Sin is not a word which we use a lot nowadays, and we are often very uncomfortable with it. It carries a heaviness and moral judgement which hurts and excludes, despite the fact that a central tenet of Christian faith is that God forgives our sins in Christ Jesus. Admittedly, most of the time I prefer to focus on God’s love and forgiveness, and the fact that the vast majority of our sin is actually us making mistakes. So often the things we do which hurt or damage ourselves or others are inadvertent, or are unintended consequences, or caused by not thinking things through. Often – most of the time! – we are making decisions and acting on limited information, and acting the best we can in any given situation.

But then maybe I’m a hopeless optimist! To deliberately act to harm or hurt another person is, for me, unthinkable. God knows I’ve made many mistakes in my life, as have we all, but they have always been exactly that – mistakes. Unintentional errors. Unintended consequences of what seemed to be a good idea at the time. But never deliberate transgression. When that has happened, I have always been horrified at the damage caused, and carry the weight of that pain for years after. I tend to assume that the vast majority of humanity is the same. I have what might be called a “Genesis 1” view, where people and the world are essentially good, but failures and breakages are sadly part of life; as opposed to a “Genesis 3” view where the world is inherently fallen and bad, and we must strive to a good which is no longer natural to us. However I increasingly begin to wonder if I must reconsider.

In recent weeks, ethics and morality (I know, old fashioned word) particularly from a Christian perspective have been much on my mind. This is partly because I have the privilege of teaching the Yr 5 at our local primary school for an hour on Friday afternoons, and partly because of the Church of England and the bishops in the media spotlight.

This week’s gospel is from Luke 5, where Jesus meets Simon, James and John, who will become three of his closest disciples and friends. The three fishermen have been out all night and caught nothing, despite all their years of expertise in fishing. Jesus tells them to go out of their comfort zone, into deep water, and try again. When they are successful, Simon’s response is to recognise Jesus as a holy man and to go away, for he (Simon) is a sinner and not worthy of a holy man’s help and presence. Not only does Jesus not leave, he invites this self-acknowledged sinner to a new life, and a new chance.

Two things strike me, in the light of my preamble.

God calls us out of the places where we are comfortable, where we can hide from ourselves and others, where we can just chalk up our failures (or even deliberate actions) as “lessons learned” and hope as few people as possible find out or remember. God calls us to radical reconsideration of what matters, and how life should be lived, and how others should be valued and treated. Through Jesus, He invites us into deeper relationship with Him, to truly and fully explore the commands to “love God, and love our neighbour as ourselves”, which Christ gives as the summary of God’s Law as given to Moses.

The other thing that strikes me from the story in Luke 5 is Simon’s honesty about himself! When a child makes a mistake, her instinct can be to hide it, usually in fear and shame. When caught in deliberate wrongdoing the child’s instinct is to deny it, or to point the finger at someone else, usually for fear of punishment. With children we understand this tendency to deflect or misdirect in hope of “getting away with it”, but in adults it is infinitely less attractive, and does not usually end well. Truth (thankfully) has a habit of coming out!

Genuine penitence and repentance for sin – whether an honest mistake, an unintended consequence, or even a deliberate wrong action – must invite a response from us, as followers of Jesus, of acknowledgment and forgiveness, even if the consequences of that sin still have to be painfully worked through in the community, not least to avoid it happening again. Forgiving and forgetting are absolutely not the same thing. What we cannot do is lie to ourselves, to God, and to one another about our actions and motives, and try to justify ourselves and our actions to seem other than we are.

Honesty is often one of the very hardest things we can ever undertake. It is painful, raw, and uncompromising. The Ten Commandments are not a list of wagging-finger-don’ts from a killjoy God. They are principles which are vital to a functioning society. If any of them is broken, then mutual trust and respect in that society are shattered, and the shards that litter the floor are every bit as agonisingly painful as any glass, or that stray piece of Lego at 2am in the dark!

As a Church, we need to work together to rebuild the trust between us all, and (perhaps more importantly) with the wider community. At present we are tarred with a brush of moral turpitude and outrageous (seemingly deliberate) transgression of Christian morality by a very few individuals that the vast majority of us would utterly reject. God invites us to reconciliation and renewal, but first we have to be honest, confess, and ask forgiveness. If we are to have any hope of rebuilding trust and true community in the Church, we must trust in the love and forgiveness of God, even as we accept that our fellow humans are unlikely to be anything like as swift and complete in forgiveness as God.

Rev. Talisker

Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash