Sermon: Mustn’t Grumble

As this is mid-lent Sunday I want to share with you the story of my own Lenten journey so far this year.   When I came along to the cathedral for the service on Ash Wednesday evening I was as yet unsure what my Lenten discipline might be.  So I felt a bit bad as I went up for the ashes.  It was as if I was getting a ticket but was not sure whether I would be climbing onto the bus.

But as I knelt during the service an idea crystallised. ‘How about grumbling', I thought.  ‘Why not try to avoid grumbling, complaining and finding fault for forty days and forty nights?' I was struck by what I thought was the novelty and audacity of the idea and decided that this would be my Lenten cross.  That, come what may, I would not grumble or complain about it.

Once you start to reflect on ‘grumbling' you realise that it is a ‘fuzzy concept' with indistinct boundaries.  It occurs to me that grumbling must often be in the ear of the listener.  Few of us recognise when we are grumbling or complaining.  Rather we think that we have a good point or that we have a duty to complain. ‘I should not have to put up with this'. Grumbling and complaining has become  such a habit in us that we do not always spot ourselves doing it.  But that's the challenge. To spot it coming and take evasive action.  I did not have to wait long for my first text.  Two days, in fact. I had been invited to preach in Cambridge at my son's college and, because I had hardly seen him over Christmas, we decided to make a weekend of it, going down on the Friday evening.  I had told the college chaplain and he said, ‘no problem, I will book you into a college room for three nights instead of one.' 

However, when we arrived at the Porters Lodge late in the evening things did no go quite as easily as I'd hoped.  We were indeed booked in for Sunday night, but only for Sunday night.  And now all the ‘normal' guest rooms were full. Our plan had been to drop the bags in the rooms and then go for a latish family meal at an Indian restaurant.  However, at the time when I was expecting the lager and popadoms to appear, we were dragging our bags around the college looking at various desultory and neglected rooms to see if we might be able to camp in them until Sunday.  The porters clearly found this very embarrassing and were profuse and repeated in their apologies on behalf of the college chaplain.  I was smiling benignly through this and I realised that my response was arousing their curiosity. College porters are I suspect only too accustomed to receiving complaints and hearing grumbles when things don't work out as planned. So I felt I had to say something. ‘I might have had a little more to say about this,' I volunteered, ‘but I have given up grumbling and complaining for Lent'.  They saw the funny side and suddenly the evening was altogether happier.  We ended up in the neighbouring hotel and sat down to our curry very late indeed.

Obviously the events of life give us, from time to time, cause for complaint and this all too easily becomes a good and perhaps extended grumble.  One of the things that astonished me when I was in India at the turn of the year - and to be honest I was astonished for a good proportion of the time - was the absence of complaint and the presence of acceptance.  It was very humbling. There is a downside to this, of course, and there are levels of corruption, degrees of neglect of corporate responsibility and sheer injustice that should be challenged and overcome.  It is possible to be too accepting.

Part of the shame of India is the way in which the caste system has dehumanised people.  Even the title of the autobiography of dalit Omprakash Valmiki makes this point. It is called ‘Joothan'.  This Hindi word literally means, 'food left on and eater's plate but which is eaten by someone else'.  To have such a word speaks volumes. To have people consigned to living in this way while working as servants is unspeakable.  The story he tells about relying for nourishment on water in which rice has been boiled is very poignant and - damning, actually.   

Part of the power of the story Joothan is that as time goes by the author discovers ways of not-accepting the injustice which he has inherited.  But while protest and anger, rage and resistance all had their part in that effective non-acceptance, mere grumbling, tiresome whingeing, habitual complaining had no part at all.  It is always so. The mature and effective response to injustice is not complaint but activism, not grumbling about how bad it is but clarifying that it is unacceptable.  It's no good merely saying that something is wrong, the task is to do something about it. The problem with grumbling is that it has a dispiriting effect and actually militates against the chances of taking positive action.

