Video for November 20/11/25
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. I'm in London this week for the House of Lords and it's pouring with rain outside.
You may remember last week, someone turned up dressed as a rear admiral to a remembrance Sunday parade, claiming to have been sent by the Lord Lieutenant's Office. It was in Llandudno. The uniform looked genuine, but he was wearing a non-regulation shirt. The dead giveaway was the long row of medals, two of which have never been given to a serving British officer together before. Understandably, many people are furious. It effectively mocks the sacrifices of genuine servicemen and women. He may have committed a criminal offence by impersonating a member of the armed forces and was subsequently arrested. I was especially shocked, uh, because I recognised him.
There is an organisation, The Walter Mitty Club, which seeks to expose such impersonations. There are a few of them about. But it’s a shock when it turns out to be someone you know. Many have had the experience of discovering something about someone they thought they knew that causes them to completely re-assess the relationship. People keep secrets from one another, some really serious. There can be the crushing discovery of infidelity or the discovery of an addiction. I heard on the radio last week of someone’s tragic slide into a gambling addiction. It was exposed when his wife discovered they were £250,000 in debt.
Such actions provoke anger in the moment, but when more rational counsels prevail, acts of self-delusion or destructive addictions are best treated as a form of mental illness rather than malice. Paradoxically, if the relationship survives it can become stronger as the truth is exposed and genuine healing takes place. The first step in the twelve-step recovery programme is admitting you have a problem you cannot control on your own. The second is to believe a power greater than yourself can help; the third to decide to trust in that power; and the fourth and fifth to conduct a ruthless moral inventory and then confess those failings to others. Although the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was a Christian, it has now become a largely secular organisation. The eagle eyed will have spotted where those steps come from! We go through those steps on a regular basis every time we come to worship-and the other 7 as well. Deep character change usually requires some sort of crisis to break our self-delusion and recognise our need for help. I hope the exposure of my former college friend will be the spur to such change for him.
Our culture encourages the concealment of problems, and if they are exposed a public relations spin to deny or minimise the issues. We are so bad at forgiveness today that this is a reasonable psychological defence mechanism. The values of the kingdom of God couldn’t be more different. Paul in Romans 8 reassures us that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”. The strength of alcoholics anonymous meetings is that ruthless honesty takes place in a non-judgemental environment. God’s first word to us in creation is love; his second word in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is also love. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “while we still sinners, Christ died for us.” It would be wonderful if our church communities were places where honesty, acceptance and forgiveness were practiced. The sort of safe places where it was ok to confess our sins to one another as James advocates in his letter. What a very different model to our culture of judgement and spin. God’s love is big enough to absorb the grimmest human wrong-doing and overcome it with love. I pray our communities might model it.
+Richard