Sermons from St Faith's
God's Abundance
Revd Sue Lucas, Ash Wednesday,
February 18th, 2015
Matt 6:1-6, 16-21
2 Corinthians 5: 20b-6:10
Isaiah 58:1-12
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the
bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the
yoke, to let the oppressed go free. (Is 58)
I’m delighted that the Mirfield students are
coming again this Lent – I had an email from the
first of this year’s crop, David Adamson – and
he’s bringing some of his friends with
him. We get a great deal out of the
ordinands’ presence with us, and we, in a small
way, contribute to their formation.
Perhaps you remember last year Ben Kerridge –
now curate at St George’s in Hornsey, North
London, saying there’s nothing like a bunch of
pious ordinands for a bit of competitive
fasting! If you know and love Mirfield –
it’s very possible to imagine it – a community
just a little trying to outdo one another in
self denial. It’s very understandable, and
completely forgiveable; but as our Gospel makes
clear, it’s not quite what our Lenten fast is
about. There is a proper self-denial, an
engagement with self-examination, an awareness
of our own personal frailty in Lent – but this
is only part of the point of the traditional
spiritual disciplines of Lent, of ‘fasting
prayer and acts of service.
For we are not persons in isolation, but in the
way we belong to one another; and we are
material beings, made of stuff, and dependent on
it; we in the Catholic tradition know, above all
that ‘matter matters.’
Our dependence on matter is made clear in the
Creation narrative – adam/adamah – mud pies, but
with the breath of God in us; both our dignity,
and our total dependence comes from this.
Basic idea is that matter is ‘good’ – ours is a
generous God, who creates in abundance, in
profligate love; there is enough, and more than
enough for all humanity to flourish.
Yet, we know only too well that matter is alsp
problematic – live in a world in which a few
have plenty, and many have nothing; in our
world, some are oppressed by matter, by having
no work, or work that oppresses them, and
concentration of wealth itself, whilst it is
valourised in our society, is deeply oppressive
– ‘spirits oppressed by leisure, wealth and
care. We fast then only partly as a
personal spiritual discipline – for connected to
that, connected to our own willingness to face,
gently, our own unruly desires and drives, is
appropriate sorrow – prophetic mourning – for
the political and social and economic structures
that oppress some and reward others.
Reward? Of course, that word occurs in our
Gospel; but in the Greek, it is actually two
words – one that has the send of ‘wages’ of
cause and effect; But the other has the sense of
the material world as God’s generous love as a
free, even a profligate gift. The
material world is a work of grace, a gift of
God’s generosity – our ownership of any of it is
only ever provisional, temporary, fleeting –
ours to use but not to own. It is very
obvious to us as clergy in doing funerals; of
course, people rightly want to provide for their
children; but much ‘stuff,’ that has been the
furniture of a life, used, treasured, even is
dispersed and scattered; we are indeed mud pies,
we are indeed dust and ashes.
Yet, in the face of this, our Gospel insists we
should rejoice; because – its proclamation is
that, appearances to the contrary, God’s reality
is not the controlling, measurable,
cause-and-effect reality of the misuse of
matter, the unjust structures that turn people
into commodities and oppress them – with
poverty, with prejudice, with no work or
oppressive work.
There is, of course, a connection with the
Eucharist – the Eucharist that is
thanksgiving; and it is not very hard to
move from our sheer materiality – the mud pie
status that God in Christ chooses to share with
us – to ‘this is my body, this is my
blood.’ In the Eucharist, we proclaim
that, though we are but dust and ashes, we can
come into the Real Presence of the Most High,
and that the more bread is broken the more it is
shared: and that, of course, is how the Church
understands economics.
So we proclaim abundance, even as we fast; to
disfigure ourselves with fasting, to be
preoccupied with personal sin – in other words,
to think that this is all about me is to
privatise religion and so to distort it by not
noticing it’s much bigger than that.
So let’s rejoice as we, in fasting, prayer and
acts of service renew ourselves in our calling
this Lent; to remember we’re mud pies, but with
the breath of God in us; to sorrow in solidarity
with those oppressed – by poverty, prejudice, by
being excluded from all that leads to human
flourishing; but above all, to rejoice; to
rejoice in our materiality and in God’s
abundance; that no human being, no situation, is
finally left out of God’s generous economy, of
God’s sense for the world. Amen.
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