And yet we in the west live in a cultural environment where complaint is customary and grumbling is endemic.  There is a constant background noise of judgement and assessment regarding everything we do. I have come to the view that this is often less about accountability and improvement and more about vindicating people's desire to have a good old moan.  I have, for instance, mostly given up providing people with evaluation forms after training events. All this ‘rate the venue', ‘give the speaker marks out of ten' stuff.  There is place for feedback, of course, because we cannot learn without it.  But there are so many ways of giving and receiving it. So I will sometimes offer participants in an event what I call an ‘appreciation form'. On such a form the questions are few, simple and open.  ‘How was this good and how might we improve it another time?' That's all you need to ask. If it was a seriously bad then it is all too evident and if it is provocatively bad then let people phone up, email or put pen to paper.   When I was vicar I once imposed a rule for a PCC discussion which said that before you said anything negative you had to say something positive.  One normally voluble contributor was strangely silent for a rather satisfying period.  And it is not a bad rule in life.  We need to earn our entitlement to complain either by genuinely suffering or by offering positive feedback first. But let me underline the main point -we live in a culture where complaint and grumble has become second nature.  I whinge therefore I am.

Going back to India I can't help but recall a hotel room in Pondicherry. In the early hours my daughter and I were both awake and switched the light on.  We were chatting away but our nocturnal conversation came to an abrupt end as rat shot across the floor and sped up the wall to the top of a cupboard.  It's the speed of the things that is so alarming.  That and the realisation that this was not the first time a rat had visited the room and that the thin blanket on the bed was, when you looked at it a little more closely, replete with evidence of their visits.  Having shaken all that onto the floor we kept the light on for the rest of the night and, this being before Ash Wednesday, I did mention the matter in a negative and disapproving way at reception.   It took a while to get the word ‘rat' translated into Tamil but to be honest I don't think it was worth the effort.  There's a kind of shrug that tells you all you need to know in any culture. And it tells you that grumbling and complaining is often a waste of time. That if you  seriously want things to be different its going to make much more time and effort than merely making a complaint.

There is of course, no mandate for grumbling in the Bible. The most famous Biblical grumbling takes place in the wilderness, after the exodus from Egypt. Like all people who are liberated into the freedom of a new and adventurous life they soon become homesick.  ‘Weren't there enough graves for us in Egypt?' they grumble. ‘Does this Moses really know what he is doing; where he is leading us? Grumbling is the language of the nostalgic and backward-looking. Grumbling is the characteristic style of those who are not up to leadership but are not happy with being followers.  It is the lingua franca of ‘Generation D', the discontented generation.

And in our second lesson this morning, we read: ‘Beloved do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged'. (James 5. 9) To grumble is very often to judge others. And that is precisely what Jesus teaches us not to do. The Pharisees and Scribes grumbled when Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them.  They really did not approve and when he got word of this he told a story intended to draw to their attention the fact that what he is doing is good even if they find it uncomfortable.

Grumbling is a most unattractive but also strangely revealing habit.  You learn a lot about people when they are in ‘complain-mode'.   And what you learn is about their lack of humility and generosity.  For grumbling comes not from the heart but from the ego and it speaks not from humility but from wounded pride. 

If he were still alive, Cardinal Basil Hume would be celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday today so I thought it would be good to give him the last word.  I read this in The Tablet (16.02.08 p15) just last week and felt it as a blessing on my Lenten journey.  It is taken from his book A Turning to God and in it he speaks of turning away from three particular sins:  pride, unkindness and then - and now I am quoting:

‘There is third thing that separates us from God, which you might find surprising - grumbling.

I learnt this from the Rule of St Benedict, which is constantly telling monks that they must not be grumblers. This is very shrewd.  There is nothing worse than living with people who grumble; there is nothing more corrosive than grumbling; nothing more unsettling than grumbling.' 

Lent is a time of joy for sinners who are prepared to repent, to change, to discover the levity of new life in Christ.  A new life in which grumbling and complaining can be no more.  There are still a few weeks left. If you would like to join me in the fast of not grumbling then I am sure that no one will complain. For you will not only be happier yourself, but those around you will enjoy the benefits too.

Stephen Cherry

Matins 2 March 2008