Homily: Thursday - 1st Week of Lent 2017 - Harmony of Prayer and Service

The short Gospel passage taken near the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount contains an interesting combination of teachings.

On one hand, it seems Jesus is teaching us about prayer. We are to turn to God confidently in our prayer life, to develop a habit of coming before the Lord with our needs, the needs of our family, the needs of the Church, and the needs of the world. Our daily prayer should certainly include petitions for the needs of ourselves and others.

On the other hand, the Gospel passage also includes a summation of Jesus’ moral teaching: do to others whatever you would have them do to you; the obligation to treat others with charity.
On one hand, Jesus is teaching about praying; on the other, he is teaching about doing. On one hand, He is teaches us to seek the charity of God; on the other, to show the charity of God.

Here we see the harmony and interconnectedness of prayer and service. We will never grow in service without prayer, and we will never grow in prayer without service.

Pope Benedict XVI took up this principle in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. “A living relationship with Christ [through prayer] is decisive if we are to keep on the right path”. “Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed.” He pointed to the example of Mother Theresa as “a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbour but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service.”

“It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer,” he said, “in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work…A personal relationship with God and an abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeaned and save him from falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism.”

Without prayer, we begin to build a world without God, and without service, we fall into a sort of spiritual inertia.

Lenten prayer and almsgiving help us to feed the fire of the Christian life, to encounter God who is the source of mercy and to become instruments of that mercy for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
 
- - - - - -

For greater devotion in our Lenten prayer, greater self-restraint in our Lenten fasting, and greater selflessness in our Lenten almsgiving.

That civil leaders will use their authority to protect the dignity of human life and the well-being of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, those who suffer from discrimination, and the unborn.  We pray to the Lord.

For those preparing to enter the Church at Easter, that these weeks of Lent may bring them purification and enlightenment in the ways of Christ.  We pray to the Lord.

For those experiencing any kind of hardship or sorrow, isolation or illness: that the tenderness of the Father’s love will comfort them.  We pray to the Lord.