Joel 2:1-2; 12-17 & Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21 Today’s gospel reading almost comes as a relief: Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. It’s a relief because we can be fairly reluctant to show signs of piety before others, especially when we’re outside of church services. If you want to get strange looks, read your Bible on the bus, pray aloud in a restaurant or talk about what Jesus means to you whilst waiting in the queue in co-op. So a gospel lesson in which Jesus says it’s better to practice your religious duties in secret may elicit a sigh of relief. But it’s odd, isn’t it? Especially when a few weeks ago in our set readings Jesus was telling us to let our “light shine before others, so they may see [our] good works and give glory to [our] Father in heaven.” Why the emphasis today on secrecy? And why the emphasis on secrecy today, on the one day of the year when we actually receive a visible mark, the imposition of ashes, that unmistakably says, “Something different is going on here”? Are we trying to show something? If so, to whom? We have to start by noting that the ashes are not for God. We’re not trying to show God something by wearing ashes on our foreheads. In Isaiah, God says it clearly: What I want from you is not sackcloth and ashes. I don’t want you sitting around looking miserable. I want you to get up and do something. Something good. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. House the homeless. Give to the poor. Change the world. That’s the kind of religious offering I’m looking for. Does God want to see something? Yes. But it’s not ashes. It’s to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God Jesus wants to see action too. His message today is about practicing our faith, linking our spiritual lives to action, through almsgiving, prayer and fasting. Living our spirituality through action is an important way to respond to God. So why does Jesus say, “Beware of practicing your piety before others”? Jesus’ words highlight two things that can rule human life, two things that can distract us from having a right relationship with God. Jesus knows we can be motivated and misled by concerns over audience and reward. By audience, we mean, for whom are we acting? For whom are we doing our religious activities? Who is our audience when we give alms or do any charitable act? When we pray? When we deny ourselves anything? For whose benefit do we do these things? Who are we hoping will notice? The other concern that goes along with audience is reward. When the hypocrites do their religious duty as an act for the benefit of being seen by others, they have received their reward: They have been seen by others. That’s it. They have been noticed by people. Jesus invites us to put our faith into action, not so we can be noticed by people, but so we will receive our reward from God. Three times he says, “and your Father who sees you in secret will reward you.” Is it wrong to be noticed by others? No. If we let our light shine, if others see the good we do, we can be powerful witnesses to God’s compassion, mercy and love. But Jesus says if we’re motivated by being noticed by people and rewarded by people, that will be our only reward. If all the attention you want is from other people, help yourself. But why settle for less than the reward God wants to give us? So why the ashes? If they’re not for God, and they’re not about being noticed by others, why do something so visible and exterior? Ashes are a reminder of humility and honesty. Sometimes we get confused about what true humility is. It’s not beating ourselves up. It’s not denigrating ourselves and saying bad things about ourselves to bring ourselves down a notch or two. It is not some strange reverse pride where we say, “Really, no one is as bad as I am, no one is as stupid, foolish or forgetful as me. I have achieved the bottom-most rung of human reality. How can God possibly love someone as lowly as me? God couldn’t possibly love me; I’m just dirt.” “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we will hear as we receive our ashes, reminding us that we are mortal and echoing the creation story where God lovingly made human beings from the dust of the ground. If we are dust, we are beloved dust, and God can do great things with just plain dirt once it’s filled with the very breath and Spirit of God. Humility is about looking at what is true and real. Humility is about being grounded in the truth of who we are: finite, flawed, dependent on God, and completely, utterly, totally loved by God, nonetheless. As we begin our Lenten journey, we accept ashes as a sign of penitence and mortality and the truth of who we are. We are invited to spend this Lent learning to trust that God is gracious and kind and forgiving and merciful, and that what humans think of us isn’t as important as our relationship with God and what we do for others because we are loved by God. We are invited to take on a discipline of doing some action solely for the purpose of pleasing God, or giving something up in order to make room in our lives for God’s Spirit to come in and move around it us. God wants to be the focus of our attention and longing. God wants to be our audience and our reward. Let’s not settle for anything less.
