The Times Are Changing: Sermon Preached on 9th February 2025 (Fourth Sunday before Lent)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 1-11; Luke 5. 1-11

“I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”

When I was young, I was far more self-conscious and afraid than I ever let on. Whenever I walked into a room, I assumed that everyone else there was competent and confident—and that I was a bluffer. I projected overconfidence to try to hide the fears that wracked me, fears I assumed nobody felt but me. A major life moment was when I realised nearly everyone has these fears, and that many people who are very confident on the surface are battling doubt underneath. Losing our illusions can be a very healthy thing.

We all say that nobody’s perfect. But we often assume that some other people are close to perfection, and because we know we aren’t, we can assume that we are terribly deficient. With age should come a certain wisdom that the things that we struggle with are usually just the same things that everybody else struggles with.

When I was younger I also hated St Paul—or I thought I did. The truth is I didn’t really know him or his writings. Despite my best efforts to pay attention, I would find myself drifting off at church when the New Testament reading came from Paul. All those long sentences with too many clauses and too few full stops. The same would happen when I tried to read Paul at home. What I hated about Paul was that he was full of misogyny and homophobia, or so I was told by both the people who thought that was a good thing, and those who thought he was a bigot.

Another thing that happened as I got older was that I started to get were Paul was coming from. Perhaps not the most stylish writer, but so brilliant at reducing Christianity to its essence. One of his great gifts is to make no bones that he is far from perfect; that any favour God had for him was entirely undeserved. Sometimes, like in this morning’s Epistle, Paul makes too much of what a horrible rotter he had been when he persecuted the Church. After his conversion, even his best friends still found him to be a very difficult man. As a young man he was exactly the sort of person who projected too much overconfident certainty in his faith precisely to cover the fears that lay underneath, and in the process he became a bit of a horror, a violent religious fanatic seemingly devoid of conscience. Yet hidden from view, Paul’s conscience was clearly deeply troubled by his actions, and then God in all His Grace brought Paul out of the darkness of his overcertainty into the light of trusting in Christ alone rather than himself. Grace is a much used but little explained concept, but theologically it means the favour God has for us which we have done nothing to deserve.

In this morning’s epistle, Paul produces one of his great lines, “by the grace of God, I am what I am”. And so am I. And so are you.

This is at the heart of the good news of which Paul writes here, the good news through which his readers are being saved—his readers then and now. Paul says the most important parts of this good news are: that Christ died for our sins, and truly rose from the dead. You can talk of Christian principles in politics; or whether ‘as a Christian’ you’re for or against women priests, or gay marriage; or of whether or not a Christian needs to have a conscious personal encounter with Christ. But this is what the Christian Faith is actually about: that On the Cross, God in Christ saved us and opened the way to eternal life for us—God alone and not we ourselves, and not because we are good but because He is Love.

One of the problems with the Church is that it too often tries to justify itself by what it achieves in this world. One danger of that is that it keeps the Church talking about this world rather than pointing people towards what Christ has opened for us in the world to come. The other danger of that has been badly exposed in recent weeks, because the Church is an institution run by humans with all the same capacity for failures as anybody else. A truth that Paul points us towards is that nobody gets things right often enough, or is good enough, or caring enough for God—if, that is, God wanted to hold us to any test. God’s Grace is enough for all of us. It is only when we empty ourselves of our illusions of being good enough that God can fill us with His Grace and Love. Losing our illusions can be a very healthy thing.

Of course this stuff about Christ being God incarnate who died to bring us to eternal life is hard to believe. It always was. Even the apostles didn’t necessarily believe Christ at first. Today’s Gospel reading is set very early in Christ’s earthly ministry. Peter has followed Jesus because he admires Him; even at this early stage, loves Him. But when Peter, reluctantly after a fruitless night of fishing, lets down the nets again at Christ’s request, and they come in literally breaking because they are so full of fish, Peter realises Jesus is something more than just a clever preacher. He is so shocked he shouts “get away from me for I am a sinful man.” As yet, Peter still has no idea how extraordinary God’s plans for him are, and how costly. But Peter does understand that He is in the presence of a holiness greater than anything he deserves, and a reality stranger than anything he could have imagined.

We faithful few who keep the Church in these villages worry terribly that we’re an ageing group doomed to rapid disappearance. That’s obvious to me as your Rector. But over the last five to ten years, there have been a series of high profile conversions to Christianity, often coming from people who’ve expressed outright atheism for a lifetime. The mood of the times is shifting rapidly, as the myth of inevitable progress through human reason crumbles. It seemed triumphant at the beginning of the century—yet it is now collapsing and taking many our old certainties with it.

I suspect even the most technophobic of you have heard of Wikipedia. On Wednesday of this week, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, posted a 13,000-word article to the internet with the comment, “Why I was not a Christian. Why I am one now.” In the heady days of the 2000s, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens led the seemingly triumphant ranks of the New Atheists, Larry Sanger had been a devoted rationalist and materialist. And his essay explaining his conversion is the sort of dry, rational, case for Christianity you’d expect from an ex-atheist computer programmer. It doesn’t particularly appeal to me personally, but it’s a powerful a sign of how rapidly times are changing. Of course we’ll see this change more slowly out here in these villages with their relatively older populations—but among young people, young men in particular, there has been a sudden, dramatic, change since the pandemic. It’s like daybreak in the desert, if you’ve ever been lucky enough to be out walking when that happens.

So, one more time, let down your nets for God, and see what happens. Of course, you’re afraid it will be a waste of time, and that worries you because we’re all self-conscious and don’t want to look like failures. But you have already toiled all through what turned out to be a dark night for the Church. What do you have to lose by having another go? Only the illusions you have long held about the world—and when you lose your illusions about this world, you might find that everything you dared hope about the world to come is indeed true.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

Top image: desert light comes and goes with great suddenness; this is the arid Tankwa Karoo National Park in South Africa. © Gerry Lynch, 27 January 2025.