Homily for 10 March 2019

10 March 2019

1^st Sunday of Lent, Year C

The world is not a bad place.  We hear it again and again in the Book of Genesis: God created the day and the night, and he called them good.  God make the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, and he called them good.  God created everything, and he called it all good.  And, finally, God created the human person—male and female—in his image, and he called them very good. 

The world is not a bad place.  The Prophet Isaiah says that, too, in sharing the word of God, “The designer and maker of the earth who established it, not as an empty waste did he create it, but designing it to be lived in” (Isaiah 45:18). 

Even human love is good, and an image of heaven on earth.  The Song of Songs reminds us of that.  And even Jesus points to the goodness of that love when he refers to himself as the “Bridegroom,” and his Church as his “Bride.”  In fact, we hear that at every Mass: “Blessed are those called to the [wedding] supper of the Lamb”—those words are taken from the Book of Revelation (19:9).

Even such things as knowledge, science, and medicine are ways God helps us to share in his wisdom and goodness.  And so, the world is not only not a bad place, it’s a good place, where God’s blessings are all around us.

But what our scripture readings ask of us this weekend (and always) is to keep that goodness and those blessings in their proper place.  The world is good...but the world is not God.  We humans are good—very good...but we are not God.  And that’s the proper order of things we’re reminded of today: a world where there is faith—not in ourselves or in worldly things—but faith in God, above all things.

Of course, as we know, the devil prefers to mix up that order.  When the devil was tempting Jesus there in the desert, he (or she or it) was trying to persuade Jesus to ditch this idea of “faith in God.”  The devil said: “If you’re hungry, then just turn these stones into bread.  You can do it...you don’t need God.”  And then the devil said: “Everything can be yours—everything: power and glory here on earth.  But God’s not going to give it to you...you’re going to have to take that for yourself.”  And then, finally, the devil said: “Put God to the test.  You be his judge and see if he’s as true as he says he is.”

The devil would prefer that we just bracket God and put him away in the closet.  Or—better yet—if we would just throw him out with the trash, so we can get on with living “my” life, in “my” way, where “I” decide what’s going to happen to “me,” and no one is going to tell “me” what to do and how to live.  The devil would love that.

The world is not a bad place.  In fact, it’s a good place.  And we’re good, too.  Even our desires for companionship and love, our experiences of goodness and beauty, and our enjoyment of earthly “delights” are all good.  It’s all good.  But none of it can take the place of God.

And, you know, what this is is the ages-old struggle between “sacred” and “secular.”  When there’s a sense of the sacred, there’s also a sense of order and structure.  There’s God, and then all the things and people who belong to God.  Then there are those who reject God outright, and finally those things which are not of God—such as murder and idolatry, and the like.  But above it all—and circulating around and within it all—is God.

But when there’s no sense of the sacred, then there’s absolute secularism.  And that just means absolute worldliness, where “the world” and all its goodness (including us) push God right out of the picture.  It’s a world where it’s just us, floating in space on a planet.  And it’s not a happy place because there aren’t any universal laws or rules, no standards, no sense of harmony and cooperation—just competition.  But, hey, at least we’re the masters of our own little kingdoms—or queendoms, or whatever “I” want to call it. 

The challenge this Lent isn’t to throw out the world—because the world is good.  And the challenge isn’t to unite ourselves so closely with the divine in prayer that we forget about the world—because, again, God created the world and called it “good.”  Our challenge in Lent (and throughout life)  is to keep those two levels of our existence—the divine and the worldly—in harmony with one another, in balance, and in their proper order.

And that’s a reason why, during Lent, we really cut back on things here in church like music and flowers.  It’s partly in a spirit of penitence that we do that, and it’s also partly because we to make sure that we’re worshipping God alone above everything else we might encounter here at Mass.  We do it to keep things in their proper order: God first, then the people and things of God, and then everything else. 

Of course, this all sounds a lot like our talks in Advent about the Domestic Church: the idea of not only welcoming God into our homes, not only into the living room, but also into the kitchen and the bedroom (even the bathroom). 

In a sacred place—in a sacred world—there is still the world.  But...God is present in that world, through that world, and above that world.  As we continue on here in the first steps of this year’s Lenten journey, the Scriptures ask us to consider: How can I make my life more sacred?  Where is God in the order of my life?  And how can I rely more on him than on myself?