LENT - A TIME FOR CHOICES, SUPERMARKETS AND DISCIPLESHIP.

The new vicar was visiting in the homes of his parishioners. At one house, it seemed obvious that someone was at home, but no answer came to his repeated knocks at the door.

He took out a business card, wrote "Revelation 3:20" on the back and stuck it in the door.

When the offering was brought up for blessing the following Sunday, he found that his card had been returned. Added to it was this cryptic message, "Genesis 3:10."

Reaching for his Bible to check out the verse, he realised that Revelation 3:20 begins, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock" and Genesis 3:10 reads, "I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid for I was naked."

Our readings today tells us that there is a difference between temptation and sin. In the Creation story Adam & Eve are tempted by the idea of being like God; they give in and in them we see the pattern of humanity striving to replace God with themselves, and the strife, and ultimately death which that leads to. Paul reminds the Romans that if sin and death came through Adam, then forgiveness and life comes through Jesus. And the gospel reading shows Jesus resisting temptation and not sinning.

Temptation is not the same as sin. I might be tempted to rob a bank; but until I do something to try and make it happen it is not sin. Temptation is still temptation whether or not you give in to it: and sin is still sin whether or not you get caught!

Lent is a good time for self reflection - as we were considering on Ash Wednesday, and that’s not about beating ourselves up, it’s about being honest and realistic - it’s about overhauling our lives and being up front about what we can do to draw closer to God.

There is a very famous prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr: “God grant me the grace to accept with serenity the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference...” and that’s a bit of a Lenten creed. [Niebuhr was a theologian born of German stock in USA in 1892 and is best known for his work in relating the Christian faith to politics - this prayer has been adopted by the Alcoholics Anonymous programme to great effect.]

So this business of sin and temptation: what is it all about? how can we get a true healthy God-given perspective on it?

A temptation is an inducement to sin - or to act in a way that is contrary to the demands of morality. So despite what the adverts might have you believe, eating a cream cake is not a sin, but repeating a bit of salacious gossip is...

A temptation highlights choice. Individual sin usually involves a deliberate choice, rather than something done or said out of ignorance or accident, misunderstanding or naivety. Circumstances and opportunities can vary tremendously for different people. I’ve never had to be faced with the inevitability of being sold into prostitution by my parents; but for some young children in desperately poor backgrounds that is the reality of their life. We may stand in our ivory towers and condemn prostitution, or the use of drugs which imprison people in a lifestyle of which we disapprove - but our temptation may be to take the high moral ground without wanting to understand the situation...

Perhaps rather than getting bogged down in defining temptations and sin we would do better to think about making choices which strengthen our life as Christian disciples. Learning to make choices is about moral character formation.

I suppose when we talk about temptation we are really talking about the continuous on going struggle that we all seem to have between good and evil, between right and wrong... how do we do what is right? what is right? does the right thing to do depend on the circumstances - is goodness (or indeed sin) relative? how do I understand what is right and wrong?

The German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (b 1886) was famous amongst other things for suggesting that each age has its own besetting worry: the age in which the NT was written worried about the world being in the grasp of an impersonal fate; during the Reformation period a sense of personal guilt was a gnawing worry; in our own time, despite our scientific advances and material comforts we struggle with a sense of meaninglessness - what is life all about? why are we here? what does it all mean? what’s the point?

If this theory is true it suggests that the emphasis in our theology has changed and will continue to change, depending on our culture. In different periods of history the preaching of Christianity as a deliverance from sin, or managing to make people feel sinful and therefore in need of salvation - all this belongs to a culture which is no longer ours.

If the besetting worry of our age is about meaning then perhaps in our presentation of the Good News it is more appropriate to talk about purpose and direction, of life as a journey of discovery and growth. And within that we can’t skate over sin - any more than we can skate over poverty, or injustice. We acknowledge that we’ve not always done what God asks of us; we’ve not always said or thought the things of God.