God’s love letter As I was thinking about what to write this month, a couple of lines from one song, kept going round and round in my head. It’s not a particularly modern song, indeed, I wasn’t even born when it was written, but its words you may be familiar with, these words were ‘love letters straight from my heart,’ from the song, Love Letters, written in 1945 with lyrics by Edward Heyman and composed by Victor Young. February is of course, the month in which we may celebrate Valentines Day, with ‘Love letters straight from our hearts,’ written to our nearest and dearest. Certainly our consumerist culture, will encourage us to spend money on cards and gifts for our loved ones. As with many celebrations, one size doesn’t always fit all … whilst many will enjoy the romance and the opportunity to express their love at this time of year, what about those who have lost their loved one, or whose relationship has broken down, or who are still searching for ‘the one?’ How do we hold these tensions, whilst celebrating the love that so many have found? Valentines’ day will closely be followed by Shrove Tuesday, if chocolate and roses aren’t your thing, then maybe pancakes, lemon and sugar are, before we potentially put all these things to one side and celebrate Ash Wednesday and enter the season of Lent, with its themes of Fasting, giving and prayer. Lent, is an intentional season of preparation as we prepare to remember the events of Holy Week, culminating in Jesus death on the cross to save us from our sins, before joyfully celebrating his resurrection, and the assurance that we can enjoy eternal life with God, on Easter day. The whole bible is a ‘love letter, straight from the heart of God,’ and we see that most clearly expressed in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which tell the story of Jesus life, death and resurrection, Gospel, literally translating as the GOODNEWS. So this Lent, why not spend a little time each day, reading from God’s love letter and commit to reading just one gospel in the 6 weeks of Lent, Mark is the shortest gospel and the most action packed, page turner! This love letter straight from the heart, the bible, is Good news for all of us, no matter what is happening in our lives and for all time. May God bless you Rev Heather
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 Romans 5:12-19Matthew 4:1-11Sometimes on Sunday mornings I’m puzzled to work out what the connection is between our three Bible readings. However, today they do appear to be very clearly linked. So, to begin I’d like to look at some of the similarities between the temptation of Eve and the temptation of Jesus. I know some of these temptations do seem to be a bit weird but I want to suggest that in fact they represent temptations that all of us experience. Firstly, Eve is tempted to take the forbidden fruit and Jesus is tempted to satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread. Of course, these aren’t exactly challenges that we face but we are all capable to attaching too much importance to our material comforts. Accumulating wealth of every kind whether it’s better food, a bigger house or a smarter car is something many of us aspire to even though we are materially much better off than any of our ancestors. After all, what could be more pleasant than a little retail therapy?Secondly, I’ve absolutely no idea how high the pinnacle of the temple was but I can guess that anyone throwing themselves off it and being caught by angels before they landed on the stones below, would be guaranteed to become a celebrity overnight. We all want our lives to be significant and probably like Eve we would like to be considered wise but that’s very different from an unhealthy desire to be the centre of attention. It’s always so much easier to focus on our own concerns than it is to take an interest in other people. And then thirdly, there’s the temptation to be like God, to be in control of our own destiny, independent of authority without needing to be accountable to anyone else. We can all be guilty of thinking, ‘It’s my life, I can do what I like with it.' Sadly, we only have to turn on the news to see how selfish people in prominent positions are capable of abusing their power and making other people’s lives a misery. So much for comparisons. There are also some important differences between the two passages. Firstly, Jesus overcomes where Eve fails. Although in the passage from Romans it is Adam rather than Eve who is held responsible. Why’s that? Well you may not have noticed that we skipped the verses about the creation of Eve in our Old Testament reading. It was Adam alone who received theinstruction not to touch the fruit of the tree. Then Eve was created and after that she succumbed to the temptation. I’m guessing that she’d only received the information second hand from Adam. And so he was the one who was held responsible. The punishment was banishment from the garden and ultimately death - death not only for him but for the whole human race who as we well know are also sinful. As we heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, anddeath came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.”Another noticeable difference between the two passages is that Adam and Eve are tempted in a garden but Jesus is tempted in the wilderness. That as well as the fact that he had fasted for 40 days gives us a very clear connection to the experience of Moses. As I’m sure you know, Moses fasted for 40 days on Mount Sinai before receiving the 10 commandments. Again from Romans we heard, “sin was indeed in the world before the lawbut sin is not reckoned when there is no law.” In other words, the main purpose of the law which Moses received was not make everyone good. It’s purpose was to demonstrate our innate human sinfulness. The generation of Jews coming out of Egypt very quickly turned to worshipping a golden calf. They were constantly moaning about their circumstances and