4th Sunday of Lent 2021 - Joyful Lenten Waters

 On the 4th Sunday of Lent, the Church celebrates Laetare sunday.  Laetare is the latin word for “rejoice”. Lent and Joy. Initially, it doesn’t seem like those two things would go together. Joy and Penance? Joy and Fasting? Joy and Tears of Repentance? 

Today, is a reminder that true joy only comes from God.  And when we make room in our hearts for him through penance, we fast from the things that keep us from hungering for Him, when we allow him to fill our hearts through prayer, we become filled with joy.  If you haven’t experience yet, during this season, maybe you aren’t doing it right? For Lenten joy abounds with all of the opportunities to turn our hearts to God.

One of my favorite cinematic images of Lenten joy comes from a very good movie called “The Mission” starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons.  If you haven't seen it, it's worth the time.  The Mission  is the story of the Spanish Jesuits who go to South America to bring Christianity to the natives there.  Robert DeNiro plays a slave trader.  He had spent years treating the natives as a commodity, often murdering them like cattle.   After he catches his wife and brother in the act of adultery, he murders his brother, and spirals into a terrible depression. Then something amazing happens: DeNiro's character becomes attracted to the Christian faith preached by the Jesuits and embraced by the natives.  

For a life of enslaving and murdering, he makes a confession of his sins, and undertakes a serious penance.  With a backpack filled with weapons and armor, symbols of his old life of violence, he climbs up this gigantic waterfall.  And the deeply moving scene of the movie is when after this tremendous strenuous penitential climb, he reaches the top of the waterfall, and surrounded by the Jesuits and Natives, he is embraced by both, and then falls to his knees.  Overwhelmed by the mercy of Christ and his own sorrow for his sins, he begins to weep and laugh for joy at the same time.  He experiences the sorrow of being a sinner and the joy of being a forgiven sinner at the same time.  Where there was only guilt and depression, through his penance, he opened himself to be touched by God.  I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced anything like that…but it changes your life.

A powerful image of Lenten joy, indeed  With great sorrow for our sins, we go to confession,  we undergo penances of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and thereby open ourselves to God in a new way.  We are changed internally, as we seek to conform our actions and our life to God.

St. Paul writes about the profound change that occurs in the soul when it comes to Christ in our reading this weekend: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” In Christ, the sinner is transformed into something new. Something awakens that was dormant in the soul, something that was dead is revived.  Blindness, like that of the blind man in the Gospel today, is transformed into sight. Hatred and coldness and selfishness is transformed into love, when Christ is truly encountered as Savior.

Our Lenten penances, our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—our stripping away the non-essentials to create pockets of silence and reflection—these things are meant to awaken something in us. But, maybe that’s why some of us find Lent so hard or unagreeable. We don’t want anything to awaken. We like our lives just the way they are. We like our earthly comforts. We like our isolation. We sense that if we became quieter, something might awaken that we don’t have control over. And so, we prefer spiritual blindness because we are afraid what we might see. 

Some of us resist the whole idea of admitting guilt. And that is to the great detriment of our church and our mission.  I don’t want to climb up a waterfall with the reminders of my sins on my back. I don’t want the Lord to spread muddy saliva on my eyes. It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to look at the ways I’ve  hurt or betrayed others with my words or actions. It’s humiliating. Yes, it is. But it’s the secret of the saints. With the sincere admission of guilt and penance for our sins comes great sanctity. 

Saint John Paul II lamented what he called the loss of the sense of sin.  He called it a crisis in the Church and the world that so many of us fail to acknowledge the destructive power that sin has in our society and our own souls.  Pope Francis echoing Saint John Paul said recently that “When you lose the sense of sin, you lose the sense of the Kingdom of God."  If we deny the fact that we are sinners, we deny our need for Christ.  

But remember, when Peter at the last supper, defiantly resisted the washing of his feet, and said to Jesus “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him,  “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”

Again, the good news, especially of Laetare Sunday is that Jesus does offer to wash us, he does offer to forgive us in the Sacrament of Confession, he does offer to place his hands on our eyes to heal our blindness, he offers to place his hands on our hearts to heal its coldness. Jesus beckons us, he calls us to repentance that we may know the joy of being redeemed sinners, and that his kingdom make take deeper root in our hearts.  

With the time that we have left of this most holy season, may the Holy Spirit help each of us to identify those selfish and sinful attitudes and behaviors and attachments which keep us from knowing the joy God wants for us. May we have the courage to do the penances we ought to, and allow ourselves to be washed by God’s mercy, and come to know the joy of his goodness dwelling within us for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

4th Sunday of Lent 2018 - Mourning Sin, Mercy, and Lenten Joy

Happiness. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle both taught that the motive behind all of our actions, is happiness.  We do the things we do because we want to be happy.  Even though there are so many things that divide the human family, the desire for happiness unites us. Why do we build cities, practice music, devote years of our life to athletic training? Why do we watch the Cleveland Browns week after week, hoping that maybe, just maybe, they will overcome past losses and bring home victory? Happiness.  Following Cleveland football is a perfect of example of how we even undergo great sufferings in order to achieve greater happiness.

