Monday, February 15, 2016

Checking your reality

Homily: 1st Sunday of Lent – Cycle C
          An African Impala is a grazing antelope that stands, on average, about four feet tall at the shoulder.  As suggested by its size, it is quite nimble, but also powerful.  Impalas have been known to jump up to 10 feet in the air (that’s the height of a regulation basketball hoop, by the way) and can long jump up to 30 feet (which is world-record length for human long jumpers).  Because of this, you might think that it would be quite hard to contain an African Impala.  Well, not really.  You see, an African Impala has a bit of an “Achilles’ heel” in that it will not jump unless it can see where it is that it is going to land; and so a solid fence of about five or six feet is generally enough to pen in an Impala.
          That seems silly, right?  Well, for us, sure.  We can look around and say “Hey, that’s a fence; usually there is more of the same on the other side and so, if I am standing on something solid and I jump it, I should have something solid on which to land on the other side.”  An Impala, however, is not intelligent in that way—it can’t reason like we do—and so it can only go on what its instinct tells it; and its instinct says, “Hey, if you’re going to jump 10 feet in the air, you better be sure that there’s something solid on which to land on the other side.  Otherwise it’s ‘game over’ for you.”  It can’t know the reality that it can’t see; and so, in spite of its impressive power, it can get trapped by a simple fence.
          As human beings, we can see beyond the empirical: that is, beyond those things that we can see, touch, taste, hear, and smell.  In other words, we have the ability to reason abstractly about situations and find solutions that other animals would not be able to find.  This is a great gift that God gave to us when he made us “in his image”.  Because of this, how we conform ourselves (or fail to conform ourselves) to reality has moral consequences.  We may blame the African Impala for “being stupid” because it gets trapped by a fence that it can easily jump over, but it could not choose whether or not it would be “stupid” (that is, “unintelligent”) and so applying a value judgment (that is, to say that it was either “good” or “bad”) is inappropriate.  We, however, are intelligent creatures; and so if one of us was penned in by a fence that we could easily hop over, we could rightfully blame that person for “being stupid”, that is, “unintelligent”, because he or she has the ability to know about reality beyond what the senses immediately perceive.  Now, when we apply this logic to the reality of what God has revealed to us, we come to know what it means to sin.
          Sin, using the line of thinking that we’ve just been using, is our deliberate refusal to conform ourselves to reality: both the reality that our natural senses present to us as well as the reality that God has revealed to us.  For example, let’s go back to the first sin.  Adam and Eve were in the Garden and God told them that they could eat of any tree in the Garden, except the one in the center of the Garden; and that if they ate the fruit of the tree in the center of the Garden they would die.  No problem, right?  There’s plenty of fruit in the Garden and so there’s no need to consider the fruit from the tree in the center of the Garden.  That’s when Satan comes and tempts Eve.  He challenges Eve to question the reality that God revealed to her: that if she ate of the fruit of that tree—fruit which looked pretty much like any other fruit in the Garden—she would die.  Eve, relying only on what she perceived by her natural senses, ignored the reality revealed to her by God—that, in spite of its looks, and in spite of what Satan told her about it, eating of that fruit would be deadly—and thus she condemned the human race to death when she took the fruit and ate it.
          This, of course, is the same scene playing out in the Gospel reading today.  Jesus, having just been baptized by John in the Jordan River, is driven by the Holy Spirit into the desert where he would pray and fast for 40 days.  At the end of that time, Satan comes to tempt him to conform himself to three false realities.  First is that power is given to man so that he can satisfy all of his bodily desires.  This is the temptation to change rocks into bread.  Second is that man’s capacity to worship is meant for our own gain.  This is the temptation to worship Satan so as to gain power over the nations of the world.  Third is that man’s status in God’s eyes makes God his servant, at his beck and call.  This is the temptation to put God’s promises to the test (saying, in effect, “Watch, I’ll make God do something for me.”).
          Jesus contradicts the proposed false realities by naming the true realities that God the Father had revealed.  Against the first temptation Jesus replies, “It is written, ‘One does not live on bread alone’”, meaning: “Power is not given to man so that he might satisfy his bodily desires”.  Against the second temptation Jesus replies, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve’”, meaning: “Worship is what we owe to God, because of his mercy to us, not as a way to get something for ourselves.”  Finally, against the third temptation (in which Satan tries to use Jesus’ tactic of quoting Scripture) Jesus replies, “It also says, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test’”, meaning: “The promises of God are not a license to be stupid, but a divine guarantee of protection in trial.”  In responding in this way, Jesus not only conforms himself to the reality that that he perceives through his natural senses, but more importantly he conforms himself to the reality that God the Father has revealed; and, thus, in stark contrast to Eve, he keeps himself from sin.
          My brothers and sisters, this Gospel reading is set before us on this First Sunday of Lent to remind us that Lent is a yearly “reality check” of sorts.  It is a time in which we are called to examine our lives in order to see whether or not we are living according to the reality both that our natural senses perceive and that God has revealed to us, or if we have given ourselves over to a false reality that Satan has presented to us.  Sin is choosing that false reality over the true one.  If we find that we are living according to a false reality, Lent is our time to turn away from that reality and to turn ourselves back to the true reality.
          And this shouldn’t be scary!  Remember, the fence beyond which the African Impala cannot see presents a false reality that there is nothing on the other side; and so it becomes trapped by conforming itself to that reality.  The true reality—that the same solid ground on which it is standing is waiting for it on the other side of the fence—would actually free the Impala; because then it could, with confidence, leap over the fence into freedom.  When we acknowledge the false realities by which we have been living, we then see that they have been confining us and, thus, we can leap beyond them into freedom.
          And so, how do we check our reality?  The same way that Jesus did: by knowing the Word of God as revealed to us in Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church.  If how you are living your life does not conform to the realities that God has revealed to us both in Sacred Scripture and in the Tradition that has been handed down to us through the Apostles and their successors, then you are living (in part, at least) in a false reality: a fence, set up by Satan, to keep you from experiencing the true freedom that God desires you to know.  Lent, my brothers and sisters, is our time to acknowledge those fences for what they are—false realities that trap us into death—so that we can be prepared to be renewed into the truest reality of them all: that we who have been baptized into the death of Jesus have risen with him into new life; the very same life that he now lives and that we encounter under sacramental signs here in this Eucharist.
          Let us, then, take up this good work of Lent; so that on Easter Sunday we may truly glory in the reality of our Lord’s victory over sin and death and enjoy once again the true freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February 13th & 14th, 2016

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