Lent 3 - Spiritual Starvation

Today’s readings are filled with images of hunger and thirst. We hear about the Israelites wandering the desert who have become so thirsty that they begin to lose faith in Moses. They demand water from Moses and begin to wonder if they will die. In the Gospel we encounter Jesus who is tired and thirsty from a long journey and meets a woman at the well where they both come to parch their thirst. We hear how the disciples saw Jesus and were concerned that he was hungry and wonder why no one has brought him food.

These images of hunger and thirst resonate in Lent. Most of us have given something up. Be it meat, chocolate, coffee or smoking, we have given something up that we hunger for. More acutely, in this time of penitence and self examination we hunger spiritually. We want to hear uplifting words from God. We thirst for the images of Jesus feeding the multitudes, of blessing the little children, of Jesus raising the dead. Instead, we hear of the challenges in Jesus’ own life and the challenges he put to his followers during Lent.

This hunger lasts for 40 days of the year. God knows that we can humble ourselves and fast for 40 days each year, because this abstinence will make us grow hungrier for God. The church limits our penitential seasons and days, because the Church knows what happens if we are hungry to long. The spiritual hunger symptoms are a lot like physical hunger symptoms. If you don’t eat for a day, you will be starving beyond belief the next day. If you don’t eat for 3 days, by that third day, you won’t be hungry any more. Sure your body needs the food, but hunger becomes so acute it no longer registers in your mind. If you don’t eat for a week, your body will shut down.

When it comes to spiritual hunger, the time line is longer, but the effects are the same. Fast a little and we desire God with all our being. Fast for months and you begin to forget about God. Fast for a year, and you no can longer see him as your spiritual life shuts down.

There was a teenager in my home parish of Trinity who showed this to us all about 15 years ago. Trinity started its confirmation classes in the fall most years, preparing for the Bishop’s visit in the spring for Confirmation. The priest at Trinity was very strict about his policy that you had to attend these classes if you wanted to be confirmed. The children eligible for these classes were the ones who were starting 6^th grade that fall. One year we had a bunch of kids enrolled, including one named Jim. Jim and the rest of his family were at church every Sunday and both their children were active in the youth programs. Unfortunately Jim and his younger brother had a problem: their grades were all C’s or worse. Jim’s parents, looking ahead to college, figured out how both their sons would get into college: through sports. So Jim was signed up for the baseball team.

By the time spring rolled around, Jim had attended all the confirmation classes and was eligible for confirmation when the Bishop visited. When the priest announced the date of the confirmation, Jim realized he had a problem. His game was scheduled to start at the same time the Bishop was supposed to be laying hands on him to confirm him. Jim went home that Sunday worried about what his coach would say when he told him that he couldn’t play in the game because of confirmation. When Jim told his parents about the scheduling conflict, his parents sat him down. Jim’s parents gave him a lecture on responsibility. You see, Jim had committed to being at every game. His parents told him that he had to be a responsible young man and live up to his pledge. He needed to tell the priest that he had a commitment so he could not be confirmed. Jim played that game while everyone else was confirmed.

Jim felt bad about all this, feeling that he really should have missed the game, not the confirmation. He decided that he would be confirmed the next year. When that next fall rolled around the priest told him that if he expected to be confirmed, he needed to attend all the classes again. So Jim dutifully attended all the classes that fall. When the baseball schedule game out later that fall, Jim was relieved to see that there was no game on Confirmation Sunday. Jim told his parents that afternoon that he was excited about being confirmed. Once again, his parents sat him down. They told him, you may not have a game, but if you had looked at your brother’s schedule, you would have seen that he has a game. This family does things together, and we support each other. If your brother has a game, you need to be there to support him.

The next Sunday he told the priest that he couldn’t be at confirmation. One family overheard and called up Jim’s parents later on that day. The asked if they could help out by giving Jim a ride to church on Confirmation Sunday. Jim’s parents told them to stay out their business. As you can imagine, Jim didn’t come to church much after this.

A few years later the Bishop’s visitation schedule was announced and confirmation classes began again in the fall. This time, Jim didn’t show up for classes. A few of the teenagers at Trinity went and spoke to the priest a few weeks before the Bishop was due to come. One of the teenagers said “Remember, Jim? I still see him at school every day. I really wish he had been confirmed. I know you have a strict rule about everyone needing to attend the fall classes in order to be confirmed, but Jim went through the classes twice. Can you please put Jim forward for confirmation this year?” The priest agreed that Jim’s two previous completed confirmation classes were good enough, and he agreed to put him forward for confirmation. The next day these teenagers tracked down Jim at school and said, “Guess what? You can be confirmed this year without going to confirmation classes!” Jim with told them he didn’t want to confirmed. Jim said “I don’t believe in God, so I don’t want to be confirmed. If God really was real, He would be the most important thing in the world, but He’s not. I needed to go to my baseball games, and those games seem to always be on Sundays. If God was real, no one would schedule games on a Sunday because it would stop people from being with God. I missed confirmation twice and I don’t even go to church anymore. If God was real, this wouldn’t happen.

