“If you wish, you can make me clean.” This ought to be the prayer of all of us, I think. Does God wish to make us clean? Of course. But do we acknowledge his ability to do so? Sometimes we are so saddened by our sins that we feel we are beyond redemption. Our brokenness stares us in the face time and time again and accuses us of being unworthy of the attention of God. But the fact remains: If God wishes, he certainly can make us clean. All we have to do is let him, to believe in his power to do it, and rejoice in his desire to do so.
Tag: sin
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Advent Penance Service
I know a lot of people who get depressed this time of year. Probably you do too. Many people are missing loved ones who are far away from home, or who have passed away. Some of my friends have a touch of seasonal affective disorder, and so they are depressed when we don’t see the sun as much on cloudy days like today, or when it gets dark so early as it does during this time. Some people also look back on another year almost finished, and they lament what could have been, or what actually has been. If there is any reason for being a little depressed at this time of year, it often seems like the joy that other people are experiencing during the Christmas season makes the pain even worse.
So for whatever reason, many of us experience darkness during this season, when so many seem to be rejoicing in light. In essence, that’s what Advent is all about. The season of Advent recognizes the darkness of the world – the physical darkness, sure, but more than that the darkness of a world steeped in sin, a world marred by war and terrorism, an economy decimated by greed, peacefulness wounded by hatred, crime and dangers of all sorts. This season of Advent also recognizes the darkness of our own lives – sin that has not been confessed, relationships broken by self-interest, personal growth tabled by laziness and fear.
Advent says that God meets all that darkness head-on. We don’t cower in the darkness; neither do we try to cover over the light. Instead we put the lamp on a lampstand and shine the light into every dark corner of our lives and our world. Isaiah prophesies about this Advent of light: “The light of the moon will be like that of the sun, and the light of the sun will be seven times greater [like the light of seven days].” This is a light that changes everything. It doesn’t just expose what’s imperfect and cause shame, instead it burns the light of God’s salvation into everything and everyone it illumines, making all things new.
Our Church makes the light present in many ways – indeed, it is the whole purpose of the Church to shine a bright beacon of hope into a dark and lonely world. We do that in symbolic ways: the progressive lighting of the Advent wreath symbolizes the world becoming lighter and lighter as we approach the birthday of our Savior. But the Church doesn’t leave it simply in the realm of symbol or theory. We are here tonight to take on that darkness and shine the light of Christ into every murky corner of our lives. The Sacrament of Penance reconciles us with those we have wronged, reconciles us with the Church, and reconciles us most importantly with our God. The darkness of broken relationships is completely banished with the Church’s words of absolution. Just like the Advent calendars we’ve all had reveal more and more with every door we open, so the Sacrament of Penance brings Christ to fuller view within us whenever we let the light of that sacrament illumine our darkness.
And so that’s why we’re here tonight. We receive the light by being open to it and accepting it, tonight in a sacramental way. Tonight, as we did at our baptism, we reject the darkness of sin and we “look east” as the hymn says, to accept the light of Christ which would dawn in our hearts. Tonight we lay before our God everything that is broken in us, we hold up all of our darkness to be illumined by the light of God’s healing mercy.
Each of the days of Advent, we have been praying the “O Antiphons” which the Church gives us in Evening prayer each day. Yesterday’s “O Antiphon” spoke of the light we celebrate tonight: “O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.”
Tonight, our sacrament disperses the gloomy clouds of our sin and disperses the dark shadows of death that lurk within us. The darkness in and around us is no match for the light of Christ. As we approach Christmas, that light is ever nearer. Jesus is, as the Gospel of John tells us, “the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
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Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent: O Radiant Dawn
There’s a little more light today. As we get toward these last days of Advent, we find ourselves in a time when more light is beginning to shine. All of the candles on our Advent wreath are lit, and the only thing that can make it brighter is the coming of our God in all his glory, dawning brightly on the earth.
