Sermons

First Sunday in Lent
Sunday 25 February at 8am

Simon Cowling
Readings: 2 Corinthians 6. 1-10; Matthew 4. 1-11

An old man was asked, 'How can I find God?' He replied, 'In fasting, in watching, in labours, in devotion, and above all, in discernment. I tell you, many have injured their bodies without discernment and have gone away from us having achieved nothing. Our mouths smell bad through fasting, we know the Scriptures by heart, we can recite all the psalms of David, but we have not that which God seeks: love and humility.'

We are at the beginning of Lent, when self-denial and discipline are high on the agenda of Christians and indeed a surprising number of non-Christians. But as those words with which I began suggest self-denial and discipline are only means to an end, the end being the love and humility that God seeks from us. The words echo a number of Old Testament passages which condemn fasting for its own sake: there's no point in fasting if all you do is look gloomy and give yourself a hard time; it's of no use to you and is certainly of no use to anyone else. The words with which I began actually come from one of the fourth century Desert Fathers, Egyptian monks who went in their thousands to the north African desert to emulate Jesus' wilderness experience. In Matthew's account of this time, it is clear that the forty days he spent alone in the desert brought our Lord closer to his heavenly Father. Thus we can see the whole experience as a necessary prelude to his ministry of loving and humble service, a refining of his mission and his purpose.

In his poem Ash Wednesday T.S.Eliot writes about 'the time of tension between dying and birth/The place of solitude where three dreams cross between blue rocks'. So how can we use the solitude of Lent? How can we most effectively inhabit this place of tension? How will God judge our fasting? The Jesus who spent time in the wilderness was human, as we are human; indeed as the letter to the Hebrews says, in every respect he has been tempted as we are. So Lent is, first of all, a chance for us, as Christians, to take seriously our call to be human. We can rejoice that God has given us the freedom to refuse to assent to evil, the evil of which we know ourselves to be capable as well as the collective evil of humankind that is so often at the root of disease and hunger, the desperation and squalor and terror of the lives so many in our world are condemned to live; we can reject the destructive temptation to grasp at equality with God, to impose our will by might on others, to accept casually the consequences of war as mere collateral damage; we can, if we will it, use the solitude of Lent to begin to glimpse within ourselves that which we were truly created to be: people created in love by God in God's own image and likeness. Yet if and when we fail to live up to this call, this responsibility to be human, we can be certain that God will not let us go. Time and again God will call us back to himself in the person of Jesus whose human arms stretch out from the cross to embrace the whole of humankind in an act of divine love. For although Jesus was tempted as we are, he was without sin. Truly human yet truly God, loving us back into our true shape.

May your Lent be richly blessed. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay