’s willingness to punish immorality mean that God is unjust? Paul says that it is up to God whether or not to punish somebody, and it does not depend on what he calls ‘man’s will or effort’. So why does God punish some people, or rather, allow them to be harmed? What are the rules? Is God just capricious, harming some people without a good reason?

Interestingly Paul doesn’t answer that. Instead, he suggests that it’s almost impertinent for us to ask that kind of question. ‘Who are you, sir, to answer God back? Can the pot speak to the potter and say, ‘Why did you make me like this?’? Surely the potter can do what he likes with the clay. Is he not free to make out of the same lump two vessels, one to be treasured, the other for common use?’

We have to recognise that God is bigger than we can understand, beyond our comprehension. As Jesus showed and taught, things are sometimes not what they seem, and values can be turned upside-down. The last shall be first … And being the chosen people of God may not protect you. Again, there are things happening today which might fit into this kind of analysis.

What about the war in Gaza? Does it make a difference that today’s Israelis say, as some of them surely do, that Hamas is like the Amalekites, previous occupants of the Promised Land, whom God told Saul and the Israelites, as told in the first book of Samuel [1Samuel 15:2-4], utterly to destroy – and God took them to task when they left some of them alive? Does that justify what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza?

Or we should consider what Paul points out in what the prophet Hosea said; [Hosea 2:23]: he said, ‘As it says in the Book of Hosea: ‘Those who were not my people I will call My People, and the unloved nation I will call My Beloved. For in the very place where they were told “you are no people of mine”, they shall be called Sons of the living God.’

The message is that just because one goes through the motions of worship, or goes to the temple, to the biggest cathedral, to the poshest church, it doesn’t somehow sanitise the things we do. We must love our neighbours, and worship just the one true God.

And we mustn’t use God as an excuse either. Fergal Keane, the veteran BBC war correspondent, was interviewed recently, and he said this: “It takes human beings to inflict injustice, pain, and cruelty on others. And it is too much of a cop-out to say ‘I blame it all on religion.’ That allows us, people with freedom of choice, off the hook. There are many places where faith has been manipulated, used as a banner, a suit of armour, as something to drive people on to hate their neighbours.” [https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/246585]

Perhaps that’s all a bit deep for Any Questions. But we should keep asking questions – and saying our prayers.

Sermon for Mattins at The Chapel of Ease, Westhumble, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, 10th March 2013

2 Corinthians 5:19 – ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them…’

Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent, sometimes known as Rose Sunday or Refreshment Sunday. More recently it has become Mothering Sunday. The good news is that Refreshment Sunday is a break in the austerity of Lent; a nice time to make a fuss of one’s mother, and to see the children giving Mum a nice day, perhaps a lie in with some tea in bed, or some nice flowers, just something to show that we treasure our mothers.

Unfortunately, however, if we think of motherhood as central to the family, family relations are not in very good shape in the world today. There are too many people whose marriage has broken down, perhaps because a partner has left with somebody else.

There are too many cases of child abuse. We are wrestling, in the church at large, with many problems of human sexuality. Our friends in the Catholic Church are reeling from scandals, most recently involving Cardinal O’Brien. It does seem inappropriate just blithely to celebrate motherhood and the family without engaging with some of the challenges which family life has to face today.

There is something very shocking about cases like Jimmy Saville and Cardinal O’Brien. It is very shocking if public figures, people who set themselves up as examples, or who preach morality, turn out not to be worthy of their fame or respect. Jimmy Saville is supposed to have perpetrated over 200 sex crimes, and although we don’t know what Cardinal O’Brien is supposed to have done in any detail, he admits that he did not do what he preached.

Last week we had the story in St John’s gospel of the woman ‘taken in adultery’. If you just think of the basic scenario: somehow she had been caught in bed with someone who was not her husband; and if you stop at that point, that is a serious matter. If we lament the fact that so many marriages fail, and that so many children and families suffer unhappiness, pain and poverty as a result, we have to pause and say that the woman – and of course the man with her – were doing what causes all that. They were not doing what they should have been doing.