Why do we desire happiness? Why do we desire joy? We are built for it. The Creator designed us with this deep longing. God made us to discover our soul’s deepest longing, in Him.

However, because of the Fall, because of the sin of Adam and Eve, our moral compass is defective. We look for happiness, we look for joy in all the wrong places. We do too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do need. We eat too much, and fast too little; we gossip too much, and listen to actual wisdom too little; we train our bodies, while neglecting our souls; we are selfish too often, and selfless too seldom; these days, we spend too much time on social media, while neglecting healthy communication with the people we should love most. We settle for the superficial, and then complain when our lives seem meaningless.

Theologians call this broken happiness compass “concupiscence”—this tendency to look for joy, look for happiness in all the wrong places, even violating natural law and the commandments of God. St. Paul even writes about concupiscence to the Romans, when he says, “Sin…produced in me, every kind of covetous desire (Rom 7:8)”...every kind of concupiscence.

So what do we do about this broken happiness compass? Well, we have a choice don’t we? Either seek to fix it or let the broken compass continue to lead us away from joy, into sin, sadness, and separation from God.

During Lent, we seek the Lord’s wisdom to identify our concupiscent habits and the fortitude to overcome them. As we pray in the Eucharistic Preface: God has given us this sacred time for the renewing and purifying of our hearts, that freedom from disordered affections *concupiscence*, we may so deal with the things of this passing world, as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.
The 4th Sunday of lent is known as Laetare Sunday, whose name is taken from the ancient latin entrance antiphon: Laetare, Ierusalem, et conventum facite, omnes qui diligitis eam…Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning; exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.

It seems kind of strange that the penitential season is interrupted by this command to rejoice. How do you rejoice in the desert? Well, there is something deeply joyful about doing penance, knowing that are doing something to please the Lord, to humble to one’s pride.

Laetare Sunday is also a reminder that it is through repentance, that our mourning is transformed into rejoicing. The very structure of our scripture readings takes us on this journey from mourning and sin, to joy and truth and life.

In the old testament reading from Second Chronicles we read of the deplorable state of the people of Israel. “In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations and polluting the LORD’s temple.” A people who should know better practicing infidelity after infidelity to God’s laws, abominations like child sacrifice, unnatural relations between men and women, worship of false gods, involvement in occult practices like visiting spirit mediums and fortune tellers. And when God sends his prophets to warn the people, they scoff and mocked and killed them.

It took exile, the destruction of their city, families being ripped apart by a foreign enemy, to get these people to begin to wake up to the consequences of their sins.

Sinful Israel here represents all of sinful humanity, the sad state of our exile from God, our rejection of God’s commandments, and the biblical warning that families and civilizations crumble when they become distanced from God.

Beautiful Psalm 137 is the song of the soul, lamenting his sins, weeping over paradise lost, remembering how good he had it when he lived under the grace and protection of God.

And then our second reading, Paul writes to the Ephesians of how the soul dead in his transgressions is STILL loved by God; that God is rich in mercy, and that grace CAN be restored through Jesus Christ when the soul sincerely repents of his sins.

The Gospel repeats this truth: that Jesus Christ lifted up on the cross is the source of our spiritual healing. That because of Him we can turn away from our wickedness, and we can begin to live in the truth. What a tremendous message.

That same pattern of “sin, repentance, mercy, and life” is evident in the life of every Christian. Every Christian begins life “dead in his transgressions” as St. Paul says, and through baptism comes to new life, the life of grace.

And, we are to follow this same pattern every Lent. Every Lent we are to identify those parts of our life that have yet to be converted, those parts of us in which we allow death, and wickedness, and selfishness, and lust to reign.

We are to bring our fallen affections, our disordered desires and unenlightened intellects to be restored by God primarily in the Sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist. Again, if you haven’t gone to Confession yet this Lent, you still have a few more opportunities. The angels rejoice when a sinner repents, and something in us changes when we go to confession as well. We experience the elation, the joy of forgiveness. Our Lenten penances too, even though they bring some suffering, bring a Lenten joy that far outweighs the suffering.

If you haven’t experienced some joy this Lent, it’s likely not because you fasted, prayed, and gave too much, but likely because you’ve done these things too little, with half-hearted devotion, and lukewarmness.

Now that we are passed the half-way mark of Lent, we recommit to the penances some of us have already given up on, and perhaps discern how we might even unite ourselves all the more to Jesus who goes to the cross for us.

May we respond generously to the call to do penance, for it is through penance and repentance, that we reject the things that deprive us of life and joy, and open ourselves all the more to the life and joy of Easter grace, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.