Homily: 2nd Sunday of Lent – Cycle C
Most of you, I’m sure, will remember
the game show “Let’s Make a Deal” with Monte Hall. It was a show that defined the genre, in many
ways, and whose popularity extends into its reincarnation today, hosted now by
Wayne Brady. You’ll recall that the
premise of the show was pretty simple: regular folk were gathered into the
studio audience where Monte Hall passed through and chose persons randomly to
offer them prizes and then the chance to trade those prizes for the possibility
of winning prizes that were more valuable.
For example: Monte would ask if anyone
had a pair of eyelash tweezers and would give the first person he saw who had a
pair $100. Then he would proceed to deal
with them, offering them something bigger of unknown value (something, perhaps,
behind one of the big doors). The big
doors could hide prizes as valuable as cars or as worthless as a ride on a
donkey around the parking lot after the show.
Thus, the crux of the show: will the person—who had nothing but a pair
of eyelash tweezers to start with—give up the $100 for a chance to win
something much more valuable, knowing that it could actually be something
worthless; thus leaving them to go home having lost even the eyelash tweezers?
Of course, there was never any way to
know for sure what would be beyond those big doors. Thus, the contestants would have to take a
blind leap of faith that there was something valuable behind the door if they
wanted the chance to take home a more valuable prize. The fact that, more often than not, people
did end up taking home more valuable prizes meant that the show remained wildly
popular for a long time.
The contestants on the show had to use
blind faith if they wanted to win a big prize.
On the surface, that doesn’t seem too different from the deal that God
was offering Abram in today’s first reading.
The beginning of our reading lands us
right in the middle of the conversation, it seems, where God invites Abram outside
of his tent and says: “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so … shall your descendents be.” Perhaps our natural reaction is to think,
“Abram would have seen thousands of stars… that would be a pretty impressive
promise.” When we keep reading, however,
we realize that it wasn’t at night that God proposed this promise, but it was
the middle of the day, because later in the reading it describes the day
approaching sunset, indicating that the earlier part of the conversation must
have been in the daytime. Abram,
therefore, couldn’t see the stars that God was asking him to count: rather, they
were “hidden” behind the “big door” of the sky.
So, when the reading says that “Abram
put his faith in the Lord”, was it blind faith?
I don’t think so. You see, on
“Let’s Make a Deal” the contestants couldn’t know what was behind the door and,
thus, were “blind” to whether or not it hid a valuable prize. Abram, on the other hand, knew the vast
quantity of stars that were out there: he had seen them. And so, when God promised him that his
descendants would be as numerous as the stars, even though at that moment he
couldn’t begin to count them (because he couldn’t see them), he knew that they
were there and so his faith was not blind.
It’s as if God had said to him: “Just as you know that there is a vast
quantity of stars out there, even though now you cannot see them, so, too,
there is a vast quantity of descendants that will follow you, even though now
you cannot see them. And just as sure as
you are that the stars will appear after the sun sets, so will these numerous
descendants of yours appear after the sun has set on your life.”
This, my brothers and sisters, is the
essence of what faith is. In the Letter
to the Hebrews it says that “faith is the realization of things hoped for, and
the evidence of things not seen.” Faith
is “evidence”, it says. Therefore, when
“Abram put his faith in the Lord” it wasn’t just a good feeling that he had,
but rather a conviction that supplied to him the evidence that his eyes could
not give him. “I cannot see my
descendants,” he might have thought to himself, “but Faith convicts me that
what the Lord says is true; thus, I will place my trust in him.”
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus’
disciples ask him to “increase their faith”, to which Jesus famously responds:
“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry
tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you”, indicating
that he wanted them to have confidence in the faith that they already had. Nonetheless, Jesus
does offer his handpicked leaders—Peter, John, and James—the opportunity to
grow the faith (that is, the “evidence of things not seen”) within them when he
takes them up on the mountain and allows them to see him in his glory in the
transfiguration. He permits this because
he knows that they will have their faith “shaken” when he is arrested,
condemned, and crucified. Faith will
tell them that death is not the end for Jesus, but rather divine glory is; and
so they can persevere, even though all seems to have been lost. Faith, strengthened by the experience of the
transfiguration, supplied the evidence that their eyes could not see.
My brothers and sisters, faith is an
undeserved gift from God that supplies us with the conviction that what God has
revealed to us is true and that what God has promised to us will be ours. Faith was given to us at baptism. This is why, in the Rite of Baptism, just
after the minister asks the name of the one to be baptized, he asks the one to
be baptized, “What do you ask of God’s Church” and the one to be baptized can
reply: “Faith”; because, in a very real way, baptism infuses faith into the one
who is baptized.
Just as the outward experience of
seeing Jesus in his glory gave the Apostles the inward assurance of Jesus’
resurrection, so too the outward evidence of baptism ought to give us the
inward assurance of the truth that Faith reveals to us: that we are now
citizens of heaven who await the second coming of Jesus, our savior, who will
transform our mortal bodies to be like his glorified body and, thus, welcome us
to enter with him into our true and eternal home.
By our sinfulness and our lack of
diligence in our spiritual lives Faith is dimmed within us. Lent, therefore, is our time to clear away
all that leads us into sin and to restore our focus on the spiritual life so
that the light of Faith will continue to supply us with the evidence we need to
trust in God’s promises. The Sacrament
of Reconciliation along with the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, and
giving alms are the tools that we use to achieve this end. Let us, therefore, my brothers and sisters,
rededicate ourselves today to using these tools to their fullest; so that, on
Easter Sunday, we may celebrate knowing that the greatest prize of all time has
already been won for us through Christ Jesus our Lord: the fullness of eternal
life.
Given
at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February 21st, 2016
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