Sermon at the Old Royal Naval  College Chapel, 20th March

My name is Fr. Tom Pyke, and I am your neighbour across the water in the Parish of the Isle of Dogs. I am also the senior Chaplain in the Maritime Reserves, a part-timer in the large team of naval chaplains serving on ships and in shore establishments here in the UK and across the globe. The naval chaplains, understandably, have a strong emotional attachment to this chapel and its ministry, so it is good to be here with you as one of your Lent preachers this year. I last preached from this pulpit when I was asked to speak about the immortal memory of Horatio Nelson. That was in happier times, when we could look back and savour the great achievements of history. Today we follow the news from Ukraine, and while it is undoubtedly true that history that is unfolding before us, and Ukrainian men and women are showing resolve and courage that will be remembered with admiration when the history of the last three weeks is written, what fills our minds is the awfulness of what the Ukrainian people are suffering. It’s hard to focus on anything else, unless you switch off your television, unless you fold up your newspaper, unless you stop following the news on social media. And I am not suggesting that you should.

But we do need to think about how we balance our lives, and how much we concentrate on one thing rather than another. If you think about it, that is precisely how Vladimir Putin has caught the rest of the world off guard each time he has invaded and annexed a neighbouring country. Usually the smoke screen has been created by international sport, whether it has been the Olympics or the World Cup. When we have been concentrating on the warm feelings of world citizenship created by sport, Mr Putin has moved against Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and now Ukraine. What were we thinking of, to be so easily distracted? 

It isn’t, by any manner of means, a new phenomenon. In Jesus’s time too there were distractions that unsettled people’s world view. In our Gospel today Jesus talks about two events that clearly had seized and held the popular imagination. The first was a tragedy of chance, almost an act of nature. In Jerusalem a tower in the suburb of Siloam, probably part of the water supply to the city had collapsed, possibly as it was being built. Everyone around Jesus was talking about this tragedy and the eighteen people, were they workmen? who had been killed when the tower had fallen. Disasters like this fill our imaginations, was there anyone at fault; was the disaster a judgement on the people who died, and if so what had been their sin; where was God if these men were killed innocently going about their daily lives? If you think back to the events of the 2004 New Year’s Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the questions people asked were the same ones, especially where was God, and how could he allow such suffering. 

And it wasn’t only natural disasters that people talked about and speculated about in Jesus’s day either. There were frequent atrocities, carried out by the occupying Roman army and by the terrorist assasins struggling against them. People like Judas Iscariot whose name suggests he was ‘Mac the Knife’ to his friends. One incident that everyone was commenting on in Jesus’ time was the horror of Pontius Pilate’s soldiers attacking some Galilean while they were at prayer, butchering them so that their blood was mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. This story had it all, a villain, Pontius Pilate - we are going to hear more about him soon - a violent act of sacrilege, defacing a place of worship, and lots of gory detail, that either excited people or made them feel sick in the pit of their stomachs. Our society tells atrocity stories so readily. The atrocities of Lviv, Mariupol and Kyiv will be added to an already long list. How could men and women be so cruel to their fellow human beings. And where was God when this happened. Did he see and did he let it happen anyway?

Jesus reminds those who listen to him of those stories, and he makes the point that those who died in both cases were no worse, and no better than everyone else listening to Jesus. What happened to them, could have happened to any other group of workmen, or any other group of worshippers. Life is precious, yes, yet it is also unpredictable. Jesus calls on his listeners to repent, because they just have no idea when they will meet their maker and need to give an account of their lives to God. They needed to here that because it was true for them. It is also true for us. In the midst of life we are in death, as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us.

But there is another way of looking at this story, and that is about distraction from the work that we have been properly given to do by God. It is also about striking a proper balance between the things we concentrate on and obsess about. The first words that Jesus speaks in his ministry according to the gospel-writers is ‘the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has drawn near, repent and believe the Good News’ The proper response to hearing the Good News is to turn our lives around, turning away from sin, and turning to Christ. This isn’t just the work of Christians when they first hear the Good News. Every day we should wonder at the miracle of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and the extraordinary fact that this miracle is lavished on us, on us as sinners whom God loves so much that he sends and give us his only Son. Who we are may change a little, but we will always be sinners, when we are compared to the goodness and the purity of God. And so repentance is a daily work, a joyful and necessary work for Christians. Only when we concentrate on what’s going on in here, when we own up to our daily sins will we also, in the same moment of concentration, be able to see where God has been at working in us, forgiving us, healing us, using us for his glory.

This is our daily work, but it is even more so during Lent. I’m not saying that what is going on in Ukraine doesn’t deserve our sympathy, our compassion, even our anger. It does, of course. And our compassionate actions need to match the emotions we feel for the people of Ukraine; so we are right to give unstintingly, right to open our homes, right to protest at the crimes that are being committed. But it should not take our whole attention. More is at stake.  Like the fig tree in the parable Jesus tells we are drinking in the last chance saloon. Always.  God who is the owner of the orchard where the fig tree grows has looked at us expecting to see fruit, and he has found little or none. He is prepared to go out of his way to give us another chance,  he gives us Jesus as that chance, but he expects to see change, fruit in us. And only if we can avoid being distracted from the task he has given us, only if we can turn from the distraction of sin, and turn instead to Christ will that fruitfulness happen. Lent is a chance, a precious chance, to let that change happen in us. Let us not lose or waste that chance. Amen