Today’s “O Antiphon” tells us as much. Today we hear “O Radiant Dawn,” and the antiphon for Evening prayer is this: “O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.”
This light is the source of the joy of which Zephaniah the prophet speaks today. He tells the broken people Israel that God has forgiven their sins, and that he continues to walk among them, which should be cause enough to remove their fear. That enduring presence among the people Israel, of course, is a foretaste of the enduring presence that we experience in the Incarnation of Christ.
Mary and Elizabeth celebrate that light in today’s Gospel. Mary’s greeting of Elizabeth is an act of hospitality, and Elizabeth’s welcome, along with the Baptist’s reaction in his mother’s womb, is an act of faith. That faith incredibly affected the salvation of the whole world.
And all of this light continues to shine on our sometimes-dark world. A world grown dark and cold in sin is visited by its creator, and that world is changed forever. The darkness can never now be permanent. Sin and death no longer have the last word for us, because that was never God’s will for us. We have hope for eternal life because our God eagerly desires us to return to him and be one with him.
And so we pray, Come, O Radiant Dawn, shatter the darkness that sometimes reigns in our cynical world. Give us the warmth of your light to warm our hearts grown cold with sin. Shine on all who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly and do not delay!
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Monday of the Second Week of Advent
What the Pharisees were missing in this gospel story was that there is something that paralyzes a person much worse than any physical thing, and that something, of course, is sin. And if you’ve ever found yourself caught up in a pattern of sin in your life, of if you’ve ever struggled with any kind of addiction, or if a sin you have committed has ever made you too ashamed to move forward in a relationship or ministry or responsibility, then you know the paralysis this poor man was suffering on that stretcher. Sin is that insidious thing that ensnares us and renders us helpless, because we cannot defeat it no matter how hard we try. That’s just the way sin works on us.
But it’s not supposed to be that way. We cannot just raise our hands and say, hey, I’m only human, because nothing makes us less human than sin. Jesus, in addition to being divine, of course, was the most perfectly human person that ever lived, and he never sinned. So from this we should certainly take away that sin does not make us human, and that sin is not part of human nature.
And it doesn’t have to stay that way. We’re not supposed to stay bound up on our stretchers forever. We’re supposed to get ourselves to Jesus, or if need be, like the man in the gospel today, get taken to him by friends, because it is only Jesus that can free us. That’s why the church prays, in the prayer of absolution in the Sacrament of Penance, “May God give you pardon and peace.”
Freed from the bondage of our sins by Jesus who is our peace, we can stand up with the lame man from the gospel and go on our way, rejoicing in God. We can rejoice in our deliverance with Isaiah who proclaimed, “Those whom the LORD has ransomed will return and enter Zion singing, crowned with everlasting joy; They will meet with joy and gladness, sorrow and mourning will flee.”
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Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time
Paul’s lament has got to be so familiar to all of us, I think. Most of us really want to be better people, to live the right way, to give witness to Christ in our daily lives. And much of the time, I think we accomplish that. But there’s always that downfall in all of us, that pattern of sin, that set of circumstances or group of people who bring us back to the nastiness that is the evil in our own lives. And try as we might to do good, there it is, close at hand, as St. Paul tells us in our first reading. There seems to be no end in sight; no way for us to actually be good people. But all we need is the desire, and, as he also tells us, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. That is the mercy and grace that is extended to us in the Sacrament of Penance. The more we desire it and approach it, the more help it will be to us. We don’t have to be good all on our own, we can’t. But, thanks be to God, we don’t have to.
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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Theologian Robert Barron tells about an interreligious dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists. At one point, one of the Buddhists said to him, “Why is that obscene image on every wall in your buildings?” He was, of course, referring to the Cross. The Buddhist explained that it would be considered a mockery in his religion to venerate the very thing that killed their leader. The truth is, of course, that it is obscene. It is strange, and Barron wrote a whole book about it called The Strangest Way.
