Recent Sermon

It's been some time now since my last post as I've been working hard on completing my dissertation. However, I would like to keep posting in this forum from time to time and in that spirit I'd like to share a sermon that I prepared for this past Sunday (1st Sunday in Lent) as part of the ministry I'm now doing in my husband's and my local parish. I'm indebted to David Lose, a scholar who contributes to the site WorkingPreacher.org, for his insights on Pascal.

It's been a gift to be able to stay involved in ministry in this way and I'm very happy to share that in this forum as well.

Blessings,
Padre Chuck

Sermon – 1st Sunday of Lent, 2011

Today’s readings talk a lot about evil. In the Book of Genesis we have the iconic story of Adam & Eve and temptation – in which the serpent exploits their insecurity and plants doubts about God’s trustworthiness, resulting in what’s come to be known forever since as “the fall.”

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus himself is tempted with offers of power, prestige, and the temptation to prove that he is indeed the Son of God.

And so, there’s lots of talk of evil – of sin, the devil, Satan, and temptation. In other words, things we don’t tend to talk about much anymore.

On the one hand, I think that’s probably very appropriate. The gospel isn’t supposed to be about scaring us or filling us with a lot of guilt. It’s rather a message about God and God’s love – how we are God’s children and that Jesus came to set us free to be precisely that – to be who we really are as God’s children.

Still, on the other hand maybe there is some wisdom in the tradition that comes down to us through today’s readings. Perhaps there’s an importance to remembering that there’s something in human nature that can lead us away from God – that tempts us to believe in the illusions that we can completely control every aspect of our lives and that we can achieve total happiness if only we grab hold of some or other particular thing. As the tradition tells us, so to speak, we’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends – usually in a great deal of suffering and misery, both for us and for our neighbors.

So just maybe there is some wisdom in returning to this more challenging strain of our tradition from time to time, especially in seasons like Lent – in returning to the Lord and taking stock of how we’ve failed in our vocation to love God and neighbor, how we can come back to God, and how we can be renewed.

I think that an important part of this work – this coming back to God – is in reimagining the tradition and updating it, with both fidelity and creativity, for our own time and place. For example, I think we often rightly recoil at references to “Satan,” “the devil,” or “evil spirits” when this language is disconnected from our everyday experience of the world, when it doesn’t resonate with how we experience good and evil. In other words, maybe there are some other ways to talk about it that might make more sense for us in our own day and age – ways that describe this reality that we know exists but which can actually be obscured by some of the older language.

Specifically, I’m thinking of two images. The first comes from a recent ceremony that took place in New York City. Just last week, a group of local pastors gathered outside the front doors of a major investment bank to perform an exorcism – yes, an exorcism. For these pastors, as for so many people, the bank was a symbol of the stunning greed of individuals and institutions who have received huge bailouts and yet often continue to exploit the poorest and most vulnerable through their lending and financial policies.

The goal of these pastors – to use some of the older language that comes to us through the tradition – was, indeed, to exorcise the demons that seem to have possessed so many. In other words, we might say that some of the older language of “Satan,” “evil,” and “exorcising demons” – if we take it too literally – might in fact now be distracting us from a deeper truth: namely, that there is a side of us that can easily give into the illusion of achieving absolute security and total, permanent control. As we know, it can happen easily. But, as we also know all too well, the consequences – the misery and injustice these attitudes produce – can literally result in situations we might liken to hell.

The second image I’d like to use comes to us from the Christian mystical tradition. Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French philosopher and mystic tells us that we each have a “God-shaped hole inside us” – a space that can only be filled by God. St. Augustine, the early church father, also says that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”

In other words, there’s a deep part of us that longs for transcendence, meaning, and fulfillment. But, often we try to fill that space with all sorts of things – for example, wealth, power, gadgets, fashions, popularity, approval, or whatever they may be. But, if we’re awake enough to reality, inevitably we discover that none of these things really fill us, often instead leaving us more unsatisfied and less at peace than ever.

Why exactly is this? Why doesn’t this work, despite all of our ongoing attempts? If we think about it, it’s actually kind of silly. We’ve got this part of us that opens out into the transcendent and the eternal – and yet we try over and over to fill it up with things we think will fill it and finally give us the sense of permanence, stability and security we’ve been seeking.

But of course we know that that never really happens. Instead, hopefully with time and with returning to God, over and over, we come to realize that having a transcendent, eternal part of us means, well…having a transcendent and eternal part of us - in other words, a part of us and of our lives that’s that not fully in our control and that perhaps we’re really not supposed to be able to fully wrap our minds around.

Maybe the key, then, is learning to live with this ambiguity, with the inevitability of change, with the presence of uncertainty in our lives. Maybe it’s learning that having a God-shaped space inside us means having a part of us that’s at once both a little beyond our control and yet filled superabundantly with love and grace and goodness. And seeing that when we recognize this truth and let go a little bit it’s precisely then that we can best access that love and goodness and grace – realizing that when we “let go and let God,” we’re not so tied to making everything go our way and, because of that, we’re set free simply to love and be loved, both by God and neighbor.

And so, though we might not think anymore in terms of serpents and exorcisms and temptations, in Lent we’re called to take stock of a deeper truth from the tradition – our chronic but treatable negative tendencies, that we all fall into in our own lives.

To do so, we might ask ourselves, What are some of the ways that I’ve lost sight of God’s love for me? What are the things I try to use to fill the space inside me that I know God alone can fill? How can I challenge myself to let go of my attempts to control too much and let God be God in my life? In other words, how can we all learn this Lent to express our hope for renewal and rebirth in this journey we’re on together from the repentance of these forty days to the joy and celebration of Easter?