Sunday 13 March 2011, 1st of Lent, Evensong (Westminster Abbey)

An extract from the Parish Magazine of St Peter’s Eaton Square, dated Lent 1911:

“A ‘Quiet Day’ was held at St Peter’s by the Vicar, on Thursday, the 23rd. The timetable was as follows: Holy Communion, 8.30 am; Mattins, 10.30 am; Addresses, 11 am, 3 and 4.45 pm; Special Intercession for the Parish , 12.30 pm. Evensong at 5.30 formed a fitting close to the day. The attendance, especially considering the weather, was very good and well maintained throughout the day.”

It’s reassuring to know that some things never change. I’m not just referring to the weather. The intensity of the worship and preaching which my illustrious predecessor as Vicar of St Peter’s, John Storrs, offered to the faithful in Lent certainly gives the lie to the suspicion that Victorian religion in Westminster was all about social convention. Ten hours, four services and three sermons: not for the faint-hearted, but not what the day was billed as, either. Ten hours, four services and three sermons do not a Quiet Day make. They ad up to an extremely active day. My point is that the weather never changes and our compulsion to pack Lent with activity, whether it’s un-quiet Quiet Days, worthy books, sermon series, or study groups, never changes either. This morning I promoted 2011’s Lent programme at St Peter’s just as John Storrs must have done 1911’s Lent programme one hundred years ago, and they don’t look so very different.

Of course, books and sermon series and study groups are good, and I hope that what’s being offered at St Peter’s (and I’m sure what’s being offered at the Abbey) will nurture the disciples of Jesus Christ in their faith. However it will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that faith is equivalent to religious activity. It will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that we can read, listen or attend our way to eternal redemption.

There is no more active word in the vocabulary of faith than the verb ‘to repent’, ‘’ in the Gospel-writer’s Greek. To repent is not simply to change your mind or adjust your preference. It’s to turn away. In early Christian liturgy candidates for Baptism were asked whether they repented, and they would turn to give their answers, demonstrating through their physical posture the fundamental re-orientation of their lives. So how strange it is that, in Saint Luke’s record of stories told to illustrate the nature of repentance, Jesus chooses as his subjects a lost sheep and a lost coin. The latter is an inanimate object capable of no activity at all, be it physical, intellectual or emotional, and the former is a notoriously stupid animal capable of the first of those but not, frankly, of much else. Neither can conceivably repent in the active sense that the verb demands. The activity in the stories is all their owners. Clearly, there’s a different way of understanding repentance.

The lost sheep does nothing except to wander in the wilderness. Yet nothing can keep the shepherd from his charge, and when he finds it he carries it home rejoicing, and calls his friends to party. It’s not the only party in this passage. There’s another in the home of the woman whose coin is lost and who lights the lamp, sweeps the house and searches high and low until it is found. The stories paint a picture of a God who does not wait to be approached, but who goes out eagerly looking for each one of us, and who will not rest while any is lost. And they paint a picture of repentance which consists less of our activity, and more of our inactivity, of our being found by God. Of course, we have to be willing to be found. If we are bent on hiding ourselves from his eyes, or blocking our ears to his call, or fleeing wildly from his embrace then we will not be. But our redemption is God’s activity, not ours.

Many of us will be very active this Lent. It’s simply how the disciples of Jesus Christ are. But as we absorb ourselves in study groups, fill our ears with sermons and concentrate our minds on books we might just ask whether our activity will allow God to find us, or whether it will keep God at a safe distance. We might ponder the commandment that Moses put before the Israelites. ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’. It’s the commandment that Jesus called the greatest. But perhaps it’s rather easier to love our Lenten diaries and our Lenten programmes. Perhaps it’s rather easier to love our activity. Perhaps. Amen.