Talking About Sin
Sunday 15 March 2026, Mothering Sunday, The 4th Sunday of Lent
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Exodus 2:1-10
John 19:25b-27
When I was a member of a set of barristers’ Chambers, back in the Dark Ages, judges were routinely beastly. Things have changed ,of course, but back then they were sour-faced, bad-tempered, and sharp-tongued. My colleague Gordon devised a strategy for disarming even the most humourless of them. It was very straightforward: he would profess full personal responsibility for anything that went awry in the course of a trial.
If the prison van was late delivering defendants to court; if the Crown Prosecution Service had failed to produce a written transcript of the police interview; if the public loos on the third floor of Croydon Crown Court had flooded – whatever – Gordon would get to his feet and say ‘Your Honour, such-and-such having happened, I apologize sincerely and accept full responsibility for it’. The judge, somewhat taken aback, would say ‘Really, Mr Padgham, I don’t think you can be blamed for the defects in the court’s plumbing’. ‘No, your Honour, I must insist’ Gordon would respond. And at this point the judge would inevitably apologize to him – and the trial would proceed, with the judge convinced that Gordon was a thoroughly good egg.
It’s an effective strategy for defanging an irascible judge, but it’s a disastrous strategy for holding anyone to account for failure. If we take responsibility for everything then we take responsibility for nothing. And, sisters and brothers, today I think we need to talk about that. We need to talk about sin. How to puncture a party atmosphere…
You’ll be relieved to hear that I’m broadly against sin. But I’m also broadly against the way we talk about sin, particularly at this time of year. Remember the familiar Lenten hymn that we sang a couple of weeks ago: ‘Just and holy is thy name; I am all unrighteousness; false and full of sin I am’. As I sang it I’m afraid I thought to myself: I don’t believe this. I am not all unrighteousness, and neither are you – not least because righteousness is God’s work in us, promised and effected when we are baptized. And I think it’s dangerous. When hymns and prayers and responses hammer home a message about our wholesale depravity and utter beyond-the-paleness then there’s a risk, a real risk, that we fail to take responsibility for that for which we most need to take responsibility.
As I said, I’m broadly against sin. There’s stuff of which each of us needs to take ownership, for which each of us needs to say sorry, and better than which each of us needs to do in future. You know what this stuff is and, if you don’t, then Lent is the obvious time to give it some serious thought. The lies; the cruelty; the frankly ridiculous and appalling behaviour in which most of us – I’ll say it – all of us indulge…We need to own it, own it honestly, and express remorse for it. Opportunities for sacramental confession are offered in the Cathedral in Holy Week: think about it.
But a second consequence is that the familiar texts of Lent may persuade us that our personal sins are of ultimate importance to God. And my larger point is that I’m afraid I simply don’t believe that our personal sins are God’s most pressing concern. No healthy religious economy places us at the centre of everything. In one of St Augustine’s expositions of the Psalms, he encourages his hearers to be sensitive to ‘the tribulation’ of their present circumstances. ‘If we think about where we are now’ he writes, ‘and reflect carefully on it, and then remember where we shall be…we discover how grave is our trouble in our present condition’. How grave is our trouble: the gravity of our trouble is not that we tell a lie to our line-manager, make an angry comment to a partner, eat more chips than is good for us or entertain a prurient thought. We must deal with the stuff that is immediately ours to deal with. But the gravity of our trouble is that almost wherever we look we see our stuff replicated and magnified on a grand, even global scale.
Almost wherever we look. We applaud cheap energy, economic growth, wealth creation, defence spending, and strong leadership. In direct consequence, the affluent north burns fossil fuels and abandons the south to a climate emergency; a handful of powerful and well-insulated men unleash brutal violence which destroys the life of the Middle East; and the charmed web of a disgraced billionaire exposes countless women to abuse and corrupts the institutions on which we all rely. The tribulation of our present circumstances is enormous. To say we are not in a good place is to fail to say half of it. We esteem the very forces that are at risk of killing us. And Lent is a time for asking God to open our eyes to this – to our stuff, yes, but more pressingly, surely, to this other stuff, to our tribulation. Augustine would say we inhabit a fallen world; contemporary theologians write of structural sin. Whatever – we are immersed, enmeshed, up to our necks in a toxic disfigurement of the Paradise that we were created to enjoy.
I repeat: we must confess our sins. We must wake up to the sin that besets the world. We must refuse to perform the self-comforting charade of blaming ourselves for some of it or of beating ourselves up for all of it, which is a potential third consequence of those Lenten texts. But we must also acknowledge that within each of us there is the potential for the colossal immaturity, gross self-obsession, terrifying insecurity, and ideological rigidity that we call out in the presidents, prime ministers, and theocrats whom we decry. Thank God, not many of us are called to positions of such power, but the realization that we need to arrive at before Holy Week is here is that were we so called we might not behave any differently.
And having arrived at that realization, what?
This is the heart of the journey to the cross. It’s Mothering Sunday: Moses is placed among the bulrushes because his mother can hide him from the Egyptians no longer. She takes a deep breath, and lets him go, committing him to the mercy of the river and of those who might find him. Centuries later another mother is found a secure home when her son with his dying breath lets her go and commits her to the mercy of his friend.
Remember that, ultimately, this is not all about us: about our sin and about our wretchedness. Ultimately this is all about love, forgiving love, God’s forgiving love which catches each of us and holds each of us in a loving embrace that is everlasting, and which will ultimately restore all things and make them perfect, beautiful, and true. Our part is to take a breath, very deep breath, and to commit ourselves to the mercy of God. Easter is coming. We don’t have long to wait.