they were much too frightened to trust God to take them into the promised land. Even Moses lost his temper and was refused entry. Only two faithful men, Joshua and Caleb, were able to lead the next generation in some 40 years later.So it seems that when Jesus fasted in the wilderness he was, in some sense, picking up the pieces where Moses left off. This becomes even more obvious when we realise that he overcame all three temptations by directly quoting the words of Moses. For example, “One does not live by breadalone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” is taken from Moses parting speech to the nation. It refers to the manna that the Jews ate for 40 years. The full reference from the book of Deuteronomy is this, “Hehumbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, withwhich neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make youunderstand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word thatcomes from the mouth of the Lord.” Again “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” reads in full as “Do not putthe Lord your God to the test as you did in Massah.” Massah, which literally means a test, is the place where the Jews complained about the lack of water after which Moses was told to provide for them by striking a rock.So Jesus resisted the enemy’s three temptations and was, at the end, waited on by angels before he entered the promised land. In contrast, Adam andEve were banished from the garden and kept out of it by Cherubim holding a flaming sword. So having overcome the temptations, Jesus, as we know, continued to lead a righteous life. In every way he was obedient to his Father - gathering and teaching disciples, healing the sick and performing other miracles but this ministry on its own wouldn’t have been enough to rescue us from the consequences of our sins. And in particular, it wouldn’t have rescued us from an eternal death. The only solution was for Jesus to voluntarily take the punishment we deserved and that brings us of course to the crucifixion.Here again, there is some very significant symbolism which connects Jesus with Adam. Adam eats the fruit from the tree, Jesus is suspended on a wooden cross. Adam is ashamed to realise that he is naked, Roman soldiers strip Jesus of this clothing. (The gospels don’t mention any modest little loin cloths.) Adam is condemned to cultivate the ground which produces thorns and thistles. Jesus is crucified with a crown of thorns upon his head. As John Henry Newman wrote in our opening hymn, ‘a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came.’ In fact Jesus often referred to himself as the Son of Man which quite literally means the Son of Adam. St. Paul summarises the exchange which took place at the cross in these words, “ . . . just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so oneman’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as bythe one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the oneman’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”That then is the Good News of the Gospel which we are invited to believe. If we are willing to repent which means turn around, our sins can be forgiven and we can be restored to a right relationship with God. We simply have to believe that Jesus died in our place. It’s a free gift which we did absolutely nothing to deserve.But once we’ve been forgiven, how do we manage to lead a righteous life? As we know only too well, all of us and not just the people in the news, are subject to the same temptations. As I outlined at the beginning, we are naturally inclined to run our own lives without reference to God, to be materialistic and to value ourselves before everyone else. Well, what did Jesus do? In our Gospel reading we heard how it was knowing the scriptures and being able to use them to refute the enemy that made all the difference. I like to think that he must have spent the best part of his first thirty years studying the Old Testament because he frequently quoted from it. On the road to Emmaus, for example, he was able to explain everything that Moses and all the prophets had foretold about him.So what about us? I want to suggest that the erosion of morality which we’re hearing about in the news is directly related to our erosion of confidence in the Bible. This is the book that has shaped our nation for generations and has given us the values which we have somehow assumed to be thoroughly British - our integrity, our sense of fair play, our concern for the marginalised to name a few. Now however, we are beginning to wonder whether we can seriously be considered to be a Christian nation at all. Nevertheless there is some encouraging news. It seems that among the younger generation the Bible is beginning to make a come back. The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, recently reported on its website. ‘Bible sales in the UK have climbed by 134% since 2019, withpeople of all ages, and especially younger readers, picking up Scripture withrenewed interest. This isn't just a publishing story: it's a sign that many aresearching for meaning and stability in a changing world.’ So to finish here’s my challenge for Lent. Instead of giving up chocolate or alcohol (and I’ve nothing against that), how about deciding to read some of those less familiar parts of the Bible for yourself? I guess we all know the gospel stories very well because we hear them every Sunday but how about tackling some other parts of the Bible that you don’t know so well? Perhaps not Leviticus or Revelation but possibly some other narrative texts that aren’t too difficult. Genesis and the first half of Exodus for example. Or maybe Paul’s journeys in the book of Acts. Instead of experiencing the Bible as a number of apparently disconnected passages on Sunday mornings, I think you could be surprised to see how well these stories hang together. And I’ve absolutely no doubt that reading them will have a very positive impact on your faith.
