Sunday 27 February 2011, 2 before Lent

“Salvation cannot be found in a garage pasty”. I’ll repeat that. “Salvation” the advertising hoardings proclaim “cannot be found in a garage pasty”. And most of us would concur.
“Good food” the hoardings continue “deserves Lurpak”.

It’s a clever campaign. A garage pasty may give a moment’s satisfaction, a mouthful of high-carb, artificially favoured, winter-warming bliss, but the moment will not last. Real enjoyment comes from real cooking, from the time-consuming collation of ingredients and from the careful transformation of those ingredients into the good food that is greater than the sum of its parts. Think about tomorrow, not today, Lurpak is urging. Think about your next meal, not about your next snack. Don’t respond to today’s craving for junk-food; set your mind on tomorrow’s banquet.

The Gospels are silent as to whether Jesus ever ate a garage pasty, and I don’t want to claim him as a mouthpiece for Ginsters. But his teaching, in the passage from the Sermon on the Mount that we have heard, challenges the ethos that Lurpak is trying to press on us. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own” he says. “Today’s trouble is enough for today”. Or, don’t let your Stilton ripen, don’t wait for your Claret mature and don’t put your chicken in to a marinade. No. Eat garage pasties.

Well, as I’ve already said, for once most of us would concur with the advertiser, and not just in matters nutritional. We try to educate our children away from short-termism in their diets. We dread them attempting to survive on Pot Noodle and frozen pizza. And we similarly try to think long-term for ourselves, managing our futures as we might manage an orgy of gastronomy. Our mortgages mean that one day we will be property-owners; our pension plans mean that one day we will not have to work; our insurance policies mean that one day when the spectre of ill-health looms large it will not intimidate us. So we worry about tomorrow. In fact most of us could worry for England. So what might it mean to live differently, to live as Jesus teaches – to live on, if not garage pasties (after all this is SW1) then perhaps a diet of quickly-prepared omelettes.

There is possibly a worked example within our reach, in the streets of Tripoli and Ben Ghazi. There the hoardings do not proclaim salvation in the shape of butter, but salvation through the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. His image still stares out across the land he has tyrannized for forty years, but it has been defaced and disfigured by protestors. There is a sense abroad that, after the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, his hour too has come. And possibly his hour would have come a great deal sooner, as would have the hour of Mubarak and the hour of Ben Ali if only the world had worried a little less about tomorrow and a little more about today. For to varying degrees we have been prepared to tolerate their regimes on the basis that our strategic and petropolitical interests have been served by the stability that they have afforded. We have ignored the internal repression that has characterized their rule; we have been deaf to their people’s clamour for reform; and we have swallowed our distaste for a form of governance that we would not be prepared to live under ourselves. We have worried about tomorrow, and as long as the troubles of today have not been our troubles of today, then they have not troubled us.

The teaching of Jesus is at odds with the realpolitik of hugging dictators. Why? Why does Jesus not encourage us to think of the promises of tomorrow and to overlook the inconveniences of today? Because today, he says, we are to “strive for the kingdom of God and his righteousness”. Not tomorrow and not the day after, but today. Today we can choose God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Today we can remember those to whom God’s kingdom belongs: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. Today we can remember the righteousness of God, the righteousness that consists not in following God’s rules but in following God’s Son. Not tomorrow. Today is our opportunity. Today.

This is a dangerous sermon to have preached. I am not suggesting that you rip up your wills, drink your cellars and cash in all your endowments. But I am suggesting that the teaching of Jesus is that we all learn a little more recklessness and a little less caution; that we all live with a little more trust and a little less fear; that comfort and convenience can wait and that mercy, justice and peace cannot.

I am suggesting that now and then – God forbid – salvation may indeed lie in a garage pasty. Amen.