Lent is a joyful holiday

An address given at St Caimin's Church, Mountshannon on Ash Wednesday, 26th February 2020.

You’ll be delighted to know that I’m not going to preach a long sermon! But I do want to say a few words about Lent.

The Church invites us, as we heard in the introduction to this service, ‘to observe a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’.

But to many in the wider society we inhabit, Lenten fasting and self-denial seem plain daft, perverse even.

‘Oh what a bore!’, I hear them say, ‘Why all this guilt-inducing, self-flagellating, call to gloomy repentance? Go away, and let us get on with our busy lives.’

There is no shortage of people to mock those of us who take Lent seriously.

My answer to them is this: Lent is not a burden – it’s not meant to be a burden, but a gift. Lent is a holiday, a holiday from the everyday - and Lent is an opportunity:

• An opportunity to liberate myself for a bit from one of those little habits of luxury that can so easily become addictive bad habits. It is a chance to prove to myself that I am more than the sum of my desires. And after the fast, thank God, I shall relish what I denied myself even more.
• Lent is an opportunity to spend more time with God, to feed my spiritual side, my soul. God is the great lover of souls, but often I feel too busy to respond to his love. There are so many ways to spend time with God that it is difficult to choose, from prayer, or reading scripture, or some other worthwhile book I wouldn’t otherwise find time to pick up, to joining with others in a Lenten course, if that is available.
• Lent is an opportunity to live more simply for a while and enjoy the present moment. Heaven knows, most of us could do with a break from the pressures to be busier and busier to acquire and consume more and more. Lent is also the time of lengthening days and burgeoning spring – let us enjoy what God has given us - for free.
• Lent is an opportunity to be as generous as I can be from the surplus of good things God has given me. There is nothing so pleasurable and good for the soul than to help someone in need or donate to a good cause.

But whatever we choose to do or not to do, we must not be gloomy about it! As Jesus tells us, ‘when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’

May we all have a joyful, holiday Lent!

Lent is a holiday from the everyday!

Address given at the Service for Ash Wednesday (with ashing) in St Mary's Nenagh on 18 Feb 2015

You’ll be delighted to know that I’m not going to give you a long sermon! But I do want to say a very few words about Lent.

The Church invites us, as we heard in the introduction to this service, ‘to observe a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’.

But to many in the wider society we inhabit, Lenten fasting and self-denial seem plain daft, perverse even. ‘Oh what a bore!’, I hear them say, ‘Why all this guilt-inducing, self-flagellating, call to gloomy repentance? Go away, and let us get on with our busy lives.’ There is no shortage of people to mock those who take Lent seriously.

My answer to them is this: Lent is not a burden – it’s not meant to be a burden, but a gift – it’s a holiday from the everyday!

Lent is an opportunity:

·         To liberate myself for a bit from one of those little habits of luxury that can so easily become addictive bad habits. It is a chance to prove to myself that I am more than the sum of my desires. And after the fast, thank God, I shall relish what I denied myself even more.

·         To spend a little more time with God, to feed my spiritual side, my soul. He is the great lover of souls, but often I feel too busy to respond to his love. There are so many ways to do so it is difficult to choose, from prayer, to reading scripture, or some other worthwhile book I wouldn’t otherwise find time to pick up, to joining with others in a Lenten course.

·         To live more simply for a while and enjoy the present moment. Heaven knows, most of us could do with a break from the pressures to be busier and busier to acquire and consume more and more. Lent is also the time of lengthening days and burgeoning spring – let us enjoy what God has given us - for free.

·         To be as generous as I can be from the surplus of good things God has given me. There is nothing so pleasurable and good for the soul than to help someone in need or donate to a good cause.

And whatever we choose to do or not do, we must not be gloomy about it! As Jesus tells us in the Gospel reading (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21), ‘when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’

May we all have a joyful, holiday Lent!

Original Sin

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 9th March 2014, the 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Temptation and sin are strong themes running through the readings set for today.

This is no accident, because today is the 1^st Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally a ‘penitential’ season, a time when we are invited to reflect on our sinful natures, and to seek God’s forgiveness for actual sin.

The 1st reading (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7) is that old, familiar story of the Fall: how the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first sin – the original sin.

The 3^rd reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11) tells us how Jesus resisted the temptation of the devil in the wilderness. He did not sin.