A God that is not really that important…. can’t really exist.”

Looking at Jim’s story you can clearly see spiritual starvation. The first time he had to miss confirmation he was clearly hungry for God. The hunger was so intense that he was willing to sit through confirmation class a second time. The second time he was forced to miss confirmation, his hunger grew so intense that his body and soul could no longer process the feeling of spiritual hunger, so he stopped noticing the hunger. By the time those two teenagers talked to Jim at school his spiritual hunger had shut down his soul.

Now Jim’s case is extraordinary. I’m sure that Jim’s parents never intended to starve Jim’s spiritual life. They made the mistake of listening to the world instead of listening to the voice of God in their prayers and to their souls. The world loves to put things in front of us that distract us from God. The world tells us He isn’t that important. The world says Sunday worship is enough. You don’t need to worry about Christian Education, or a personal prayer life or about helping those in need. The world says you don’t need to go to church every Sunday. That’s that job of the dedicated elite, not the average Christian. The world wants to starve you spiritually so that you can serve the world and not God.

During Lent we keep hearing about abstinence and fasting. These are good spiritual practices. However, there is one thing I hope you don’t fast from this Lent. Spiritual Food. In fact, I hope you feast on this nourishment. Prepare yourself a banquet and enjoy all the wonderful spiritual foods God has put in front of you. The Sacraments. God’s Holy Word in Scripture. Christian community. Daily Prayers. Sunday School. Lenten programs. Family prayer. Helping the needy. Loving those who don’t love you. Breaking bread with strangers.

Please don’t spiritually starve yourself because the consequences will be dire. Instead, pull up a chair to this banquet table of spiritual food this Lent and feast.

Jesus, The New Adam

As we begin this season of repentance, we yearn for the dawn of Easter morning where our salvation is obtained. The Church in her wisdom knows that in order to begin to understand the radical significance of Easter we first must begin to understand why it was needed in the first place, how it affects us and how we are to respond. Our readings today from Genesis and St. Paul’s letter to the Romans lay out succinctly the reasons why we need salvation and the means by which we may obtain them.

The passage from Genesis tells us about the fall of Adam and Eve. However, to understand this fully, we must go back even further to the beginning of creation. We know that in the beginning God created all that is, and that includes the Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven who we join our voices in praise with. God created the Angels as intelligent, immortal and spiritual beings that rejoiced in the praise of God and served Him. Sadly, right from the get-go, a host of them fell behind a leader, the Devil, who chose themselves over God, and rejected Him. Jesus spoke of this to his disciples and told them “I saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” (Luke 10:18) The Devil and his followers fell from the heavens and have ever since tempted God’s greatest creation, man, to follow their decision to choose the self over the Loving rule of God and to join them in their wretched fallen state.

This is the lead up to story we encounter in Genesis. Just as the Angels where created as beings that are to rejoice in God’s love, mankind was created as God’s most perfect creation, made to rejoice in God’s love and share in the eternal multiplication of this love. True love involves the choice to love, not the coercion to love. God gave us the choice to love him fully or to reject Him, so that our relationship with him would be one of pure self giving love.

The Devil in the form of the serpent beheld creatures made in the perfect image of God, who glorified God and shared in His love and hated them in his heart. Determined that these beloved creatures should share his fate of selfishness and outward loathing, the Devil comes to tempt us with His lies.

Adam and Eve, our first parents live in a place where all is provided for them, but it comes with some rules. We are not to eat of the tree in the middle of the Garden, for God tells us that if we do, we shall die. The Devil comes to our parents breathing lies and tells Eve that eating the tree will not make us die, but will make us like God. We all know that there is nothing that can make man become God, and we know from the world around us that death certainly exists. As Jesus has taught us, the Devil is “a liar and the father of lies”. (John 8:44) Eve bought into this lie, as did Adam, and they both ate from the forbidden tree. In this moment mankind made a choice. We will not always serve God. When we believe it serves our purpose, we will serve ourselves first, thinking we know more than God. Yes, the Devil tempted, but the choice was made by Adam and Eve on their own of their own free will. That is Fall of Man, when we decided to put ourselves first, believing we understood the ways of creation better than the Creator.