Although it may be rather unfashionable to talk in these terms, it seems to me that all these things – abuse of children, adultery, being a sexual predator, abusing a position of authority, are all species of sin. What makes these things sinful, as opposed to being just bad or criminal or immoral, is that they drive a wedge between us and God. The word for ‘sin’ in Greek is ´αμαρτια, which means literally, ‘missing the mark’. You will remember the famous passage in St Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 7, where Paul expresses his frustration and anger at his sinful nature.

He says, ‘For I know that nothing good lodges in me – in my unspiritual nature, I mean – for though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do. But what I do is the wrong, which is against my will. And if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin which has its lodging in me.’ [Romans 7:18-20, NEB]

To a greater or lesser extent we do sinful things because of human frailty. We do sinful things, even despite knowing what the right thing to do is. When you see all the evil that is around us, it is very daunting. What does it mean? Are we submerging under a tide of immorality and godlessness?

Let’s read again what St Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians. ‘God …. hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them…’ [v. 18-19]

‘Not imputing their trespasses unto them.’ No longer blaming them. Contrast with that the story of the Old Testament, say in Jeremiah, for example. The prophets of the Old Testament had to battle with constant tension between God and his chosen people.

Jeremiah says, ‘Hast thou utterly rejected Judah? hath thy soul lothed Zion? why hast thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us? we looked for peace, and there is no good; and for the time of healing, and behold trouble! We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers: for we have sinned against thee.’ [Jeremiah 14:19-20]

That’s a very different message from the one that we find in St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. St Paul is all about reconciliation. The interesting thing is that the word in Greek that is translated as ‘reconciliation’ (καταλλαγη) originally meant ‘exchange’, almost ‘a trade’, substituting one thing for another. It is also the word used to translate ‘atonement’, as in the Jewish festival of Atonement.

We say that Jesus’ sacrifice, his death, ‘atoned’, made ‘atonement’ for, our sin, made up for it, paid the price for it, in some way. He ‘redeemed’ us, he paid a ransom for us. I have always found it tough to think in terms of a blood sacrifice, that Jesus’ death on the cross was in some way a blood sacrifice. This passage in 2 Corinthians shows us another way of understanding the idea of atonement. Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus’ death, reconciles us with God.

Richard Hooker, the great Reformation theologian, said, about this passage, ‘Let it be counted folly or frenzy or whatsoever, it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man has sinned and God has suffered; that God has made himself the sin of men and that men are made the righteousness of God.’ Richard Hooker, A Discourse of Justification, http://tinyurl.com/dxfvxzq

It’s a sort of a swap, an exchange: reconciliation. Eugene Peterson, in his translation of the Bible called ‘The Message’, which is perhaps a commentary and a translation rolled into one, expresses this passage in 2 Corinthians as follows. ‘All this comes from God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins.’

This is the clue to the Christian revolution, that God is not vengeful, he is loving. God knows that we are imperfect, and that we do bad things. The woman taken in adultery didn’t intend to hurt anybody, but was just prey to an animal passion. Even St Paul, doing the things that he hated, was still subject to the influence of sin.

We should remember this when we are confronted by people who have done truly dreadful things – the killers of little Jamie Bulger came into the news again this week, for example; and of course we can think again of Jimmy Saville and others who seem to have allowed their baser instincts to get the better of them.

Jesus said to the woman, ‘Has no-one condemned you? She answered, ‘No-one, sir.’ Jesus said, ‘Nor do I condemn you’. Jesus’ message is, to put it another way, we should hate the sin, but have compassion for the sinner. This is a message of forgiveness, of redemption, the very opposite of hopelessness and bleakness. It is a happy message. It is a message for Refreshment Sunday: Mothering Sunday. There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a rosy glow. Rose Sunday looks forward to the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness – as Homer put it, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ – on Easter morning.

Any Questions?

Rose Sunday looks forward to the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness – as Homer put it, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ – on Easter morning.