And we all must have thought about this at one time or another. Why is it that God could only accomplish the salvation of the world through the horrible, brutal, and lonely death of his Son? That question goes right to the root of our faith. We know that we had been alienated from God, separated by a vast chasm of sin and death. But into this obscene world, Jesus becomes incarnate; he is born right into the midst of all that sin and death. He walks among us, and goes through all of the sorrows and pains of life and death right with along with us. If sin and death have been the obscenities that have kept us from God, then God was going to use those very things to bring us back. Jesus comes into our world and dies our death because God wants us to know that there is no place we can go, no experience we can ever have that is outside of God’s reach.
Today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, also called the Triumph of the Cross, was celebrated very early in the Church’s history. In the fourth century St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in search of the holy places of Christ’s life. She razed the Temple of Aphrodite, which tradition held was built over the Savior’s tomb, and her son built the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher over the tomb. During the excavation, workers found three crosses. Legend has it that the one on which Jesus died was identified when its touch healed a dying woman. The cross immediately became an object of veneration.
About this great feast, St. Andrew of Crete wrote: “Had there been no cross, Christ could not have been crucified. Had there been no cross, life itself could not have been nailed to the tree. And if life had not been nailed to it, there would be no streams of immortality pouring from Christ’s side, blood and water for the world’s cleansing. The legal bond of our sin would not be cancelled, we should not have attained our freedom, we should not have enjoyed the fruit of the tree of life and the gates of paradise would not stand open. Had there been no cross, death would not have been trodden underfoot, nor hell despoiled.”
Because of the Cross, all of our sadness has been overcome. Disease, pain, death, and sin – none of these have ultimate power over us. Just as Jesus suffered on that Cross, so we too may have to suffer in the trials that this life brings us. But Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, a place where there will be no more sadness, death or pain, a place where we can live in the radiant light of God for all eternity. Because of the Cross, we have hope, a hope that can never be taken away.
The Cross is indeed a very strange way to save the world, but the triumph that came into the world through the One who suffered on the cross is immeasurable. As our Gospel reminds us today, all of this happened because God so loved the world.
We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
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Saturday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings
I think the readings from St. Paul’s letter to Timothy the last couple of days have been so wonderfully challenging. Today, in our first reading, he admits his sinfulness, relying on God to save him: he says, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Of these I am the foremost.” This, as anyone who has struggled with addiction will tell you, is a very important first step. Until we admit to what is dogging us, we will never be able to recover from it.
And sin does dog us, it is an addiction that will drag us down from our relationship with God and convince us that we are unworthy of salvation. But, thank God, we couldn’t be more wrong. We, like St. Paul, merely have to admit that we cannot break free of it all on our own, and trust in God’s mercy. St. Paul says he is the foremost of sinners. Well, so am I. And I hope you’re ready to say that you are too. Because there is not other way to be saved.
If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, how can we ever find salvation? Well this is the question of our time, I think. So many of us feel uncomfortable admitting sin or confronting it. But if we are not sinners, then we don’t need a Savior. That might explain the empty places in our church pews, but are we really ready to take that risk? Are we really ready to think that our eternal life is something we can take care of on our own? I know I’m not ready to go there. The consequences for being wrong about that are just too horrifying.
Now I’m not saying we are all mass murderers or something horrible like that. But we all have those times when we’ve turned away from God in little or small ways, times when we have rejected his Lordship or even his love. And when we’ve done that, we have sinned. There is no other word for it. But the good news, as St. Paul says to us today, is that Christ came to save sinners.
There’s a wonderful little prayer that is deeply rooted in the Eastern churches that helps combat this attitude that sin does not affect us. It’s called the Jesus Prayer, and it’s meant to be prayed contemplatively, almost as a mantra. I find it great for calming me down in anxious moments, and focusing myself when I am scattered. It takes about two minutes to learn it and you’ll remember it the rest of your life. So here it is, the Church’s ancient prayer for sinners, the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Amen.”
