Guilsborough: Sunday before Lent. 22 Feb. 
“ Search me O God and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts/ And see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. “  
The news in recent weeks has been so apocalyptic that I’ve been looking around for  Solomon Eagle.  I don’t know if his name will ring a bell with you but he is one of the more colourful figures that flit across the history of the mid-seventeenth century.  I think he may have had some Quaker connections - though I would not want to press that point.  Along with the Levellers, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, Titus Oates et al  Solomon  Eagle enjoyed his brief moment in the limelight.  He stalked the streets of London during the Great Plague, crying out against the sins of  the City, often stark naked, according to contemporary accounts, and always with a brazier of hot coals on his head,  symbolising the imminent appearance of hellfire for all concerned. 
He got a good fire for his pains in 1666 from Pudding Lane to Pie Corner, but thereafter, as the London recovered and rebuilt itself, he fades from history.  We have, then, a Solomon Eagle moment at present, with  “ woe, woe, woe”  being cried out everyday by press and politicians,  and depressing statistics paraded before us .  
Pass the brazier Esme  and I’ll get on with a denouncement of capitalism and all its works, bankers’ greed, politicians duplicity, businessmen’s incompetence, teenagers immorality, the culture of ephemeral celebrity  etc etc  I might as well get it off my chest. . 
Certainly in some  areas of our lives we have changed our tune completely over the years.  How well I remember 50 years ago or so, the Opposition in Parliament,  I think in the person of  Jim Callaghan as Shadow Chancellor, denouncing the introduction of Premium Bonds by Harold Macmillan as a “squalid lottery” -  a step down the road to ruin.  I felt quite guilty spending a £1 on a Premium Bond from my Christmas postal delivery wages.   It’s never won.  Serves me right, the high minded might say.   
Nowadays a political party once regarded as the advocate of sobriety and thrift regards gambling as an industry.  We only just avoided a rash of super casinos. Last month I read that the Culture minister warned that slot machine operators were “finding trading conditions increasingly difficult “  and promptly changed the rules to allow them to offer higher prizes.  Rules on TV adverts for gambling have also been relaxed and viewers are now told “ It matters more if you have money on it”.   Seven of the top 20 millionaires in the Sunday Times rich list, have apparently made their fortunes via on line gambling. 
Looking around us, then, it’s a pretty grim scene and there is always, as one grows older a tendency to think that  “ things ain’t what they used to be.”  But, as the historian Macaulay put it,   “no man who is correctly informed  as to past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the future.”   It was worse when Solomon Eagle was around.  
When things go wrong, however, we tend to look around for someone or some vice  to blame.   Some people  seem  now in a philosophical panic,  proclaiming the death of capitalism, the end of the financial world as we knew.  One commentator said he felt like a priest when a member of his flock abandons the faith because a child dies. Everyone knows if they think about it that  tragedies happen. We know that from history and from our Bibles.  That’s not a reason to blame God.  We need more resilience one could argue and our Christian faith helps with that.  Things will get better and we shall , one hopes, have learned some lessons from the present difficulties. 
But  it’s easier to criticise.  Christians seem to do quite a lot of it.  One thinks of a bishop or two, blaming the recession on sin;  and there’s Dr Ian Paisley on “wailing and gnashing of teeth”.   But Christianity, as I see it, is a religion of hope and optimism . And our hope and optimism are based the teachings of Jesus, who  gave us a set of rules, principles, to follow building on the Ten Commandments.   One of these is humility and another is understanding of and love for our neighbour.  We can make a better world. It takes us back to that old adage. For best results follow the maker’s instructions.  
We have, then, everything to look forward to as we journey through life, through this Lent,  towards, one hopes, redemption and heaven – gospel to proclaim.   “Tell of that glorious Easter morn , empty the tomb, for he was free; he broke the power of death and hell/ that we might share his victory.  “ 
As part of that journey through life,  and on this the last Sunday before Lent I’ve been thinking about how best to handle the next 40 days so as to make the best use of the time for some spiritual advancement.  The Church of England, I hear, has proposed that we undertake a carbon fast.  Reducing our carbon footprint will help everyone, not just ourselves, towards a better world.  Good idea: but is it practical for everyone?  I haven’t asked the vicar, but I somehow doubt whether it will be feasible for him to abandon the internal combustion engine and pedal round his eight parishes.  
Whatever we decide to do in Lent, and even if we decide to give up nothing material,  Lent is time for us to put temptation behind us. The Garden of Eden and the desert are the Bible’s two climatic extremes, and  the context of two very different temptations.    It is interesting to compare the experience of Christ in the wilderness with that of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden.  
Adam and Eve succumbing to the wiles of the serpent show how easy it is to forget about God’s warnings.  Whereas Christ in the desert no doubt felt  hunger and temptation to turn stones, as the Devil suggested,  into bread, but recognises that it is not the time and place to act on impulses.  
These two biblical stories show how easy it is to abuse our God given freedom.  I would imagine most of us share more of an affinity with Adam and Eve than with Christ.  That is why we are apt to excuse the couple in the garden.  We argue  that they were, rightly, curious, they could not resist and anyway what’s wrong in pursuing self fulfilment by eating the apple of the Tree of Knowledge?  In that respect Adam is “everyman” and Eve is “every woman”.  No wonder we tend to understand  their behaviour. We see ourselves in them. 
And after what I said earlier about the grim goings on around us to-day, we can see that we, like Adam & Eve, are God’s “earth creatures” , dependent on our Creator for everything.  They, however, lived as if the Garden was theirs by right.  We tend to do the same. 
So the moral of the two stories seems to be that though we might share the nature of Adam and Eve, Christ undoubtedly gives us a new ideal. And the importance of Lent is to remind us that by disciplining ourselves now  - and it happens to fall in the midst of a recession  -  we might be able to establish a pattern of living which is more about God-dependency than self –sufficiency. 
However if that is true, it seems to follow that we have to advocate,  especially in Lent,  a type of asceticism.  The desert being a place of abstinence and prayer, whereas the Garden is a place of excess and alienation from God.  Important though it has been in Christian tradition, the way of the desert – for want of a better phrase – is not, at least in my view, a superior form of spirituality and it is in any event impossible to maintain in practice in the early 21st century. We have to eat, drink, celebrate, study and work with others.  Even in Lent, life in the Garden must go on. 
Lent, then, as a teacher at university once told me, is about learning an attitude of heart, a frame of mind, being less self sufficient and more God dependent.  It’s about trying to lose ourselves and finding God wherever we are.  It is the best time of the year to study the Bible.  We need to learn how to resist temptation and self gratification.  And if giving up alcohol for example will help you to do that,  so much the better.   
Of course Christ’s example is still our ideal,  an ideal that can be practised here in Guilsborough or wherever we are.   So let’s make Lent our own internal journey as it were, living somewhere between the excesses of the Garden and the asceticism of the desert so that we may in the words of the collect “ so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal.”   Let’s metaphorically, if not actually, get on our bikes and pedal. 
