Words from the 5th Chapter of the Gospel according to Luke.
“Go away from me, for I am a sinful man.” Now, when was the last time that someone said that to you? I suspected as much. It is not the sort of thing that we expect to hear nowadays. It is not the sort of thing that we expect to hear, firstly, because it contains a reference to sin, which is a concept that has somewhat gone out of fashion. There may be a valid reason for this. Perhaps, in the past, church people banged on rather too much about sin and its consequences. Perhaps people used it rather too much, in particular, to condemn the actions of others, of which they disapproved of others, of whom they disapproved. Sin was something that other people did. Hmm. Or perhaps sin never quite recovered from the 1960s revolution which led to what was called simply the me’ generation, whose motto was, whatever turns you on’. That is, nothing is intrinsically right or wrong but thinking makes it so. I do my thing and you do yours. I don’t comment on what you do and don’t expect you to comment on what I do. We are each happy in our own, self-contained worlds and morality is purely relative. There are no absolute values, no unquestionable rights or wrongs. In such a universe, there is no place for sin.
Now, I don’t think that anyone here wants to turn the clock back to the days when the sanctimonious, holier-than thou flung the accusation of sin loosely at anything from new fashions in skirts to novel styles of music. All the same, whenever a concept gets jettisoned, it might be worth reflecting for a moment on whether we might perhaps have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. So what better, on this joyful occasion when we prepare to celebrate the sacrament of baptism, than to spend a couple of minutes reflecting on sin? Well, you may think of a number of better things, actually, but let’s give it a whirl.
Where shall we start? Where else but with fish? Simon Peter and the others had fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus appeared and told them to put out into deep water and try again. They caught so many fish that their nets threatened to break. They filled their boats, which began to sink. Now you or I might have done many things at this point abandoned ship, thrown some fish back, even decided to become a vegetarian. But what did Simon Peter do? He fell down before Jesus and said, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” What was he thinking of? And what have fish got to do with sin?
Simon Peter was, I suggest, awestruck. He knew in his inner being that he was in the presence of someone of immense and extraordinary powers. No mere mortal could contrive what Simon Peter had just witnessed. Simon Peter, a professional fisherman, knew a bit about fish and he knew a bit about that lake. He knew that no natural power could have conjured up that colossal catch. He could only fall on his knees. But why did he say what he said? Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. He said this because he did not feel worthy to stand in the presence of Jesus. He did not feel worthy to stand so he fell to his knees. He did not feel worthy to be in the presence of Jesus, so he urged Jesus to take himself away. Simon Peter felt unworthy. Of course Jesus did not go away. He stayed with Simon Peter and the others, and they stayed with him, to do his work.
Simon Peter was instinctively aware that, before the presence of the Holy One, he was a sinner. This does not mean that he itemised to himself individual sins that he had committed. He did not reflect on his dubious taste in Galilean music or his choice of newfangled sandals, which some of his more prudish neighbours might have thought sinful. No, he was simply aware that, whilst the Holy One was perfect in goodness, he himself fell far short of perfection. And he fell far short of perfection not because of any especial sinfulness on his own part but simply because he was a human being, with all the shortcomings that that implies.
St Paul expressed a similar awareness of his unworthiness to serve the Lord when he wrote to the Church at Corinth, as we heard this morning, “For I am the least of the Apostles because I persecuted the church of God.” And that Church existed to offer worship to Jesus Christ who, “died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” When we talk of Jesus, the Son of God, dying for our sins, we do not, I think, enumerate our individual meannesses, reprehensible though they may be, but we contemplate the general awfulness of which humanity is so palpably capable and guilty.
Moving on from fish, why do we baptise babies? How can we think that they have sinned? To which the short and simple answer is that we do not think that babies have sinned. We baptise babies because they are human beings and, like all other human beings, they inherit the latent sinfulness that is the mark of our species. As we go through life we may try ever so hard to be perfect but we do not succeed. We fall short of God’s reasonable expectations of us. We strive to be holy but we fail. All of us. The Genesis stories of Adam and Eve express this in terms of their disobedience of God’s commands in the Garden of Eden, where humanity is given everything by God but chooses to defy his instructions. It is this inherent tendency to waywardness that is meant by the much misunderstood term, original sin’. It is because we recognise this inescapable fact of the human condition that we bring babies to baptism. We do not believe that the individual baby before us has sinned what could be more absurd? but that we recognise sinfulness as an essential, if regrettable, aspect of human nature. So we bring our babies to baptism so that their sinfulness may be washed away in the sacrament of water. Our Lord himself sought baptism by John the Baptist. Fully divine but fully human, he sought a public act of cleansing of himself and dedication to repentance before God.
Whilst it may no longer be fashionable to talk about sin in secular society, then, we who are Christians should not be afraid to do so. We do so, however, not to fling sanctimonious accusations at others but to recognise our own shortcomings. Like Simon Peter and like Paul, we acknowledge our unworthiness to stand before the Lord whilst he, of course, stoops to embrace us and keep us by his side. So we bring our babies to baptism to make, on their behalf, this public act of acknowledgement of human sinfulness and to seek God’s cleansing action upon us. We may, with Simon Peter, say, Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man, but we know that our Lord will never leave us. This is what we want for our children and this is what we want for ourselves. Amen.