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Wednesday of the Ninteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Living the Christian life never means that we just calmly except anything another person does. But we do need to follow a certain procedure in dealing with those sins against us. It’s not right, for example, when we are wronged, or when we perceive we are wronged, to immediately email everyone we know and slander them. Nor is it okay for us disciples to talk about a brother or sister in the Lord behind their back. When someone wrongs us, we owe it to them to give them the opportunity to make amends. We bring the matter to their attention in charity, and open up a pathway to forgiveness. If they choose not to take it, we can escalate the issue as our Lord describes in today’s Gospel, but we never have the right to ruin a person’s good name without cause. Christ has given the keys to forgiveness to the Church as a gift. But that means that we who are the Church have a responsibility to forgive, just as we have been forgiven.
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Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel is perhaps a bit more vivid for me this week, because on Sunday I spent time weeding the side yard at my mother’s house. It’s not a task I really look forward to, but it is kind of good in that when you finish a job like that, you can look at it and see something good happened. There’s a sense of accomplishment. When Father John and Father Jim and I had lunch yesterday, we talked about what we did over the weekend. Father Jim joked that the difference between a weed and a plant was where it was growing.
That’s the kind of question the disciples had for Jesus today. Jesus had just told them several parables about the kingdom of God, and this one didn’t get read in the Gospels the last few days. So we have the explanation, but not the parable. You can check it out in the 13th chapter of Matthew. The story basically went that the landowner sowed good seed in the field, but when it started to grow, weeds came up too. His laborers asked him about it and he said, “An enemy has done this.” So they wanted to pull up the weeds, but the master said to let them grow together until harvest time, lest in pulling them up they also accidentally pull up the good plants. They could then be pulled up and burnt at harvest time.
Now I think a good gardener might quibble with the analogy. But that’s not the point. The point is good news, and the good news is this: however much we may resemble the weeds during our life, Jesus gives us the time to grow into much lovelier plants during our lives. He doesn’t blot us out of the book of life for one transgression. But the warning is that we only have so much time until the harvest. If we are going to turn to the God who sowed us and provide good fruit, we need to do it now. If we wait until the harvest, it may well be too late. Our God gives us the freedom to choose to be the good seeds in the field of the world, blessed are we who choose to grow that way.
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Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
A perfectly respectable reading of the whole Exodus story is the allegorical one. In this reading, the Egyptian army, its chariots and charioteers and even its horses, symbolize the forces of evil and sin. God loved the Israelites, who are God’s chosen people, and in a sense, you and me, so much that he rescued them from their abject slavery in Egypt, a slavery that we all have to the forces of sin. Anyone who has struggled with an addiction or any pattern of sin in their lives, can tell you how sinfulness is really its own kind of slavery. God leads his chosen people away from sin back to the Promised Land, the heaven he promises us all. On the way, the forces of evil are drowned in the abyss of the Red Sea, which symbolizes the abyss between this world of sin and the Promised Land of heaven.
I like this allegorical reading because we are all pretty well removed from the ancient history of the Israelites and the Egyptians. But the slavery that we all have to sin at one point or another in our lives is anything but ancient history. God intends a very real exodus for all his chosen people, and he continues to do the work of salvation in and for all of us every day. All of us who are sister and brother and mother to the Lord Jesus, all of his family, are too important to be left behind in slavery to sin.
All we have to do is follow the Lord through the desert of purification, through the abyss of whatever the Red Sea looks like for us, into the Promised Land. And it won’t be easy. If the desert doesn’t discourage us, the abyss will outright frighten us. But the thought of being back at the fleshpots of our Egypt of sin should easily be enough to keep us all on the journey to get where we’re supposed to be. We too might sing to the Lord for he is gloriously triumphant. The horse and chariot of our own sinfulness has been cast into the sea.
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