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The Rev Dr. Alan Billings |
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The Rev Dr. Alan Billings |
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Oscar Wilde said a second marriage was the triumph of hope over experience. As someone who is not in the slightest bit interested in football, it seems to me that he might just as well have been talking about England in the world cup. I watch my football-loving friends on these occasions with disbelief, as reason and emotion fuse into something like excitable gelatine.
And yet even I could not help but feel more than a smidgeon of sympathy for the England goalkeeper on Saturday evening. If you did manage to miss the game, the Sunday papers and every single news bulletin since, I'm referring to Robert Green's fumbling of the ball that gave the United States an equalising goal. It was a moment of high drama, made even more heart-stopping for football fans by the way it seemed to happen almost in slow motion.
Afterwards Green acknowledged his error and was stoical. "I'm a thirty-year-old man. You have hardships in life and you prepare for it mentally, and that's it. You've got to have a concrete head about these things. I'm strong enough to take it..." And colleagues were quoted as saying with great charity, "We all make mistakes."
Indeed we do, though most of us hope that when we do there are not several million pairs of eyes watching and several million people analysing, discussing and forever remembering.
But how do we recover when we make our mistakes, our serious mistakes, in life?
Christians understand the importance at these times of being part of a group of people who are under no illusions about their own fallibility and failings. This is surely one of the most important functions of the institutional church. Religion is often discussed as if it were all or only a matter of beliefs. Christianity does have its doctrines, its theology. But it also seeks to embody that theology in its congregational life. A congregation is not only a group of people who believe things, it is also a group of people who perform what they believe. That means being people who acknowledge their own mistakes, empathise with others and practice forgiveness - learning to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We may be fortunate and find this in our family or our circle of friends. But not everyone has a family or friends, and not everyone's family or friends turn out to be as understanding or as forgiving as we might hope.
A congregation, therefore, has to see itself - like the best families and friends - as a community of forgiven sinners, not a finishing school for saints, because if we are to recover from the mistakes we make in life we need the sympathy and support of those who know they too are fallible. We all need somewhere to go where hope can triumph over experience.