You’ve heard me talk before about the many and various agonies that stem from being British. It’s not just that 100 British people can cram inside a train carriage and maintain dead silence because they haven’t been introduced to each other. Neither is it only that the national pastime is queueing (waiting in line), which the British have perfected, and includes tuts and sighs and passive aggressive murmurings if anyone tries to jump the queue. And nor is it just the infuriating British attitude towards winning. But that is the one that’s on my mind this morning.
Our attitude to winning is actually in our DNA, passed from one generation to the next – and it is
the belief that taking part is more important than coming first. Ladies and gentlemen should try their hardest but not be so vulgar as to beat anyone. Countries that win are viewed as show-offs, and unsporting. So, fun fact of the day – in the Olympics, the United States and Russia/the Soviet Union have won about a third more gold medals than silver medals. But that’s a bit arrogant for the British mindset, because the Brits proudly boast an all- time Olympic tally of way more silvers than golds. Winning, you see, is all rather unseemly.
I think it’s all about guilt and fairness, and the British have so much to feel guilty about. There is not a troubled place anywhere on the globe that does not have British fingerprints all over it. So, I think there’s this psychological need to let others get their own back. A kind of masochistic sense of fair play. ‘Sorry about that whole empire thing, now please humiliate us on the sports field and we’ll call it even.’ The British, you see, have this charming but profoundly misguided belief that life should be fair.
Add together these two features of national life – being fair, but losing - and you get a frustratingly annoying, highly damaging, and uniquely British phenomenon. It’s the idea that we deserved to win but actually lost. If you google the phrase ‘We deserved to win’, you’ll discover that the people who usually say this are on British websites, not American ones. In the US
there’s this admirable belief that if you won you deserved to, and if you lost, you deserved to. By contrast, a British soccer fan will believe that because her team had 80% of possession and had 20 shots on goal compared to their opponents’ 2 shots on goal, her team deserved to win. And she’d be right if football matches were decided by the number of shots a team has. But they’re not. They’re decided by the number of goals you score, and if you fail to score with your twenty chances, but the other team scores with just one of their two chances, then you deserve you lose.
Harsh, but true, and blindingly obvious to American sports fans. And the tragic result of this is that the British sports fan not only has to shoulder the pain of losing, he often carries the added heartbreak that a terrible injustice has occurred, and there’s no court of appeal, thereby making it impossible for him to move on with his life. Things in the US are much simpler. We lost, suck it
up, learn from the experience, and win next time. Seriously, I think the word ‘deserving’ should be banned from the language. If you can’t accept that life is unfair, then you’re going to struggle in this world. If you can’t live with the idea that people suffer when they don’t deserve it, then you’re going to feel perpetual anger. If you can’t rest with the knowledge that evil actions go unpunished, then you will have the joy strangled out of you. If you live by the motto that everyone receives what they deserve, not only will you be permanently frustrated, you will reject
and resent the God of the Bible, especially the God of Jeremiah, who tells his people in this morning’s Old Testament lesson that God is going to treat them very, very unfairly.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
This is an inspiring passage of scripture. It’s hard to read it without a smile on your face. God promises a new covenant. You see, the old one just didn’t work. We humans broke it - constantly, deliberately, irreparably. So, God dreamed up a new one.
The first was based on law; the second on grace.
The first was based on human actions; the second on faith.
The first was chiseled on tablets of stone; the second handwritten in the
chambers of the heart.
In the first, God dictated the law and we obeyed it or else; in the second,
God writes the law, and then helps us to obey it.
This covenant is living, organic, internal, intimate, dynamic and one other thing that I said earlier – it is very, very unfair. Because in this new covenant God will not treat us as our sins deserve. How spectacular is that? All you‘ve done to hurt other people and to damage your friendship with God – it’s done away with – forgiven, defeated, rendered powerless.
But let’s make sure we really understand the implications of that. If God treats us unfairly by not holding our sins against us, then it also means he does it for other people. So, work with me here – the sins done to you, the hurts inflicted on you, the injustices dealt to you by a person of malice to you, well, they’re forgiven too. The person who has treated you appallingly will not be given justice by God – they will be forgiven, just as you are. God is shockingly, offensively unfair. Do you really want to live in a universe in which God treats your enemies with undeserved love and unmerited forgiveness? Be careful of your answer. Because if you say ‘no’, if you demand that God treats people the way they deserve, then will you still be alive this time tomorrow?
It would take another 600 years for this promise of the new covenant to be fulfilled. Jeremiah probably had no idea what it would look like when it finally arrived. It was a man, a perfect man, born in miraculous circumstances, with a heart sold-out to God, and this covenant was sealed
in his death and resurrection. The stone was rolled away from his grave, and the stone of our hearts was dissolved by his resurrection power and replaced with hearts of flesh.
We religious types can have this natural but deadly trait of thinking that God should be fair. And, because God should be fair, we, the religious types who are good and moral and pure and holy, should be rewarded, and the others, who are disobedient to God’s laws, should receive rejection and misery. We must learn the deep ancient truth that that is not the God of Jeremiah and the God of Jesus.
So, I’m downsizing my vocabulary. I’ve decided that looking at my circumstances and labelling them ‘deserved’ or ‘undeserved’ is a waste of time. If I banish the labels of deserved and undeserved then I’ll be freer to accept each day as it comes and receive its gifts. And that may help me forgive my enemies too.
In Cambodia, a man named Aki Ra does important work. Dirty, dangerous, ridiculously dangerous, but essential work. Aki Ra leads a team of 20 people, all of them dressed in military fatigues. They walk slowly and carefully through the Cambodian countryside. Their task is clearing land mines left over from the appalling civil war. Aki Ra leads the way, and his team follow in his steps. Aki Ra can do this because he knows where the land mines are. You see, he planted many of them himself.
Aki Ra was just 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge gave him a rifle as big as he was and set him to work laying landmines. He was good at it, too, laying between 4,000 and 5,000 a month. Even as a child he knew what these landmines did and why he was laying them. He felt pain knowing
what he was doing, but he had no choice. He was under orders, and the Khmer Rouge had ways of making people obey.
When the war ended and Aki Ra tried to move on with his life, his conscience gave him no peace. And so after receiving some basic training from the U.N., he began going out into the countryside by himself to clear mines, using a knife, a stick and his bare hands. Eventually, he traveled to the UK, where he received advanced training in mine-clearing techniques.
In 2008, Aki Ra assembled his team of 20, all of them Cambodians, some of them former soldiers, some the victims of war crimes, one of them an amputee who had lost a leg when he stepped on a mine; and together they formed a demining nonprofit.
To clear land mines, you have to know what Aki Ra knows: you must know where they are. Have you ever laid landmines? I have. Every time I’ve set a trap for my neighbor, every time I’ve plotted and manipulated and weaseled a plan that will harm someone who has harmed me. I’m the third child of three. I don’t enjoy the life I have today by not knowing how to manipulate people. As a child I was less articulate than my sister and brother, less mobile than them, less developed in my skills. How else could I get my parents’ attention and validation but by pulling their emotional strings –make them feel sorry for me, make them think I’m a victim, make them
laugh, make them feel entertained, make them think I’m cute. We manipulators know where the landmines are. We planted many of them. We must dig them up and destroy them.
We are children of the new covenant and we know that God will not treat us as our manipulation deserves. And we know that he won’t treat our enemies as they deserve either. Today is the day to revive those new covenant hearts o flesh, to listen the voice of God deep in those hearts, to
understand the sheer limitless dimensions of God’s grace. Let’s clear mines.