Gimli Glider - Sermon 1st June 2008

Romans 1:16-17 ;3:22-31, Matthew 7:21-29

I'd never been in a plane before, let alone flown anywhere, until the day, almost three years ago, when I flew out for the first time to Zimbabwe. I loved the experience, and my family still catch me staring wistfully into the sky every time plane goes over - which as you know, since we're on the flight-path to Glasgow, can be every ninety seconds at peak times. Carolyn doesn't swerve violently on the flyover any more when I shout "Look at that!" It's only another plane taking off.

But that's not how I felt on that October morning when I was sitting, cases packed, with nothing more to do until the taxi arrived than dwell on the fact that I would be six miles up in the sky in a few hours' time, with nothing but a few millimetres of aluminium between me and ... well, you can see how I was thinking. So for distraction, I turned on the television, thinking I'd lose myself in a documentary on National Geographic. The choice on offer was "Air Crash Investigation", followed by "Seconds from Disaster", followed by "When Expeditions Go Wrong". Of course, as a Minister, I don't believe in omens, not for a moment...

But the odd thing is that since my first flight, I've become an afficionado of such programmes, especially "Air Crash Investigation". For one thing, they serve to remind you of just how safe flying really is. Accidents in flying are really very rare. Then again, the technical prowess of the teams which reconstruct what happened to bring about one of these oh-so-rare accidents is as reassuring as their obvious dedication, which comes across in interviews, to finding the cause, and making sure it never happens that way again. And where there has been a real disaster, real loss of life, these programmes are, in their own way, very respectful of that; they don't, it seems to me, let the technology and the science displace the fact that in the end all of this is about people, and making sure that people don't suffer like this again, and acknowledging very sensitively the grief of those who still live with the consequences of such disasters.

But despite the title "Air Crash Investigation", by no means all of these stories do end in disaster. One of them, aired again last week, told the story of the "Gimli Glider". That's the actual name of the plane, and although this incident took place in 1983, the actual plane, new at the time, was only taken out of service this year. It was Air Canada flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton on 23 July 1983, a brand new Boeing 767, when about halfway through its flight, at 41000 feet, it ran out of fuel. The crew started to glide it to Winnipeg, but while Captain Bob Pearson struggled with the increasingly heavy controls, his co-pilot, Maurice Quintal, was frantically doing sums, as were the air traffic controllers they were talking to. They all deduced at about the same time that the plane didn't have enough remaining height to make it to Winnipeg.

There was only one thing that could be done. First Officer Quintal remembered the old Gimli airbase, to the north, where he had done his Air Force training. The maths indicated they did have enough remaining glide time to reach that. And from that point, there came a succession of things which had Hannah [my daughter] and me, watching together, emitting louder and louder choruses of "Oh, NO!" Firstly, when they sighted the airbase, the plane was coming in far too high and fast - but they didn't have enough speed to go round and try again. So Captain Pearson, who was a glider pilot, had to do a glider pilot "thing" called a "forward slip", which involves almost flying the plane sideways to lose speed and height quickly. Between them and the airstrip was a golf club, and s they came in over it, they were so low that one of the passengers shouted "I can see what clubs they're using!" The crew, having no power, let the landing gear fall into place by its own weight - but the nosewheel didn't lock into place. "Oh NO!" said Hannah and I!

When they caught proper sight of the runway they were about to land on, they realized that it wasn't a runway any more but a motor racing strip. "Oh NOOOO!" said Hannah and I! On top of that, it was a Family Race Day, and the far end of the runway was full of families with camper vans. "Oh NOOOOOOOOOO!" said Hannah and I! As they came in, they could see that two boys had cycled out into the middle of the runway. They saw the plane coming in at 200 miles an hour, and in their panic they turned round and tried to outrun it. "Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" said Hannah and I! By now, our nerves were shreds.

But the fact that the nosewheel had collapsed was one of the things that saved everybody. The friction of the plane's nose against the runway slowed it down much faster than would have happened otherwise. Apart from a few minor injuries when the passengers jumped down the slides, no-one was hurt.

It turned out that the brand-new 767 was one of the first planes Air Canada had that was fuelled in kilogrammes rather than in pounds. By a series of small mistakes in converting, the ground handlers had put in the number of pounds of fuel that there should have been kilogrammes in it - and of course there are two pounds and more to the kilogramme. And nobody had spotted it. There were other factors too, including faulty gauges, but that was basically it.

