February 19th, 2026
Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s video.
I’m standing opposite the Palace of Westminster this week, the home of both houses of parliament. It would have been nice to film over there but I’m afraid that’s not allowed. There are many conventions and legal restrictions that govern our activities in the House of Lords. A few weeks ago, I managed to break three of them on the same day. In a debate I forgot to thank the peer who had sponsored the debate, I stood up to leave when the Speaker was addressing the House and the ultimate faux pas, I managed to be late for a debate I was down to speak in. The rule is you must be in at the beginning if you are down to speak. Not only did I get unceremoniously scrubbed, but the poor government whip had to trawl around the house to find the following speaker who could deliver the tribute to a new member’s maiden speech I was due to give. Fortunately, Lord Lilley delivered it very well. The peers affected were very gracious in accepting my apologies, but it was none the less very embarrassing.
This video is released the day after Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Traditionally, it’s a season of self-examination and amendment of life. We are invited to contemplate our sins, seek God’s forgiveness and ask the Holy Spirit’s help to become more like Jesus. Focussing on our sins is not encouraged in our culture. Sin is a word associated with judgemental attitudes, lack of affirmation and a snobbish moral superiority. If we are to engage in this Lenten work, its helpful to understand exactly what sin is and what it isn’t. At face value the bovine ignorance of procedure I described earlier isn’t sin, its just ignorant frailty. However, it could be sin if I had deliberately set out to do it, either to gratuitously offend others or satisfy some perverse ego drive to be the centre of attention. That’s the difficult thing about sin. Its not just the action itself; it’s the motivation that lies behind it. The same action in one context with one motivation could be innocent and loving. In another context, with a different motivation or driver, it could be very serious indeed. I’m sure I will have said before that a focus on love in our proclamation of the gospel can be very helpful if we understand love as the giving of ourselves for others, and much less helpful if we’re using a secular definition of love as a form of unconditional positive regard. Clearly God takes sin very seriously indeed. The whole Bible is the story of God’s redemptive action to deal with it. Our sin is probably much more serious than we think it is if it required God to become a human being, experiencing an excruciating death on the cross in a way that threatened the very unity of the Trinity. I have recently been receiving stories on my social media feed of those who won the Victoria Cross. Such human sacrifices are astonishing, but in the divine economy they are only a pale illustration of what God did for us in Jesus.
Sin shouldn’t be limited in our minds to actions against the moral law. Such actions emerge from the heart. As Jesus said in Mark 7: 20, “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person”. You note Jesus is not afraid to name things as sinful rather than as quirky personality traits to be endured by the people who must live with us who display them. The danger is that for fear of naming reality we end up colluding with one another’s sinfulness rather than the more difficult work of helping one another grow. As the Apostle James advocates when he invites us to confess our sins to one another that we might be healed. What is so extraordinary in the life of Jesus, and what we find so difficult in human community, is to name reality in all its seriousness and relentlessly move toward that reality in sacrificial love. Paul’s diagnosis that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ gives no grounds for moral superiority or judgementalism. Every time we point the finger, we find three pointing back at ourselves.
In the Gospel story an honest appraisal of ourselves in the light of God’s love in Jesus is the road to life not condemnation. The Gospel reveals the very bad news that we are alienated from God, unable through our own unaided reason or efforts to repair the relationship followed by the very good news (which is what Gospel means) that God in Christ makes it possible for the worst imaginable sins to be forgiven, the relationship to be restored and a new power to be released into our hearts to begin the work of transformation.
I am eternally grateful to have discovered that myself 48 years ago. It may not have been sinful to break House of Lords convention, but I will definitely be referring more closely to the rule book in future.
+Richard