Epiphany 5 (Year C)

(Isaiah 6.1-13; 1Corinthians 15.1-11; Luke 5.1-11)

It’s been, for me, these last few days, the usual, fairly hard week at the Cathedral – that familiar sense of too many things pressing for my attention; an almost infinite need, which feels impossible to meet. The knowledge that a number of people would appreciate some contact; but I don’t know how to create the time for that to happen. That there are so many plans to realise the potential of this Cathedral, but the needed repairs stack up too, and there is never enough money for either. And through it all, the nagging question of how what we are trying to offer here makes any sort of difference; how might it connect with the pressing questions and needs of a world that feels like it is spinning out of control. Is it worth the effort? Am I up to the task?

Let me be clear, I’m starting with that, I hope, honest and frank assessment and revealing of my doubts and fears, not to elicit your sympathy, or kindly attempts to persuade me that it is not so. This is not a cry for help. It is instead a small attempt to be honest about the daily questions and inadequacies that I live with, because the church is a gathering of those who begin in an honest account of our inadequacy, our flaws. And if I that is true for us as church, then it is true of me. To articulate and understand the ways it is true of me is to suggest that you might recognise something of that in your own life too. The problem with pulpits is that they can suggest the preacher is on a different plane to everyone else. But that is not true. What we are addressing here is the human condition.

And such honesty is important, if sometimes hard. Doing any kind of job, with competing and sometimes overwhelming interests and demands, necessarily asks you to develop a thick skin, so that you don’t suffocate under the sense of the impossibility of doing it all. But that thick skin can lead to a hardness of heart; a protective closing of myself off from pain – my own or that of others - because I can’t solve it, or sort it. I haven’t the time, or the resources, or the wisdom to know fully how to respond. And so I share something of my frustrations and failures not so that you can tell me that that is not the case, or that I’m doing a grand job; but to prevent that thickening of the skin, that hardening of the heart which no longer feels the necessary failures of my response. The church is where, at its best, we are given the strength to be honest before God and before one another. I – like you, I suspect - live with a deep sense of my own inadequacy to, and failures in, the tasks set before me, set before us.

A number of months ago we moved, within this Sunday service, our confession of sin, and the proclamation of absolution, from near the beginning to later on. We will now declare that that we have sinned in thought, word and deed, and in what we have failed to do, after our intercessions. As part of our response to the proclamation of the Word that is our readings and this sermon, we will offer that admission of our own failings.

That pattern – of responding to an encounter with God’s Word, with a sense of our failure and inadequacy – is found in each of our readings this morning. Isaiah, in the midst of that wonderful vision of God in the majesty of God’s holiness, cries out: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ And St Paul, in his proclamation of Christ’s resurrection, nevertheless reminds his readers of his own unworthiness: ‘Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.’ And Peter, in that tender and life-changing encounter by the lakeside, as he hauls the overwhelming catch of fish aboard, can only respond with a sense of his inadequacy: ‘When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken.’

Two books that I would commend to you – one from a dozen years ago, the other much more recent - have sought to explore in a seemingly a sceptical world, why Christian faith still has something to offer. Both Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic and Elizabeth Oldfield’s Fully Alive seek to reach beyond a narrow Christian audience and articulate to those who might be seeking and exploring, something of the heart of Christian wisdom and practice. And both both books begin from a recognition of what Francis Spufford calls HPTFTU, the human propensity to (let’s call it) mess things up. HPTFTU is a shorthand for both authors, a helpful re-working, of what the Christian tradition has called sin. And their books explore how we handle that human propensity, what Christian faith and wisdom offer in response.

I offer you that shorthand because HPTFTU helpfully makes us see sin not simply as individual decisions and acts of wrongdoing, although it can of course be that; but also as a basic fact, propensity, of human existence which we all, to greater and lesser degrees, participate in. And so sin is understood in this broader meaning of a sense of dissatisfaction, unease, anxiety. To see it in those terms connects the sin we will shortly confess to all sorts of common experience. We begin to see sin popping up all over the place once we are alert to it. The fear of missing out (FOMO) for example is rooted in that unease about ourselves, and the fear that others are having a better time, having that experience which would finally make us feel complete. Or Imposter Syndrome – that description of the sense, allied to what I articulated at the start of this sermon, that you’ve been promoted to a job, or inhabit a life, that you don’t deserve, or are incapable of fulfilling. Even climate anxiety, that widespread sense amongst the younger generation particularly, that we, humanity as a whole, are not up to the task of living on this earth sustainably; that the propensity and shape of human living necessarily tends toward destruction. These are all manifestations of HPTFTU, our deep sense of, and the truth of, our human propensity, individually and collectively, to mess things up.

In our Service this morning, as every Sunday, the response to our collective admission of sin, is the proclamation of absolution:
God, who is both power and love, forgive us and free us from our sins, heal and strengthen us by the Holy Spirit, and raise us to new life in Christ our Lord.

Isaiah, Paul and Peter don’t remain in that place of shame, and failure, because they hear God’s call to them in the midst of their sense of inadequacy, of unworthiness. It is not that that failure is not acknowledged, but that it doesn’t stand in the way of the call, and their response to it. Or, perhaps putting it better and more starkly, admitting their sense of inadequacy is what breaks them open to hear that call, the foundational gift and call of love on their lives, our lives. That is what absolution is – not a get out of jail free card, wiping us clean of sins, but God’s word of love addressed to each one of us. And addressed in our moment of need, at the point at which we have honestly admitted our propensity to mess things up, when, if we have been honest in that admission, we feel ourselves judged. And God’s word of love and new life arrives at that moment not to judge and condemn us, but to turn things around. To turn us around when we are open to hear that word of love, and begin again on that new basis. Not doing what we do because we are fully capable, but because we are loved; because we are part of a community of similarly inadequate, flawed, beautiful and loved human beings. And I mean all of you; inadequate, flawed, beautiful and loved human beings. To live out God’s call in a world loved into life by God.

Here am I, says Isaiah, send me,. Here we are – inadequate, flawed; and loved - send us. Amen.