Captain Pearson was asked what difference the flight had made for him. His answer, in the laconic style of a very competent man, was very surprising. He had found it a "relaxing" experience. What he meant, he explained, was this. You can train all your professional life for an emergency, but until one actually happens, you don't know how, or even if, you will be able to perform. Now he knew that he could, and because of that, he knew that he would be able to function even in extreme circumstances. And First Officer Quintal said something very similar. And they interviewed a passenger, a laid-back businessman in late middle age, who said that for him, Gimli had been "the best thing that ever happened to me". "Apart from marrying my wonderful wife!" he added, very quickly. He had had a few minutes to assess his life, to look back on it and regret the way he had treated people sometimes, the things that he'd let become important - and he's been able to take stock of the things that were really important. And it was as though he had been given a new life.

It's very important that nobody was killed in the story of the Gimli Glider. The experiences of survivors of fatal crashes seems to be quite different, often because they seem almost burdened with the guilt of having survived. But even there, there is a sense of knowing what life is about now, and even of knowing who you really are, because of they way events draw out truth about us.

I suspect that that's a big part of why we watch things like Air Crash Investigation. Because they let us raise for ourselves the huge questions:

"How would I be, how would I behave, how would I cope, in something like that?"

"What is my life really all about?"

"Who am I, really?"

Jesus says:

"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell - and great was its fall!"

And that's what he's talking about. The testing times. The times which suddenly strip away all support and pretence from us, and reveal us for who we really are, and show us where we really stand. The Lord's Prayer has us ask: "And lead us not into temptation ", but the real thought behind it isn't so much the scenario of being left alone in the sweetie-shop with a bar of chocolate on the counter. It's to do with those moments in which we find ourselves not just tempted but really tested. The newer translation that's often used has a stab at it: "Lead us not into the time of trial. " It's not an experience we are supposed to seek, then. Something, in fact, that Jesus tells us we should avoid.

And yet some people do seem to go out of their way to test themselves. Mountaineering, parachuting, extreme sports, there are lots of people, probably the vast majority, who do these things, because they enjoy the thrill, the buzz, the adrenalin rush. But there is a small minority - and they often stand out especially to the others who do the same testing things - who are driven. They push, and push, and push, and are unrelenting in their testing of themselves. It's almost like an extreme form of self-distrust. I have to keep pushing, I have to keep testing, because I need to know whether it's in me... I need to know how I would perform...

But then again, there are, and always have been, people who have done their Christianity that way. People who are constantly testing themselves, constantly driving themselves on, in the name of their faith. Perhaps the pattern for all of them is a man called Pelagius. He was actually a British monk, who moved to Rome and was appalled at its moral laxity. He taught that God would never ask us to do anything we couldn't, and so the very highest standards that came from the most rigid understandings of what God expected, were the very least that was expected of us. Now that sounds great, doesn't it? No slacking, no excuses, no underperforming and just squeaking by in our Christian living. His motto could have been, like that of Nike trainers, "Just do it!" And fittingly, people thought of him and his followers as "spiritual athletes".

But at the bottom of all of this marvellous sounding, and very impressive, moral effort, there was something deeply wrong. Basically, Pelagius was teaching that the Christian life was about our efforts to do what we knew we should. Yes, there was temptation, and yes, all of life was one long time of trial, but it was all about us living the way God wanted us to, because, in the end, we could. No slacking, no excuses.

It was Pelagius's misfortune to live at the same time as one of the greatest minds of all Christian history, Augustine of Hippo. And as has sometimes been pointed out, while Pelagius and his band of spiritual athletes were living a life of elite Christian purity, Augustine was having to be bishop of a filthy little African port, and preach the Gospel there.

Now, Augustine's legacy is immensely complicated, and there isn't even time to go deeply into his fascinating clash with Pelagius this morning. But our Gospel reading, oddly, lets us put a good bit of it into a nutshell.

Both Augustine and Pelagius are deeply concerned at the strength of the structure that we are building as we live as Christians in the world. But Pelagius seems completely preoccupied with what we build . Pelagius seems to think that the whole thing is to do with how robust our construction is, how much stress the walls can take, how well braced the structure might be. For Pelagius, if what we build falls down, there is nothing at all left. Everything is gone.

Augustine says "look at the foundation." And if you re-read this little Gospel this morning, you'll see that that's what Jesus is saying too. Look at the foundation. See what you are building on. And that of course is exactly what Paul is saying in the reading we heard from Romans earlier on.

It seems to me that the story of the Gimli Glider is the story, not of people who were made to look at what they had built, so much as to ask themselves what they had been building on. It's a story about foundations. About what actually lasts, and about what you can actually build on. And go back to building on, when everything gets demolished. And about why, when something happens that you think is going to demolish everything, it doesn't. Things still stand. Because of the foundation.

Here's the foundation of our life, here, spread out on this table. God's love, God's grace. Take, eat, drink ye all of this cup...