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The Second Sunday in Lent, 2005
February 20, 2005
Christ Church, Covington
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone
who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jo. 3:16).
“Perish” is a strong word. Apparently the original Greek word means
“lost”, with two senses: to be missing, as in “the sheep that has gone
astray”; and then the sense of the word that we find here: to be ruined,
destroyed, lost in a more final sense. So “perish” is a strong word here;
a kind of parenthetical comment placed in the Gospel to indicate exactly
how grave the situation is.
How did we get in this mess, to the point of perishing? The metaphor that
comes to mind is “shipwreck” or “crash-landing”. These are events in which
there is loss, ruin, destruction, and also (sometimes) a lifeboat or
parachute. The great shipwreck of the human race, of course, took place at
the very beginning. You know the story. Adam and Eve in the Garden, placed
there by God. Their own ambition and self-centeredness led to
disobedience, to expulsion and death. There was no easy way back.
Everything changed. They “crash-landed”, if you will, with only the
clothes on their backs, stripped of much of what they’d possessed and
keeping only fragments of their former lives.
This event is the great semi-submerged wreck that the human race keeps
running afoul of. We’ve lost the ability not to sin, the ability to be
“perfect”, though we still make real choices with moral significance and
we’re still susceptible of God’s grace. In short, we’re perishing unless
saved by God.
Let’s stick with our shipwreck metaphor, and let me tell you another
story, this one the mainspring of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim. This is
a bleak novel, one of many by Conrad; Caroline knows something’s up with
me when I pull out Conrad. In the story, Jim is the chief mate of the
Patna, a worn-out old steamer on the Indian Ocean run. His ship sinks one
night, and at the crucial, irreversible point, Jim saves himself and
members of his crew while the native passengers, pilgrims to Mecca,
perish. In the novel, this event is in the past, and it is literally the
shipwreck that Jim keeps stumbling across. He can’t get beyond what he has
done; and there is no forgiveness that he can grant himself or that others
can give him. “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a
well – into an everlasting deep hole…”. The narrator Marlowe adds, “He had
tumbled from a height he could never scale again.” What a dark place to
be. I tell you a fictional tale here because it is a bit safer, since here
we touch a raw nerve in every life.
So we have two “shipwrecks”: the wreck of the human race, in its very
beginning, and the choices we ourselves make that seem to wreck us and
leave us washed up and finished. Perhaps “perish” is not too strong a
word. But if there is this wreckage (really the same disaster, after all)
there is also remedy, redemption, and rescue. That’s the point of our
Gospel, after all: rebirth. To be “born again” or “born from above” (Jo.
3:3) is necessary for us because new beginnings are necessary. We need to
begin over again, time after time, and that’s what Lent is all about. The
human race has crashed-landed, and a great project is afoot for its
restoration. Each of us is in need of beginning again, and Lent is the
time that we remember this truth. The “take away” is to reflect on that
one point in your life where you are most in need of a new beginning, or
that one point in which you can celebrate already a new beginning.
Repentance is real, redemption is real, new life is real. Make a new
beginning today. There’s no need to perish.
The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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