ST ANNE’S DUNBAR GOSPELS

Ash wednesday– 5th march 2014

Run for it!

Readings:

1 Cor 9: 24-end – Run to win!

Matthew 6: 16-21 – Where your treasure is

I’m one of those people for whom sporting imagery doesn’t really work. I never even won an egg-and-spoon race.  I was a very weedy little boy in a school of rugby players. When it was time for team captains to pick their players, I was always the last chosen, with the captains usually bickering over who was going to take the liability that was me: “You have him!” “No, you have him!” It doesn’t do much for your self-esteem.

My school reports also didn’t help. In one year the games master just wrote one word: “Timid”. In another, the damning resumé: “Tries hard, but his physique is against him”. Until finally, after a year of hiding every time the bus came to take us to the sports fields: “I do not know this boy”.

So sports and me don’t have a good history. And yet I know what Paul means, without discipline we don’t achieve anything. Or as Jesus often puts it, if we want new growth to come, then we’ve got to be ready for the pruning that makes that possible. Sometimes, of course, we want to say to the Lord: "Enough, you’ve pruned me as much as I can take".

But we’re encouraged to get into this race because Jesus has run this race before us. The writer to the Hebrews says we should start this athletic discipline because Jesus has already blazed the trail for us. He’s our pioneer. He subdued his own nature, his ego, he endured the discipline of shedding everything and taking up his Cross. Why? - to embrace suffering for its own sake? – no, he did this “for the joy that was set before him.” (Heb 12:2a)

So we begin to see that this invitation to follow Jesus into the wilderness and beyond the wilderness, to Jerusalem and the Way of the Cross, is, in the end, an invitation to joy. So if we discipline our bodies in order to make our souls more opened to God, maybe loosened up a bit from our obsession with ourselves, we do it in order to embrace life.

So fasting, if we do that, is only a way to make a space where God and you can meet – that’s why Jesus says you do it in your secret place and don’t parade it about for all the world to see. The world doesn’t need miserable, po-faced Christians. It needs joyful Christians, who emerge out of that secret place where we meet God in a special way and go out into the world in a way that gives life. Out of any sacrifices we make, any disciplines we offer to God, should come only good fruit: love, joy, peace and all the rest.

And it’s not just about abstinence – which I have to admit sometimes just makes me cranky and hard to live with. Instead Lent can be about not giving something up, but taking something up. Maybe Lent can be when I write that letter to a friend that I’ve been meaning to write for months, or picking up the phone to someone, or deciding to sponsor a child in a developing country, or remembering to show some interest in the person who serves me at the checkout at Asda, or dedicating more time to praying for people I love.

Because this is Jesus yet again trying to help us see what’s really important. Where is the treasure of my heart? Do I love God and do I love others as much as I like to think I do? This is a time to stir up the gifts of the Spirit in me, so that I really do produce good fruit, for myself and for the world. And that only happens with some pruning, some discipline. And we don’t have for ever to get down to this. It’s not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Paul says: Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation. That’s why in this service we’re reminded of our mortality. We are dust and to dust shall return; but we’re dust into which again and again God breathes the breath of life. May he breathe that breath into us today.