So that’s not to say that we are any less sinful than we were in earlier history; or that we have any more existential angst than in earlier history - it’s to say that approaches to explain, understand and live the Christian faith have to be made afresh in each and every generation. We are challenged today as to what we understand by temptation and sin, perhaps more than we were a few generations ago when there was a more widespread feeling that we are all sinners, when the concept was broadly understood in a more general way. That kind of language is not in common parlance these days - except perhaps in the simplistic world of advertising where covetousness, waste, envy, vanity, gluttony and greed are used to persuade us to fund our capitalist consumer society...

Although we may not, as a culture, feel particularly sinful we do live in an age where some terrible things have been happening: during the last war 6 million Jews and 28 million Russians were killed... Conflicts have abounded: do you remember the litany Penny recited on Remembrance Sunday about the conflicts in our life time?: Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, Israel, Yugoslavia, Eritrea, The Falklands, Rwanda, The Lebanon, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq...

The media is full of terrible stories of violence and sin: yet nobody seems to want to take responsibility: these are all somebody else’s problems. Our culture seems very inclined to blame somebody else... the world’s problems are a result of America’ foreign policy; if I trip over a flagstone I will sue the Council; if my child fails an exam I will blame the school... “It wasn’t my fault!” Does this sound familiar? And there’s nothing new about this blame shifting... How about this:

Did you eat fruit from the tree I told you not to, Adam?

Errr... Eve made me do it!

Did you eat fruit from the tree I told you not to, Eve?

Err... the snake made me do it...

And yet, thanks in no small measure to environmental theology and ecopolitics, we are beginning to see the interconnectedness of life: how our shopping habits can be reformed by introducing a Fair-trade concept; how our carbon footprint directly impacts on our global environment; how our use of pesticides affect the water we later drink... We are beginning to see that we are implicated in what we understand as the sin of the world... and later in the this service we’ll remind ourselves that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world...

We can make a difference: we can change: we have choices. And that brings us back to temptation. Rather than depicting sin and temptation as characatures, two dimensional simplistic concepts - maybe we need to think more in terms of making choices which strengthen our life as Christian disciples.

And when we make those choices we must bear in mind our influence on a global village. Rather than thinking of them as temptations, we are faced with choices every day:

• how much petrol we use;

• what price we pay for our coffee;

• whether we buy cheap clothes made in questionable circumstances;

• running a bath or taking a shower...

• buying organic or battery chickens...

• using rechargeable batteries...

• thinking about solar panels on our houses...

• swallowing whole the media presentation [eg the hysteria surrounding the the ABC who “wants to introduce Muslim law in the UK”... which is not what he said at all. Mark Twain said: "If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."]...

• believing the adverts [“It’s not just food... it’s M&S food...” it IS just food!]...

• believing that gossip doesn’t matter...

• that what you do or say somewhere else - on holiday, at a conference - is not the same as when you’re at home...

These are all opportunities for choices which draw us nearer to God. Lent is a time for consideration of these difficult dilemmas which face us on a daily basis: to become informed (about consequences and God’s will for example) and therefore better equipped to do the right thing - whatever that may mean.

So please don’t be fooled into thinking that Lent is a time for offering God sacrifices which cost us nothing.

I tell you this so that I am accountable to you: I’m trying to give up supermarkets for Lent... I’ve been getting more and more cross at the way our eating habits and lifestyles are being dictated to us by very powerful consortiums; at the way in which small businesses are being pressured out of existence; of the exploitation of farmers and those involved in agriculture. So I’m trying to use this time to shop in town. It will take me longer and be less convenient: it may cost me more (I don’t know: I’m keeping a tally!). It’s a discipline to invest in the place where I live: not to give my money to head office in London. It’s about supporting the local, it’s about enjoying regional and seasonal foods; it’s about disallowing Tesco’s power and control over my life

“All these groceries I will give to you if you acknowledge that Tesco’s is the most powerful retailer... “ I have a choice and I am trying to make choices to support Hastings, rather than a faceless money making machine...

So this Lent rather than using it as a time to contemplate how sinful we are, let’s use the opportunity to think about the choices we have, about how we might choose for God, and about how our choices strengthen our life as Christian disciples.

Fr Andrew Perry

Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea