Lord Lucan, Shergar and Reggie Perrin - Sermon 22nd April 2007
It's a confession that I've made to you before that I really miss Punch magazine, and that I loved it for the cartoons. Now that's something nobody will ever say about Life and Work ! One of the bits I really loved was the competition at the end, where readers had to supply a new caption for a classic cartoon. I remember several of them, but my favourite was one of those beautifully crafted cartoons, showing a collection of Edwardian gentlemen, and ladies in huge hats, rich blouses and voluminous skirts, at the races, watching a horse and rider thunder past, into the picture. One of the ladies is saying something to another. I don't know what she said in the original caption, but according to the winner of the competition she is saying "Gosh! It's Lord Lucan on Shergar..."
Lord Lucan. Shergar. Two names, three words, to conjure up a concept. Disappearance. Lord Lucan, of course, fled from the middle of an appallingly messy situation involving the murder of a nanny. Poor old Shergar had nothing to flee from. He won the Derby in 1981, by a still unsurpassed 10 lengths. (Isn't it amazing what you can learn at church!) He was kidnapped in 1983, and never seen again.
Lord Lucan's disappearance, a decade earlier than Shergar's, has woven itself into another odd set of coincidences.
Since the disappearance, many alleged sightings of Lucan have been reported from all over the world, but the police investigation has drawn a total blank in its efforts to find the runaway Earl. In a curious coincidence, in December 1974 police in Australia arrested a man they believed was Lucan but was in fact the British MP John Stonehouse, who had faked his suicide a month earlier. (Wikipedia article)
John Stonehouse! Now, there's another name to conjure with when it comes to disappearances! The MP who fled from a series of financial failures, leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami. And does all this not irresistibly remind those of us old enough of another name - that of Reginald Perrin!
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was groundbreaking TV comedy, created by David Nobbs, and brought to life by the incomparable Leonard Rossiter. The first series charted the disintegration of the central character, Reggie Perrin, under the numbing weight of the commuter routine, the desolation of his working life at Sunshine Desserts, and the complete emptiness of his life. Here, Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, is our friend!
Clearly this sort of thinking - that you could do away with your old "self, and somehow start again, was "in the air." That's what these coincidences seem to attest to. But as a second, then a third series of Reginald Perrin came along, as so often happens, you begin to see patterns in the coincidences. And you are reminded of Sigmund Freud's point that, while there may be coincidences in nature, there are none in the affairs of human beings. Instead, there is circularity, and repetition.
In the second series, he remarries his wife and they build a retail business ("Grot") which sells useless items, hoping that it will be an interesting failure. Instead...Grot becomes a runaway success, and Reggie ends up employing all the staff from Sunshine Desserts, including his former boss, CJ. This causes the Perrins to fall into the same boredom that Reggie had suffered before, so at the end of the second series they fake a joint suicide.
It must be clear by now that what we are talking about is the most extreme form of running away. And as Freud tells us, running away is always a running into repetition:
The third series... saw Reggie come pretty much full circle, back where he started. He is rehired by CJ's brother FJ at Amalgamated Aerosols, with CJ himself as Reggie's supervisor. The final scene sees him contemplating another trip to the beach for another possible faked suicide.
Reggie Perrin can't cope with who and what he has become, and runs away from it; his death may be faked, but the truth of his situation is that he is desperate enough to kill something. Not so much himself, perhaps, as his self.
It's a strange thing, this "self." Common sense tells us that we all are one. A "self ", I mean. Much contemporary thinking suggests that instead of our each "being" a "self ", we actually "use" several selves, maybe many, in the course of a day. It used to be a joke in our family, that my mother had in her repertoire her "shirt shop voice". This harks back to an incident in my last year in school, just before our form 7 social. I had saved up my cash for the purposes of decking myself out as the smoothest, coolest dude at the party.
For North Walians, the place for posh shopping then was Chester, and I knew just the ridiculously upmarket shop I was headed for - and pretty much what I wanted. I arrived, of course, much less than the vision of sophistication I hoped to leave as, and, to my mortification, was treated with complete distain by the very snooty assistant.
My mortification was kicked up three orders of magnitude, though, when my mother weighed in on my behalf. Not in the least aggressively or rudely. But in a voice - and with a persona I hadn't ever heard before. She quite deliberately became the sort of person that Hyacinth Bucket desperately aspires to be. Her manner would have made royalty feel downmarket. And within twenty minutes, I left the shop with exactly the blue velvet jacket, the flared trousers and the frilly shirt (outlined in black) with huge silk bow tie, that I had imagined myself in. It was, in retrospect, probably less Motown than waiter, but I felt cool.
