Ash Wednesday, 9 March 2011

At last week’s Annual Parochial Church Meeting I spoke of my interest in the gym. It’s not purely a personal interest, although part of the Lenten regime that I’m aspiring to is a more rigorous use of my own membership. I went at lunchtime which is why I’m looking the picture of health tonight. It’s an interest in the reality that gym membership is booming while church membership is not.

I attribute this to three words beginning with ‘P’ at which gyms excel. They have a clear purpose; they offer a clear programme; and they make a clear promise – they promise that if their members follow the programme they’ll achieve the purpose. I told the APCM that I believe that the Church needs to get better at articulating its purpose, its purpose of forming disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of God’s world. It needs constantly to shape its programme to meet that purpose; and it needs to rediscover its confidence in promising that that through faithfulness to the programme that purpose will be achieved.

This is abundantly true in the season we enter today. Lent’s purpose is the formation of disciples; Lent offers a programme; and Lent makes a promise. This is reflected in our liturgy. The Introduction has placed before us the programme. It’s of ‘self-examination and repentance…prayer, fasting and self-denial…reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. It promises that ‘By carefully keeping these days’, that is, by following this programme, we will ‘grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord’. The Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer will express our hope that through Lent’s pilgrimage of prayer and discipline ‘we may grow in grace and learn to be your people once again’. And in the Post-Communion Prayer we will pledge ourselves to follow daily ‘the blessed steps’ of Christ’s most holy life.

That is why Lent’s theme at St Peter’s this year is Via Crucis: Via Vitae. The Way of the Cross is not a way of life, like veganism, Freemasonry or caravanning, but the Way of Life. It’s not just that we will be privileged to host a performance of Liszt’s work for piano and choir on Sunday 10 April – although as it features Leslie Howard and our Choir under Andrew’s direction I would advise you strenuously not to miss it. It’s that in the Way of the Cross, in the last hours before Jesus’s crucifixion, we discover for our discipleship what the Atkins diet is for slimmers or what British Military Fitness is for those strange individuals who enjoy running round Wandsworth Common while being shouted at. We discover the programme, the model, the pattern, that we are called to follow.

It is a pattern that we will enter into and inhabit on Tuesday evenings throughout Lent. Using the building, its grounds, and the garden of Eaton Square we will walk with Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane to Pilate’s judgement hall, from Calvary to the empty tomb. We will hear the story told again and again, and we will pray for ourselves and for the world to which the Way shows the way. In a series of addresses followed by meditations on the organ we will ponder the disciplines that the Way requires of us, the disciplines of prayer and worship, of study and service. Then on Sunday mornings our preachers will bring alive for us the virtues which will flourish if we are faithful to the Way. These are not Virtues with a capital ‘V’, a notion so redolent of Sunday School Victoriana, but the hard-won, costly virtues of trust, of justice and forgiveness, of solidarity and hope. It is these that will transform God’s world, a world in critical need of more trust, more justice, more forgiveness, more solidarity and more hope.

And the Way begins tonight with a cross of ash inscribed on our foreheads. Ash serves as a sign of our acknowledgement of our sin and of our contrition at our sin: so ash does for us what that first run or first tomato juice sometimes does for potential gym members. Ash signals our willingness to change and be changed. Ash also reminds us that we are mortal and that one day we will die: so ash also does for us what health scares and encroaching middle-age sometimes do for actual gym members. Ash spurs us on to change and to be changed, to allow God not to remove our mortality but to transfigure it, so that our every pore shines with divine light.

Via Crucis. We follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We tread where he trod. Through prayer, worship, study and service we are formed as his disciples; through the love, hope and forgiveness that flow from us God’s world will be transformed. Amen to that.