ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
ASH WEDNESDAY, 2008
Sermon Preached by the Vicar at High Mass
"Blow the trumpet is Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people."
I was called not to one but two assemblies this evening. Instead of beginning of Lent with you this evening, I could have been at a drinks party at Tate Modern - not to see exhibition of modern art but to hear a presentation from CCLA, the body set up by the Church of England and the Charity Commission to handle the investments of churches and voluntary organisations. I was invited because I am chairman of the USPG, the missionary society.
In my reply, I regretted that I could not attend because today was Ash Wednesday and still observed by the Church of England as a Fast Day. On a practical diary level I would have to be in church. At a spiritual one there seems something seriously wrong when a church-linked organisation does not even know when Ash Wednesday is, what it means and why plying its investors with booze on that day is singularly inappropriate and inept.
I do not open my daily newspaper expecting to find much in the way of spiritual solace, but today I was taken by surprise. Some of you may have seen the Bishop of London on TV last night speaking from a damp and windswept Trafalgar Square about a Carbon Fast for Lent. The Bishop's Lent Message is included with your service book, so you can read more about it there.
I was surprise to see this taken up by Zoe Williams, a writer whom I do not normally associate with matters spiritual.
"there is", she writes, " something about being told to rein in a bit by the church that is more convincing and less annoying than being given the same message by almost anybody else.
When politicians do it, it smacks of vote-seeking and bandwagon-jacking.
When magazines do the environmental number, its hypocritical. An article about the impact of climate change will almost always be followed by an advert for a Land Rover.
The Church, however, has history, tradition, ideology, sincerity and authenticity; there is a message of self-denial going back to the dawn of time. It has an awful lot to play with when it seeks to influence our behaviour in terms of carbon use. It has been into small economies since before the environment even existed. Even people with no other knowledge of Puritanism know that it is against excess."
"Maybe Catholics", she jokes, " queer the pitch a bit, with whatever carbon footprint a bell or smell might entail. But broadly speaking, Christianity has a long peerlessly established history of telling us all to pull in our horns a bit.
"Even we faithless", she concludes, "can see how copper-bottomed this is, and it makes it very easy to take. In a time when the religious establishment often finds itself behind the curve - either opposing other religions, or launching some wearisome campaign against homosexuality or contraception - its status as environmental pioneer is worth playing up."
Well, that is quite a lot to live up to. So we had better make a start. One light bulb seems quite a small thing, but if all the Christians in London did it; that's an awful lot of light bulbs. That one light bulb makes us think about all our light bulbs, about our use of energy and resources in other areas of our life. In the same way giving up particular foods or drinks is meant to make us think about the way we eat and drink generally. It helps is question all our spending and buying and getting and accumulation. Do we really need those things? It reminds us, as our theology of creation does, that all this is a gift from God rather than our private property to be disposed of as we see fit. It reminds us that we are stewards of God's gifts, that we have a duty to hand them onto those who come after us. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his New Year message, "God does not do waste". Nor should we!
Lent begins very early this year, so it coincides with the season at which those all those diets and detox programmes and gym memberships taken up after the excesses of Christmas and the New Year lapse. All those resolutions to reform abandoned for another year.
There is a spiritual wisdom in starting with small things, do-able things - rather than great heroic schemes which crumble to dust at our first failure and leave us disheartened. Most of us know this from the experience of past Lenten rules. It is better to do something simple faithfully and well than to fail at the first hurdle of some great spiritual steeplechase.
This is not to trivialise Lent in the way that giving up chocolate only to follow it by gorging ourselves on Easter Eggs might do. Those little changes, those small renunciations, are not meant to be something we do for forty days and then forget. If we see them as means of grace, then they should be things which transform our lives, so that we are not the same at the end of 40 days. We do not just go back to being the same as we were. This is applies to all our Lenten disciplines - giving more time to worship, prayer, meditation, repentance, almsgiving. These are all tools of discipleship.
What Jesus says about not parading our religious practices still speaks to religious people, especially perhaps those like us who use external practices in our spiritual lives; they can simply be showing off. But Jesus lived and spoke in a society where religious practice was the officially supported norm. We do not. We need to take seriously the pressures of advertising and consumerism which surround and beset us all the time. To do that we need to be bind ourselves together as a solemn assembly to support each other in resisting them and becoming a living example, a sacrament, of a better way.
In the last few days scientists have been saying that we may be reaching a tipping point in the process of global warming. There is no time to waste.
"Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation".