It’s the time of the year for a sermon.

It is easy for Christians to feel guilty in Holy Week – when the betrayal, abandonment, and death of Christ is recalled. It is easy to make good people feel guilty.

Many people think the church is only good at making people feel guilty. Certainly the church has been quite adept at that.

Guilt is only of any worth when it causes us to turn around. Feeling guilty isn’t what matters. It is the preparedness to change, the turning around however many times I betray the claims of love and high ideals, that is the point of Holy Week.

Guilt falls away when we make the triumph of love our own.

Quite a short sermon!

On Monday I kept my follow up appointment at Guy’s Hospital. It had been a while coming but there was no urgency. I arrived early and was seen promptly by the consultant physiotherapist. A student was in attendance. I was questioned, listened to, and examined for about half an hour. My condition (chronic lower back problems) was explained simply and clearly. Within two hours of getting home I had an email summarising everything that had happened and detailing what I am to do.

Everything I hear and read about the British National Health Service via the media is negative. My experience is positive.

I wonder what it is like to work for an organisation which continually gets a ‘bad press’? Those working for the NHS who I met did not seem particularly downcast.

Then again I shouldn’t be surprised. I worked for and am still part of the Church of England. It has had and still gets a terrible press!

St Agnes Kennington Park, where I go to church, thrives. And so does the neighbouring parish St Mary Newington. I’m told it’s the same story at St Mark’s just up the road at the Oval.

I am not suggesting that what I read and hear in the media is not true. I am in London and the experience of the NHS may be different elsewhere. The Church of England may be in dire straits in the country. What I am saying is that the negative reports are by no means the whole truth.

Thank goodness for young neighbours and great nephews.

I had to get a new television.  Mine was deemed ‘old’ by the BBC and unfit for ‘Iplayer’ or ‘Netflix’. It was not simply a matter of unplugging the old and plugging in the new. Who knew that the television was in some way connected to the box in the study that makes my mobile telephone work? It was. Then the new one had to be ‘programmed’.

Fortunately one of my great nephews came to Sunday lunch and offered to come back the next day and sort it all out. He did. It involved a good deal of work little of which I understood. I gave him dinner. It was the least I could do.

British Telecom have ‘Gone Digital’, whatever that means and sent me a new ‘box’. Going Digital also involved plugging and unplugging ‘systems’ and entering numbers. Fortunately I have a young neighbour who helps with my garden and who understands these things. 

He came round and we telephoned British Telecom on ‘speaker’. My friend did the talking and answering the, to me, incomprehensible questions. The telephone is almost sorted. No home line;  just the mobile and the television.

Thank goodness for the young!

I thought back wistfully of my childhood when there was a telephone on a wall in the cold back hall. You wound a handle, lifted the receiver and a voice would say, ‘Number please.’ You gave the number and the voice would say, ‘I will put you through.’ And that was it. Of course sometimes one couldn’t get through. We survived.

Sometimes there is conversation and a general feeling of camaraderie in the men’s changing room at the Castle centre following a swimming session. On Monday, having done my 500 meters, I sat, pausing before the business of getting dressed and reassembled.

“How was that?” One of my fellow swimmers asked. We went on to discuss the benefits of swimming. He then suggested I take up yoga. I told him that I had – ‘chair yoga’.

“Say that again,” a younger man asked and I repeated,  ‘chair yoga.’

“How do you spell that?” And I spelt it. The young man laughed and said that he had thought I was referring to some particular Eastern variety of yoga. I said that the yoga I did involved me sitting on, beside, or behind a chair and that it was probably my New Zealand accent that misled him.

A general discussion followed about countries of origin and yoga. Among our number were men from Nigeria, Romania, Eritrea, Japan, Martinique and Sierra Leone; and some white Brits as well. We were all Londoners living near Elephant and Castle.

The conversation went on to problems of backs, knees and symptoms of unknown cause. We touched on the efficiency or not of Southwark Council. There was a brief comment about the American political situation and by the time I left it had moved on to football.

I wonder if the same thing happens in the women’s changing room or in most changing rooms.

Today is the first day of Lent for most Western Christians. Lent is that time of prayer, fasting and alms giving which precedes Holy Week and Easter. In my childhood it was quite usual to ask or be asked, “What are you giving up for Lent?” It was often chocolates, or sweets. We had Lent boxes to put some of our pocket money in each week. That was our alms giving. I can’t remember what we did for prayer.

In adulthood I remember once visiting my mother and, mistakenly, picking up her glass of gin and tonic instead of mine (it was after six) and taking a sip. It was only tonic, no gin at all. When I commented on this she said, “Of course not, it’s Lent!” She did not publicise her Lenten fast.

Recently I’ve become aware of how general fasting is in the world’s religions not only in Judaism and Islam but also in Buddhism and Hinduism. I shouldn’t be surprised. While so much attention is focused on the differences and divisions in our world there is a great deal that we have in common.

And perhaps we are being joined in out Lenten fast by a multitude of our secular friends who are on a diet to lose weight. I was frequently reminded at theological college that you must not separate mind body and spirit. We may end up this Easter fitter on every front.