(Side note: I'll be making the Cursillo weekend this coming weekend, so I won't be posting a homily. Perhaps, however, I'll think to post some reflections about my experience. Please pray for me and the men making the Cursillo weekend with me!)
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Homily:
3rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle B
There’s a certain danger in the familiar. Familiarity tends to lull us into
complacency. This isn’t necessarily a
bad thing, but complacency can leave us vulnerable to being caught off-guard by
things. Familiarity also leads to
routine. As humans, we are creatures of
habit and we like when things are predictable.
Thus, we have a “morning routine” in which we repeat pretty much the
same acts every morning so that we don’t have to think about what we need to do
to get up and get on with our day. The
problem with this kind of familiarity is that the surrounding world quickly
fades back into the landscape and no longer registers in our consciousness as
something of which to take account.
I’ve suffered from this myself. When you travel to Saint Meinrad, where I
went to seminary, there’s an approximately 8-mile strip of Indiana Route 62
that you must navigate after exiting Interstate 64 coming from the east. In my first years at the seminary, this was
one of the most enjoyable parts of the trip as I passed in close proximity to
fields and farmhouses, some complete with hens pecking around in the front
yard. After six years, however, this
strip of road became so familiar that I practically could navigate it with my
eyes closed. At times I experienced that
I had passed some of the “milestones” along the way without having acknowledged
that I had seen them. Because I was so
familiar with the road, the surrounding landscape no longer entered my
consciousness. I think most of us can
recognize this experience in our own lives: in our commute to work, our schools
and classrooms, our offices and office buildings, in our neighborhoods, and
often too in our relationships things become familiar and thus fade out of our
consciousness.
In our first reading today, we heard the recounting of the
Ten Commandments. For many of us, I
suspect that listening to these being read is kind of like making that drive
down Route 62: as it goes on we might stop and think to ourselves, “Wait, did
he/she say the 6th one? I
don’t remember hearing it.” For many of
us, the Ten Commandments are perhaps so familiar that they’ve become “part of
the landscape” and no longer impact our daily consciousness.
The ancient Jews also fell into this trap of
familiarity. They had had the Law for many
years and most people were very familiar with it and with its demands. Thus, they no longer thought about the Law,
but rather had worked their lives around it.
So much so that they turned the Temple Cult—that is, the sacrificial
offerings that were prescribed by the Law—into a business for profit.
Then Jesus breaks into the scene and disrupts the
familiar. He sees the way that Satan,
the father of lies, had distorted the truth of what the Temple Cult was
supposed to represent: man, in a special relationship with God, offering
sacrifices both in worship and homage of the all-powerful creator of the
universe and in atonement for offenses against Him. Offerings, meant to restore and maintain that
special relationship, had been distorted into cold demands and business
transactions and that is what Jesus was driving out. By turning over the tables of the familiar,
Jesus was hoping to reawaken an awareness of the true relationship to which God
had called them.
The zeal with which Jesus desired that the Temple—his
Father’s house—be free from defilement is the same zeal that he has for our
hearts. He wants to turn over the tables
of the familiar in our hearts and drive out any distorted images of self, of
God, and of what God asks of us so that we can once again see the beauty of the
relationship to which he has called us: both collectively as the People of God
and individually as adopted sons and daughters.
The difference between Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple and his cleansing
of our hearts is that he cannot just burst into our hearts without permission—for
that would violate our dignity. Rather,
he must wait for us to invite him in so as to shed light on anything that is
untrue, that is unholy in our hearts and our lives.
My brothers and sisters, if all we have done this Lent is
take up our old familiar practices then we have little more to hope for when we
arrive at Easter Sunday than a feeling of relief for not having to maintain
that discipline any longer. The
challenge we have before us today is to make this Lent somehow different by
allowing Christ into our hearts, by exposing to him all of those aspects of
ourselves that we are not proud of—the ways, perhaps, that we have become
complacent in following his commandments, most especially to worship him alone—and
by cooperating with him in the hard work of driving out all that isn’t pure,
that isn’t true from our lives.
Now, Jesus knows that this isn’t easy for us. He knows that the world is constantly going
to pull us towards the comfort of familiarity.
And so he doesn’t expect us to do it all at once. He simply asks that we begin. A simple way to begin this work of
conversion, that is, of opening our hearts more and more to Christ, is to
follow these four steps: pray, listen, act, repeat.
Pray: First we must
pray that God will help us to examine our consciences and identify those things
that need to be driven out. As he
reveals them to us, we need to pray that he will reveal to us some way that we
can act to overcome that disposition or attitude in our lives. For example: perhaps we recognize that we
struggle with selfishness. And so we
pray that God will reveal to us someone with whom we can practice being
selfless in the coming week.
Listen: Once we’ve
identified our vice and asked God to show us how we can overcome it, we need to
listen—not just in the silence of our prayer time, but also as we go through
our day—for God to reveal to us how, in the concrete circumstances of our day,
we are to act to drive out this vice from our hearts. In other words, we listen for that little
voice saying to us “Wait! Don’t be selfish here!”
Act: If we are
sincere in our prayer and attentive in our daily living, we will soon see how
it is that God has asked us to give of ourselves in a way that overcomes our
vice. It will click like a light bulb
going on. When this happens we are
called to respond. It usually will be
unexpected, but when we respond to these intentionally prayed-for promptings of
the Holy Spirit, our hearts slowly change and we become more and more open to
allowing Christ to dwell in us and to direct our daily lives.
Repeat: Once you’ve
responded then the hard part truly begins because maintaining this practice
over a lifetime, without allowing yourself to become complacent because of
familiarity, is truly a challenging task.
It is a task, however, that will make you a saint.
My brothers and sisters, we can only overcome bad habits by
cultivating good ones and if we try to do it ourselves, we are bound to
fail. If we let Christ direct the way
that we cultivate these good habits, however, then our efforts are not only
going to be sustained but they’re going to bring joy to our lives as well.
And so, if your Lent has gotten a slow start, don’t worry… because
there’s an app for that: pray, listen, act, repeat. My brothers and sisters, let Christ turn over
the familiar in your hearts so that the joy of the Resurrection—the joy of true
liberation from the mundane familiarity of the world—may be yours this Easter.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – March, 7th & 8th, 2015
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