As important as my mother's astonishing ability to modify her "self " appropriately, was my inability, at that time in my life, to be anything other than the gauche teenage male I was, unable to face down (interesting expression!) a snooty assistant, stuck with the way he saw me. Or maybe more importantly, stuck with the way / thought he saw me. Which was how I thought everyone else saw me. Which is who I assumed I was. Because that was so much to do with the way I saw myself.
Burns begged:
O wad some poo'er the giftie gie us
Tae see ourselves as ithers see us..
Now all of this is central to our understanding of the Gospel. Because the Gospel speaks of newness of life, of forgiveness of sins, of the possibility of breaking, in some profoundly meaningful way, with who we were.
Often this is presented along the lines of being "born again". And there it is, in Scripture, John 3:3, "Jesus answered him, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.'". And this is very often presented as an experience - one kind of one-size-fits-all experience - which all must go through before they can call themselves, or be called, Christian. (Notice again that language of what we think ourselves to be, and what others think us to be...) You must be "convicted of sin". People who think like this often recite catalogues of heinous things they are supposed to have done or thought in their previous existence. Quite a lot of it is really scary, because the self-hatred that comes through seems so extreme. But then, it's OK to hate a self that is dead. That has been killed. And the new self, the "born again" self, is something quite different. Split-off. Separate, as black is separate from white, even where people speak of the "Old Adam" living on, or the taint of "vile self".
This sort of split-off, black and white thinking is something that is recognizable from a psychological standpoint as deeply unhealthy, and immature. But the folk who say that this is the only way Christians should think about themselves - "selves" again - say that that's just importing secular values, that this way of thinking is Biblical, Scriptural, God's truth. So we're stuck with it.
Well, it isn't and it's not.
Quite apart from the fact that that verse in John doesn't mean what they say it means. The word translated "again" is anoqen, and can just as easily be translated "from above". In fact, when Nicodemus tries to confine it to meaning "again" - "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" - Jesus marvels at his single-track mind. Have a look at the passage and see.
But both our main readings today take us way beyond this split, schizoid (and deeply paranoid) thinking about selfhood, into much more complex territory.
Firstly, there's Saul on the road to Damascus. We all know the story, and we all think we know what it means, right down to the changing of his name. He was a persecutor of the church, a Bad Man in a Black Hat. Now he is the Great Apostle, in a White Hat. We forget, at the simplest level, that he probably had both Paul and Saul as part of his full name already; that changing his name from the one to the other was likely of some significance, but not more than me changing my "first" name from Owain to John, or people calling me the one or the other. Quite a lot of people call me John. Just as quite a lot of people call me "Owi", or "Now", or "John-O". I always knew if I was in real trouble with my olds if they called me "John Owain". Different selves...?
But notice that Paul doesn't ever apologise for what he was. In at least one place - the letter to the Philippians - he boasts about it!
If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to understand that what Paul once was is still pretty important to him!
But look at the other story. Peter. And what a complex self Peter is. Or has. Foisted with all those expectations. Of leadership. Of being the first to speak, without necessarily putting his brain in gear before his mouth moves off. Of being the one who will be there until the end.
And think how the events of the previous few days have modified, and even wrecked that self-image, by bringing out so much stuff that is part of him. So many different selves, that he didn't know were there. The violent, sword-drawing self, who, denied recourse to violence, bottles out and runs off with the others. The timid self struggling to be brave, which regroups and follows Jesus to the high priest's house. And most significant of all - and who knew that this was in there - the pathetic coward, intimidated by the mouthy chambermaid. Who denies Jesus three times...
And that's the self that stands in the boat, and sees Jesus on the beach. And leaps into the water in joy, And then stands about awkwardly, knowing that there's something to be dealt with. And that awkward moment is the most revealing of all. It's more than that he doesn't know where he stands with Jesus. It's that he doesn't know who he is. And he suspects that he's now a person whom Jesus can't love, can't trust, can't really forgive. Not properly. Graciously, yes. But not mend, not fix.
Because in the end, we're forgetting one of the most crucial things about selves. We exist in relationship. Change the relationship, and you change the self at at least one end of it.
Because what Peter has to learn is that Jesus loves and forgives all that he is. Not just the bits of him that he, Peter, is proud of. The bits that Peter wishes in his heart he could be swimming naked from this very moment, leaving them behind with his clothes on the beach.
And that, in the end, is the huge lesson we have to learn about what love is, and it can only be taught us by God, who is love. That God's love operates in the ambiguous greys of real existence in real life, and that the black and the white are really our own schizoid way of sorting things into what we love and what we hate. That God can love what we can't. That God can accept what we refuse - even about ourselves.
And so we learn, that God's love in Jesus Christ can accept what we are, and love it all, and set us free to acknowledge it and to change.
That's what forgiveness means.