This decision made at the prompting of the Devil had everlasting effects on all people that followed our first parents. The choice of the creation made in the Lord’s image had a catastrophic effect on all of us. Adam and Eve passed on their proclivity to sin along with the stain of that first sin on to all who have followed them. Their decision to choose themselves over God let loose a form of death that can eternally separate us from God into the world and gave the Devil power in this new fallen world, as we had proven to him and his fallen angels that we were fertile ground for temptation. He decided to forever tempt us to follow his choices so we could share in his fate, because misery loves company.

The Old Testament shows the effects of the Fall on all humanity. Far from being people who love each other unconditionally, we were now a creature that has the remarkable ability to hurt and destroy all that surrounds us. God keeps on giving us new ways in that we may turn ourselves around and follow him fully, and we keep finding ways to make bad decisions and follow only our own prideful desires instead of the Lord’s.

Yet being the beloved creation of God, He could not stand to let us persist in this state of an utterly broken relationship. The Wisdom of Solomon tells us that “God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living. For He created all things that they may exist.” (Wisdom 1:13-14 NETS) Even though we are the ones that removed ourselves from the perfect relationship with God and opened up the way for full spiritual death, God knew it was only He who could undo this action.

In the fullness of time, God brought about the means of our redemption. Just as free will was the tool used by the Devil to tempt us, the gift of free will would be the means by which our redemption would begin. Just as Eve spoke to the Fallen Angel and began the undoing of mankind, the Blessed Virgin Mary spoke to an Angel and began the redemption of mankind. The Angel Gabriel came to her and told her that she would conceive the Son of the Most High. At this moment all creation came to a screeching halt before a humble young woman in a far off town. Free will gave the Blessed Virgin Mary the ability to say “No, I will not have any part in this!” However, she chose the opposite and said “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:39) In an answer that must have infuriated the Devil she chose God’s will over her own, knowing that the Creator knows best how to take care of the creation.

The Blessed Virgin Mary, acting in the reverse role of Eve cooperates with God so that He may bring forth the new Adam. The birth of Jesus, fully human, fully man, allowed for the undoing of the fall. As St. Paul tells us in the reading from Romans: “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation of all, so one man’s act of righteousness lead to justification and life for all.” (Romans 5:18)

The sin of an individual human is undone by a perfect human. The act of prideful disobedience is undone by an act of ultimate submission: Christ’s self emptying birth into a mankind enslaved to sin and eternal death and Christ’s obedience to the will of fallen man, even to the point of death so that death itself may be conquered.

This is the Good News in Jesus Christ: by union to Him by Baptism we are freed from the power of everlasting death and reconciled to God so that we may see, hear and feel him more clearly.

Even though we now have access to this new relationship with Christ and have a pathway to everlasting life with and in God, it is not all done and over with. None of these benefits of Christ are reckoned to us as a right once we are united with Jesus in Baptism. Just as God allowed us to exercise our free will both to fall from grace and to accept a pathway back into it, that freedom of choice is still there for us. Our free will is guaranteed until the end our life, and the choice to choose God or to choose ourselves always stands before us.

The Temptation that Jesus faced in the desert is the fate of all mankind. We are still subject to temptation, both by the devil and by our sinful desire to make ourselves a little god over and above the Lord. Thanks be to God that He showers us with grace so that we may resists these temptations!

During this season of Lent, we are given the opportunity to remember both the original Fall that needed to be undone by Christ and it’s continued effected on us. Each and everyone one of us can see ourselves in our first parents in some way. It’s easy to think that given such a blatant order like “don’t eat from that tree” would be easily followed by us in if we were in their place, but each of us is capable of the same mistake. Regardless of what each of our individual temptations are, it will always boil down to what each in every sin really is: the desire to put ourselves before God.

In this season of preparation and penitence I invite you to take stock of your life. Look at all things going on in it and ask of each of them if they are of God’s will or your own. Spend time contemplating your own life, but also spend time contemplating what you can do to help those around you. Pray for your brothers and sisters that they may serve God’s will only; and that they may have God’s strength, grace and peace. I promise you that if you pray for others, if you help people out in some way, you will begin to see Christ in them and you will begin to better understand God’s will for you in your life.

I will pray for all of you in the midst of the hard work of Lent, and I hope that you in turn will pray for me. Do this hard work of Lent, but always remember that Easter morning will dawn soon, even if it seems far off from today.