ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass on the Second Sunday of Lent, 4 March 2012.
Readings: Genesis 17.1-7, 15, 16; Romans 4.13 - end; Mark 831 - end.
Jesus said: those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
Lent is the spring season which brings with it the promise of new life, the growth of resurrection life within us. Lent, the season from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday, is presented to us, by the Church and in the gospel, as a time in the wilderness where Jesus won his battle over his demons. Lent is not a season for punishment, but a time for healing. Lent is a time for losing our life, taking our attention off ourselves and our constant preoccupation with progress and gain.
Every wilderness has a false trail, a path which goes nowhere. There's false trail in Lent all right. Let's go down that path a little way. We can always double back and start again.The false trail in Lent brings us out into the open in Holy Week, thinking "I'm not ready for this, I really can't cope with Holy Week this year because I'm a bit of a fraud. I've had a rotten Lent. I didn't finish the book. I haven't given up anything important to me. I'm no better a person, and no farther forward in my spiritual life than I was on Ash Wednesday. So I thought about doing something extra and public spirited, say helping with coffee after church. But I don't want to stay for coffee after church. So I've given up coffee for Lent." Let's doubleback right now. Lent is not a finishing school laid on for our benefit. Christianity is not about self-improvement. If you are a misanthropic difficult old or young bat now, the chances are you'll be the same in five weeks' time. I don't think God's interested in a new revised version of ourselves, that's the respectable gender neutral version, our image of what we should be like. God meets us in our wilderness now, to show us His way out. There is no place where God's love does not exist, and that includes the dark, unexplored, dangerous areas in our own personal wildernesses. In the wilderness, our real world, we learn in Lent the hard truth that we must lose our life. We must give up that external identity we prize so greatly, so that we can give priority to what is more permanent within us, what is everlasting, what we desire above all, the life of God.
What is this everlasting life we are trying to find? It is the life of Christ within us, and it is there that we find God's love because God loves his Son - that's the message on every page of the Gospels - and God loves the life of his Son in us. So, losing our life, that fundamental Gospel command, losing our life, doesn't mean obliteration or death, it means uncovering the life of Jesus in our lives. It is about spring, Lent, new life. This is more a task for the heart, than the head. The conscious mind thinks in terms of progress, how am I doing? How am I getting on? In the heart, the awakened heart where the spirit lives, we discover we don't have to do anything. We know God, and God knows us, we just have to realise this, awaken to it. This is why so much of the Bible, and the parables, are about losing and finding, dreaming and awaking, dying and rising; the desire for God (which we feel rather than know), the desire for God is the desire for a life we have lost and now wish to find again; it is hidden within us, we just have to uncover it, like the bulbs which are pushing their way into the light now. The competing desire for progress, doing better, having a good Lent, being a nicer person, is totally unimportant compared to this opening of the heart, the revelation of Christ's love within us. There is the new centre of our lives, where we can admit who we are and how dependent we are on God's grace.
Jesus shows us the way out of our wilderness. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. There's the adventure, there's the risk, there's the challenge of Lent. How do we start? In the early Church Lent was a time of preparation for baptism, the induction course, getting ready for the great feast of Easter. It was a time of training, and the Greek word for training was ascesis, from which we get our word ascetic, to describe a lifestyle of abstinence and self-denial. This was the training for being a Christian, because they knew that in the spiritual life, less is more, so the outward physical life of a person should reflect the dedicated life within, because Christianity is a religion of body, mind and spirit together. This church was founded to revive the traditions of the early church such as ascesis, training for a spiritual life. And despite the cult of the self-satisfied individual in the last two centuries, and although we're told that Jesus loved a party, there is no reason why even folk as decadent as ourselves can't give self-discipline a go. In fact we've got to try, because without some pattern of self-restraint, some external expression of losing your life, some preparation for silence and stillness, the contemplative life is impossible, the heart is not awakened, the Christ life, resurrection life, is not uncovered within us; we have no method for changing the false values by which we live. It's not really a moral matter. Nor is it a matter of reducing calories or units to become healthy and wise; that's a modern diversion from the main task of our lives. Ascesis is a practical matter. Abstinence and self-denial help us be Christians.
Abstinence and self-denial begin with the discovery that one of the greatest joys of the Christian faith is simplicity. If we can find simplicity in life, then abstinence and self-denial take care of themselves. So I see Lent, not as an obstacle course of things to do and things not to do, but as a time when we uncover three simplicities of the Christian faith:
First, simplicity of heart, or poverty of spirit, the lightness of being which comes from giving up complexity, and just starting again each day. We get rid of any idea that we are accomplishing something in our spiritual life.
Second, simplicity of direction, the narrow way out of the wilderness which has been shown to us by God in Christ. Lead Kindly Light. We change the direction in which we look for happiness.
And third, simplicity of life, a paring back of all that is unnecessary and restricting in our lives, so that we can release the freedom, the space, the depth and the love which we know are at the centre of our being. We find life by letting go of it. Those who lose their life will save it.
O grant us in our home to see
the heavenly life that knows no end.