You need to be watchful when you're looking after an old building, which is why our churches are inspected every five years, and a report made on the fabric each year to the Annual Meeting. At the quinquennial the architect sets out what's really urgent, and helps establish what our priorities should be for maintenance and repairs. If you miss something, even something quite small, it can work to bad effect unseen for years; and by the time you realise there’s something wrong, it is in fact very wrong indeed. There’s a guide to church mission I was looking at recently, and I was a bit surprised to find that it began not with, say, ideas for door to door visiting or tips on how to run a better youth club, but a piece about checking and clearing the church gutters and drains. Mission begins here, said the book: a tumbledown building may well be the sign of a tumbledown faith.
And the book went on to point out that regular maintenance is as vital for the church people as it is for the church building. In just the same way as a blocked gutter left uncleared can let damp into the fabric of the wall, so bad habits or foolish indulgences, if left unchecked, can begin to do serious damage to a person or to a congregation. And missing out on good practices like prayer, Bible study, or churchgoing, or even just checking to see how the neighbours are doing, can be just as damaging.
Because in the baptism service parents and godparents have to say that they repent of their sins, I always talk about sin when I make a baptism preparation visit. I find a lot of people inside and outside church have quite a narrow a view of what sin is. We tend to highlight the bad things we might do rather than the good things we miss out on doing: but to miss the opportunities we have to do good is just as sinful. And when it comes to bad things we do we may well tend to count some as more serious than others, like sexual misdemeanours, or flagrantly breaking the laws of the land - but should we, really?
The simple definition of sin is us going against God. The word in Greek is ‘amartia, and its original meaning has to do with falling short or missing the mark. Think of the dart that fails to lodge in the right place on the dart board. Maybe it hits another scoring section, so still counts for something; it might even hit the bull; or it might miss the board completely, or bounce off, or even lodge in the back of someone’s neck and cause some pain. Even if it still makes a score, it’s in the wrong place. And that’s sin - ‘amartia - us being in the wrong place: not being where God wants us to be, or doing what he would have us do.
We haven’t read from the First Letter of John this morning, but the reading we could have used is in your readings sheet. John says that to sin is to break God's law. In that case, we should look at what that law at its simplest says: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Or as Jesus said to his disciples: 'I am giving you a new commandment, love one another, as I have loved you.' Sin happens when we lose touch with the love of our Lord.
In the first reading we did have, Peter and John are being challenged after having healed a lame man in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. We heard Peter’s reply to that challenge. Peter could well have simply condemned the Jewish leaders for having conspired to put Jesus to death, but he didn’t. Instead, he offered them a second chance. His words might have made them squirm a bit, but they’re positive words. I know you acted in ignorance, he says. And though you did wrong, the wrong things you did brought about the fulfilment of what God had always planned, and what the prophets of old foretold. It’s not too late, he says: turn back to God, repent of your wrongdoing, and know that God stands ready to wipe out your sins. God is granting you a time of refreshment and remaking, Peter tells them, so make the most of it. All sin condemns us, but no sin takes us beyond the reach of God’s love.
Let’s turn to the Gospel. ‘Look, I'm not a ghost,' Jesus assures his disciples. 'Touch me, see the wounds; share your food with me, and watch me eat. Believe that this is real.' We see how hard it was for these men to believe: hard enough to believe that their Lord was alive, despite the cross and the tomb, but they need also to understand that what they’d seen happen on Good Friday hadn’t been God’s plans being thwarted and everything going wrong, but the opposite of that - God’s plans being fulfilled, and everything being set right. Jesus needs to open their minds to understand what the scriptures had really said about him. But they do at last come to understand, which is how Peter was able to talk with such authority and passion to those who crowded round him in Jerusalem.
For us just as much as for Peter and the other disciples, Easter’s message is that love is both the right way to live, and the only way to life. That's why people built churches, and worship in them on a Sunday (as opposed to any other day). We’re supposed and called to be Easter people. And while we won't ever quite shake off, in this life, our tendency to sin, incompetence and an over-large concern for our own popularity and standing, the challenge of Easter is that we should do our best to rise above all that, as God gives us strength and vision. A phrase from one of the books on my study shelf puts it rather well, I think: ‘Sin may impose its company on us, but it has no claim on our hospitality.’
“You are to be witnesses to all this,” says Jesus to the disciples in this morning’s Gospel - witnesses to all the world. There are no limits to the love whose sign is the cross. There’s no sin so small and trivial that it doesn’t condemn us: all sin counts against us, and on our own, we’re lost. But there’s no sin so big and nasty that it can’t be healed and cancelled out by the cross. We’re sinful folk, even though I hope we’re trying hard not to be, but we’re longer imprisoned by sin. For the Lord is risen, he is risen indeed, and he’s calling each one of us to bear faithful witness to the power and wonder of his saving love.
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