Sermon by Fr James Heard, Ash Wednesday, 1 March 2017, United Benefice of Holland Park

Sermon by Fr James Heard, Ash Wednesday, 1 March 2017, United Benefice of Holland Park

The trouble with tonight’s Gospel reading is that it’s a bit alien to us contemporary Christians. Having received the sign of Ash on my forehead at earlier services today, I’ve experienced a few sideways glances, the helpful ‘you seem to have a got a bit of soot on your face’ looks. Its considered rather odd – because being ostentatious about the observance of our religion is something you simply don’t do in sophisticated urban Western society.

‘What are those people doing Mummy?’ I heard a child ask on a Palm Sunday procession. ‘That’s just something that funny churchy people do, darling.’ So, no, we wouldn’t stand at street corners praying, and its very un-English to make a fuss about the amount of money one gives away, and who fasts nowadays anyway…So where’s the impact in today’s Gospel?

Well, let us put ourselves in the place of Jesus’s disciples: it would have seriously impacted on them. They lived in a society where the outward expression of your religion was hugely important. How else were people to know that you were a good Jew? That you observed the food laws. That you observed your obligations towards the poor and needy? How else were you to pray? The Torah was clear on the subject: what clothes you were to wear, how and where you were to stand.

Jesus’s words would have been a shock to the disciples: ‘Let the expression of your faith be a private thing’ he seems to be saying: ‘lock yourself away – let it be between you and God’. This is completely counter cultural to his times and how local Jewish communities would have worked.

Jesus is touching upon the inner and outer life. You might do all these things – almsgiving, fasting and praying – but why? What’s the motivation? And if it’s not about the transformation of your inner life… it’s just a show, a performance.

So, Jesus isn’t saying don’t bother with them. He’s asking his disciples to re-examine the reason for doing them, so as to establish a new relationship with God, with themselves and with their world.

Last week I saw the Oscar Wilde inspired film, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The well-known story reflects the inner and outer world of a man – a young man who has the world at is feet. He has power, wealth and prestige. He meets Lord Wotton who leads him astray and Dorian Gray fully gives himself over to his wild, lustful, greedy, as well as hateful passions. His secret is that he remains on the outside, youthful and beautiful. While what’s really going in his wild living is found in a portrait of himself. It’s a picture that changes over his life, a picture that he keeps hidden that shows what he’s really becoming – and it’s an image of the ugly, warped self that he has become. Yet the inner and the outer self remain separate.

Lent is a time when we are encouraged to reflect on our inner and outer lives – are they separate, compartmentalised dimensions. Jesus was very clear – evil or good spring from one’s inner life. A healthy tree produces good fruit. We are encouraged in Lent to have a Spring for the soul – to have a spiritual spring clean. It also gets us thinking about makes the human flourishing and our small part in that.

Tonight’s Gospel demands of me that I look again at the traditional things that Christians are asked to do during Lent. For instance: Giving up chocolate or coffee isn’t about beating myself up, or showing how self disciplined and holy I am. Nor even because I need to drink less (even though I know I do). It’s actually about a whole process of thinking again about food and drink in the context of today’s world, the society I live in and the intense inequalities I try not to look at on the news or in the papers.

‘Giving up’ isn’t part of being holier than thou. It’s about reminding myself that there are huge and troubling questions about food and drink our affluent society: size zero models and obese children; fish caught in Norway, flown to China to be gutted and flown back to be sold in London; it’s about cocktails in the city of London sprinkled with gold dust and how it is that we’re not outraged that children die of starvation or disease every day in our world – in our world that actually has more than enough food for all.

Giving up chocolate, my glass of wine, may not do anything at all to solve these obscenities. Giving a bit more money away during Lent will be a molecule in a parched land. Spending a bit of time sitting, thinking, praying will have no practical outcomes…

But in the act of stepping aside, as Jesus asks his disciples to do, stepping aside from the prevailing culture, we might address some fairly fundamental questions about how we live as a Christian, a citizen, a brother or sister of the child in the devastated city of Aleppo. And perhaps, just perhaps, start to live a little bit differently, and encourage others to do so.

And if the sight of a glass of water with my fish tonight is just too depressing, and the prospect of a glass of wine just too enticing…perhaps the ash on my forehead, the sign of my mortality, and the reminder that I am clay, infused with God’s Spirit, might just remind me that I am in Lent, apart, in a wilderness.

It's a reminder that I have a chance to step aside and reflect on myself that this is a gift…a time for transformation and growth…that it’s never too late…that God is waiting for me in that wilderness time…waiting to be merciful …that it’s not actually about trying so hard to be holy, and its everything about letting the Kingdom break through into my very privileged life.

Reference: Joe Hawes, All Saints Fulham