Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:
"Amen, you wonderful priest." The climatic scene in the BBC drama Broken had Fr Michael, the central character, sharing the Eucharist at a Mass for his dead mother, with each of his parishioners saying to him as they received, "Amen, you wonderful priest".
Events had conspired to create a crisis of faith for him at this point in the drama and he had planned to step down as a priest as a result. We presume though that the affirmation he receives from his parishioners at this low moment in his ministry enables him to continue.
Broken is an excellent example of a drama based on a good priest. There have been others in recent years; the comedy Rev and the film Calvary, for example. What they all have in common is the understanding that a good priest is not perfect.
In Broken, Fr Michael clearly struggles with his own demons at the same time that he comes alongside his parishioners to support them in their struggles. Indeed, he is enabled to support them with empathy and understanding because he is honest about his own struggles. It is this honesty and vulnerability which makes him 'good', not any sense of supposed moral perfection.
In our Gospel passage (Luke 6. 37 - 42) Jesus illustrates how easy we find it to criticise others - to see the speck in another’s eye, whilst ignoring the log in our own. Jesus is calling us to become, like Fr Michael, aware primarily of our own faults and failings (this is, after all, the point of including confession in church services) and then to use this awareness not to prevent us from acting (because we are overwhelmed by guilt) but instead to use it as a spur to acting to support and enable others out of the empathy and understanding that results from our awareness of our own shortcomings.
‘Maybe you know the saying, "When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you." Jesus had a version of this wisdom when he said, "Don't focus on the speck in your brother's eye while ignoring the log in your own eye." When cruel accusations fly, we all need to hear the voice of reason that says, "Look in the mirror … You might just be talking about yourself" …
We all know what it's like to get caught up in the heat of the moment. When we cannot bear to see something painful in ourselves, we want to get rid of it. We want to relocate the ugliness we feel about ourselves and put it into someone else. We say those bad feelings do not apply to us; they apply to someone else. The fancy psychoanalytic term for this unconscious process is projective identification. We get rid of the unwanted feelings (projection) and identify them as belonging to someone else (identification).' (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/headshrinkers-guide-the-galaxy/201109/three-fingers-pointing-back-you)
Jesus is calling for us to look within ourselves for our faults before we ever start pointing them out in others. Another proverb covers similar ground: There is so much good in the worst of us, / There is so much bad in the best of us / That it ill behoves any of us /To find fault with the rest of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted this proverb when he said, ‘There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.’ In reflecting on this quote, Katha Waters, Bookstore and Resource Center Manager at The King Center, suggests that we often don’t see things as they are, but instead see things as we are. People often seem to judge others not based on the real person, but on their own prejudices. Since perception is reality to most people, we often misjudge others based on misconceived generalizations. As we have been reflecting, no one is perfect, no one is all good or bad. To understand this should be to have better tolerance for people and not let hate overcome us. So, next time we are tempted to criticise another person, maybe we should stop to think whether we are really judging them or are really looking at a reflection of ourselves (http://www.thekingcenter.org/blog/mlk-quote-week-good-and-evil-all-us).
The point of this isn’t that we become overwhelmed by guilt or a sense of failure. Instead, Jesus is calling us to become, like Fr Michael, aware primarily of our own faults and failings in order to use this awareness as a spur to acting to support and enable others out of the empathy and understanding that results from our awareness of our own shortcomings.
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Nina Simone - I Think It's Going To Rain Today.
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