In the Epistle reading from his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-19), Paul contrasts the sin of Adam with the righteousness of Jesus. This passage is very important historically for the development of Christian theology, because it’s a scriptural foundation for the theological doctrine that it is by God’s grace through Jesus Christ that original sin is overcome.

It’s this uncomfortable idea of original sin that I want to explore today.

First let’s look at the story of the Fall.

Surely this is just an old myth, with no relevance to sophisticated people like us today? Well, yes it is a myth, and a very ancient one. But like many an old myth I think it captures an essential truth.

We don’t need to believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first man and the first woman, the ancestors of us all - but they are typical men and women, very like you and me. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they did so, and became like God, able to distinguish good from evil. We can all tell good from evil, can’t we? We call that capacity conscience: it is part of what makes us human - we are moral creatures.

Adam and Eve could distinguish good from evil, and like us no doubt in their best moments they would prefer good to evil. But that doesn’t mean to say that they would always choose good over evil, any more than we do. Like us, they had free will. They were tempted by the serpent, and they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, because they desired it - because it was good to eat, because it was beautiful, and because it would make them wise. So many rationalisations for their bad choice! We don’t need to believe in a literal talking serpent, but we’ve all heard that little nagging voice in the head, haven’t we? Prompting us to do something we know in our heart of hearts is wrong, for what we pretend are jolly good reasons.

This is original sin – Adam’s sin, Eve’s sin, and our sin too: to know what is right, but to be tempted by our desires to do what is wrong, and all too often to give in to our desires. We all suffer from it, without exception. It is not so much a mysterious, theological doctrine as a truth about our psychological natures, derived from observation.

Matthew tells us how Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, but resisted his blandishments.

But how did Matthew get the story? Since Jesus was alone in the desert, I think the source must be Jesus himself, who told it to his disciples. They in turn passed it on to Matthew, the Gospel writer, and so to us.

The devil tempted Jesus, we are told, just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. Jesus was human like us - he could hear that nagging little voice in his head too, but he had the strength to resist it. This should be no surprise, since we believe Jesus to be fully God as well as fully human.

Notice how the devil quotes scripture as he tempts Jesus: “He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone” – it is a quotation from Psalm 91. We should be on our guard, I think, when we hear someone use scripture as a weapon against an opponent in argument – it just might be the voice of the devil tempting us.

Notice also how Jesus quotes scripture too to rebuke the devil and to resist temptation. Perhaps we might do the same when we are tempted. Scripture can also be a tool to help us resist temptation. Now that’s a thought that might help us keep our Lenten resolutions!

So we come to Paul, and his contrast between the sin of Adam and the righteousness of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I find his argument convoluted and difficult to understand. But he ends up crystallizing matters in these words:

‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience - Adam’s -  the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience - Christ’s - the many will be made righteous’.

Paul seems to believe that Adam’s original sin causes our own, rather than being a consequence of our common humanity, as I do. But Paul sees the reality of original sin only too clearly: all human beings, like Adam, are inevitably sinners; like Eve too for that matter, though Paul leaves her out.

Later on in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul expresses the human dilemma perfectly:

‘I do not understand my own actions… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

What a mess we are all in! Our sins convict us; they cut us off from God; and we inevitably suffer spiritual death. Or to put it another way, in the language of psychology:

I feel shame for the bad things I do; the shame destroys my self-esteem; and I plunge into deep depression.

But Paul also sees another reality: the reality that God offers us a way out of the mess. The way out is God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. By following Jesus’s path of obedience to God, our sins will be forgiven and we will be made righteous. Again, to put it in the language of psychology:

When I am truly sorry for the bad things I’ve done, I will change for the better, seek to make amends and cease to feel corrosive guilt, coming to accept myself for who I  am whatever my flaws.

So to sum up

Every one of us, without exception, should feel uncomfortable about original sin, because it is a reality: we all share the innate tendency of human beings to sin, which leads every one of us to be a sinner.

But as St Paul saw so clearly, that is not the end of the matter. God offers us the free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. If we follow his way and repent, our sins will be forgiven.

And a final comforting thought for Lent: ‘Remember, I am with you always’, says Jesus. The essence of original sin is the nagging little voice of temptation, which we personify as the serpent or the devil. But if we trust in Jesus and listen for it, we can also hear his confident, comforting voice: he encourages us to resist temptation, and offers us forgiveness when we succumb to it, if we come to him in penitence.

Let’s try to listen for Jesus’s voice, really listen, as we travel with him on the way to Jerusalem this Lent, to Calvary and on to Resurrection!