Well, the trap is to think Lent puts a damper on things. You’ve got to deny yourself. But you could say you’ve got to affirm yourself or, as it said on the Temple at Delphi, ‘Know Thyself’. Don’t worry so much about the alcohol or chocolate because, if you’re honest, giving that up for Lent is only a way of trying to force yourself to do what you failed to achieve in ‘Dry January’. 

I’m going to talk about self-identity two weeks on Thursday. But this Thursday I’m doing sex. Well, not so much doing it as trying to work out a thoroughly modern Christian approach to a subject that the Church has messed up for centuries. Starting with the Bible, then Christian Tradition, the 20th Century sexual revolution, and then asking the questions: is it alright to be Christian and gay? To have sex outside marriage? To have one night stands? To be in polyamorous relationships? To have fun rather than love? To look at porn? And I’m going to propose that instead of saying no to everything, we say yes to these things as a base point and then critique that position with the values each of us hold as Christians. Not what the Church says, but our own personal Christian value set.

I think we have to do this because of what I quoted last week: ‘…the Church systematically violates the moral intuitions of most of its natural constituency.’