Sermon Ash Wednesday - 22nd February 2012

On this, the first day of Lent, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches.

I met a one-time famous politician once. Jonathan Aitken. In Brixton Prison. He was preaching on a Sunday morning about 18 months ago when our parish team was helping lead the service. He spoke from the heart about his own time in prison and his finding faith and forgiveness in Jesus Christ, after he himself was disgraced and jailed. He was honest and open and the prisoners seemed to like it. He wasn’t always like that. Far from it. He was jailed for lying in court to protect his own reputation and political career, hiding behind a superficial veneer of respectability, manner and background. I’d walked past him once before, many years earlier, in the late 1990’s, on a street in Westminster. It was dark and quiet. I was working nearby and he lived near my office and the scandal about him had just broken. I remember being tempted to spit out something rude to him, express my disgust at lying politicians. I’m glad now I didn’t. He might have remembered my face!

What is it all about, this willingness of politicians to lie, this hiding behind superficial respectability? And what about my reaction on the street? Why does it matter that politicians should speak the truth?

I wonder what will happen to Chris Huhne shortly, you’ll probably be familiar with the allegations that he got his wife to lie for him about a traffic offence. And that he was proclaiming family values in his election campaign while having an affair with his assistant. “Not another one!”, we might be tempted to cry…but why should we not just give up and expect them to be all the same? Why do we long for them to be honest and hate it when they pretend?

My brother told me two weeks ago about a good friend of his. She is worried about a possible serious illness and he asked me to pray. She has had a hard time in recent years. Her father died suddenly. She has a sister. Everyone thinks the sister is lovely. She goes to church. But when my brother’s friend gave her niece, her sister’s little girl, a piece of cake at a party when the sister did not want her to have any, the sister flew into a rage. Now she won’t speak to her own sister, my brother’s friend. In fact she has moved to Australia and hasn’t made contact for some time. So what is this churchgoing all about?

A very good friend of mine from work used to take me and the rest of the team every Christmas to a church near Holborn where his sister’s cousin was a well-known priest. He was quite famous this priest, well known to many in the media and we had our team Christmas lunch in the café in his church for a few years on the trot. He always came over to say hello. He appeared very respectable, although to be fair he never claimed to be perfect. A pillar of the church nevertheless. Young people were proud to say he married them. But shortly before he died some now middle-aged men finally found the courage to talk about the abuse they suffered at his hands at a school in Africa in the 1960’s and the impact on their lives ever since. A TV programme was made and the priest confessed as he was dying. The family’s image of their successful, holy if human, charismatic, role model priest now lies shattered.

A footballer, lauded as one of the finest of his generation, a gentleman, polite, respectable, a perfect role model for youngsters, is finally confirmed yesterday as having had affair after affair after affair including with his brother’s wife. It’s not the human frailty that hurts so much as using a so-called “super injunction” to try to protect his misbehaviour and then hiding behind the superficiality of respectability for so long.

The Jewish people in Old Testament times seemed on the face of it to be doing everything right. They engaged in daily religious observance, fasting and prayers. They taught and they learned. They rigorously studied the scriptures. The whole nation was very, very “religious”. They seemed to want God to do what was right for them. “But the problem?” says Isaiah the prophet, “is that if your religion has no depth it is worthless. If it has no core of reality it will have no impact.” What is the point of your fasting if in the rest of your life you exploit your workforce, quarrel and fight with each other, even on the same day you have been fasting”. If you set out to claim true respectability, says God, prove to me that you have understood it and will live it, prove to me that you can make tough choices, prove to me that you can take the burdens of selfless living. Prove to me that it is more than this superficial veneer. Prove to me that it is true! Feed the hungry, fight for justice, provide homes for the homeless and do not reject your own families. A thin veneer of respectability will get you nowhere but actually live out these values and when the costs to yourselves may be high and then blessings will flow: light, healing, righteousness, glory. The vision is of repaired and fruitful communities. Walls repaired, broken dwellings restored, foundations rebuilt and strong.

But in New Testament times, they were at it again, turning up at the synagogue to make their gifts with trumpeters going ahead. “Look at me, look at me, look how good I am!” And praying, standing up in public in full view of everyone. “Just look how religious I am. I even stand on the street corner to pray so that everyone can see me!”

I’d like to suggest that this sense that those who proclaim to live by principles and values should live them in reality is a God-given sense. It does actually matter because these are real values. Truth matters. Depth matters. Hypocrisy is obnoxious because it is wrong. And these things matter because God wants the best for us. Honest leaders building strong communities. Churches where the hallmark is selfless giving and care for the needy, because this means they mean what they say. Families that are not at each other’s throats.

So when will it end? When will the politicians behave, the public figures not pretend, the priests not abuse? Are they all still just like those so called religious people of old, it doesn’t matter whether it is the Old Testament or the New? Bunch of hypocrites, the lot of them!

Of course these questions are important and of course we should react with careful anger when we see this behaviour in others. Truth and a desire for a society and lives where people practice what they preach and people are built up are God-given values.

But I suggest that in Lent in particular there is a potentially more uncomfortable question that all of us must face. And it is the one that I think Jesus consistently reminds his hearers of. And that is this. Forget others for now and start with yourself. For me, start with myself. How is my giving to others? Is it so real, so selfless, so generous that to be honest I have no real idea how much I give? I don’t even let my right hand see what my left is doing! Is my prayer real prayer, between me and God, in secret, from the heart? Do I demand forgiveness of others but can’t bring myself to forgive? Do I turn to the sinner and see the speck in his eye but ignore the log in my own? Do I secretly thank and praise God that I am not like the people I and others despise? Do I pick up stones to throw at the adulterer?

During Lent we are called to engage in a more disciplined life, possibly to forego some luxury, to pray more regularly, to contemplate, to reflect. We are preparing to commemorate what, if the Christians have got it right, are the most significant events in human history. So let’s catch sight of the depth and the wonder and the potential behind it all, the hope of glorious things. Let’s make sure that our self-discipline goes beyond the mere ritual of religious observance and leads us rather deeper into the life-changing, life-enhancing possibilities that lie behind.

Amen