Welcoming Grace

(16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

The short passage from the Gospel of Luke that we have today, that of Martha, stressed out with much serving, and her sister Mary, listening quietly to the Lord, has a long history of comment and interpretation...

However, for a summer Sunday, perhaps just a few little points are good enough … and the Church, as a tender mother, helps us in this, giving us a key to interpretation in the first reading, that of welcome and hospitality.

(As we know, for the Sundays in Ordinary Time, the first reading and the gospel go together, while the second reading has its own cycle.)

Marriage

 (27th Sunday, B)

I’m a little hesitant to try to preach on marriage, given especially that I have no experience of it. In fact, I don’t even know very many married people on a personal level, except for my parents—whom I got to know pretty well because I first met them when I was very young.

Nevertheless, I’ve given homilies at plenty of weddings, especially early on in my priesthood, and therefore have reflected some on this great Sacrament. So, I’ll give it a shot, and you, especially you married folks, can feel free to take what I say with as many grains of salt as you see fit.

The Answer to Prayer

(17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C; Last Mass at Sacred Heart)

In the gospel today we hear some of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. ‘Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.’ Even more, by sheer persistence, Jesus says, we will receive a favorable answer to our prayer.

To hear this can be a little jarring; it can be an occasion of a ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Often it doesn’t seem like we get what we pray for simply by our trust in God and our faithful persistence in prayer. Look at poor Abraham; after all of his haggling for the city of Sodom, we know what happened to them. In the end only Lot and his two daughters survived that mess, if you don’t count Mrs. Lot who turned into a pillar of salt during the escape. Even more, if you keep reading in Genesis you will observe that Lot’s daughters weren’t exactly the most wholesome and righteous girls that ever lived.

So how are we to take what Jesus says, when he assures us that our prayers are answered, and that we will receive what we want from God, who is even more attentive than human parents who know well how to give good gifts to their children? I think we receive an answer when we read carefully.

Jesus says, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” There it is. The Holy Spirit is the gift we receive from our trust and persistence in prayer, not anything else that we might think we need or want.

The Holy Spirit Whom we receive in prayer is the same Spirit Who stretches the divine life of the Blessed Trinity into the world to conceive Our Lord through the consent of our Blessed Mother. He is the same Spirit who gives birth to the Church when He comes to rest on the apostles gathered in prayer on Pentecost. Both of these mysteries are present when each of us receives the gift of the Holy Spirit through prayer. Just as with Mary, the Spirit desires to conceive the Word of God in us, that we may bear his presence to the world and the Word may become flesh through our words and actions. By our common prayer here in the liturgy, we are transformed anew into the Body of Christ, ready to be sent into the world as God’s own reconciliation, forgiveness, and sacrifice for the life of the world.

This gift of the Holy Spirit, given to all who ask with faith and persistence, is the perfect answer to prayer because it draws us into the infinite creativity, delight, and joy of the Blessed Trinity himself. This is the heart of the Christian mystery; that we might come to share, through the Holy Spirit, the same intimacy of Jesus’ relationship to the Father. In this sense, all of our prayers are answered because we receive the gift that is infinitely satisfying and delightful, God himself.

This is not an easy gift, however. To be conceived as the Body of Christ in the world also means accepting the Cross. To consent to become the Body of Christ here at Mass is also to consent to the Cross that the Body of Christ carries. The Cross is God’s answer to the suffering we have brought upon this world with our sins: not to magically fix the world, but to show us a way through its suffering to new life. Taking up our Cross means refusing to pass evil on, rejecting revenge and refusing to participate in this world’s cycles of violence. Jesus’ life and death assure us that those who accept the Cross in this way participate in God’s work of renovating the world through the divine life poured out into our humanity in Christ. The mystery of this renovation of our humanity is what we call the Resurrection.

Let us surrender today to the gift which God is (literally) dying to give us, the Holy Spirit. By this Gift we are drawn into the divine life of the Blessed Trinity, and are made sharers in the salvation that Jesus Christ has accomplished for the world.

The Desire of our Hearts

(Pentecost, Vigil)

For me the spirituality of the Pentecost Vigil, which we celebrate tonight, connects all the way back to the other side of the liturgical year at Advent and Christmas. Just like the season of Advent, the Pentecost Vigil is about the desire of the human heart, our deepest longings, and what we really want and look forward to.

That’s basically what we are as human beings, a desire. We seek. We want. We do everything we do because of the belief, right or wrong, that it will make us happy. But what is it that we really want? At a basic level, the goods of security, comfort, and pleasure. Go a little deeper, become a little more mature, and we realize that we want beauty and goodness. In the end what we want is love, to delight in loving and being loved. Ultimately what we want Love Itself, and this Love is the goodness out of which all of the goodnesses of the creation overflow, the Mystery and Source of all that we call God.

It is God that the heart wants. St. Augustine calls the human being a capax Dei, a “capacity for God.” (De Trinitate, XIV:11) The human person is a desire, a home, and a capacity for God. St. Paul expressed this so viscerally in the second reading tonight: our longing for adoption into God, the redemption of our bodies for which we long and for which all creation is “groaning.”

The trouble is, we are often misguided in our effort to satisfy our desire for God. We reach out for the wrong thing, thinking it will make us happy, but it doesn’t. And this goes for all of our little, distracting personal sins all the way up the great tragedies of violence that scar families, communities and nations. The classic Biblical example of this problem comes to us in the first reading today. The prehistoric people tried to build a tower that would go up to heaven. They wanted to reach up and grab the heaven that they desired. And so it is with us whenever we try to get what our heart wants by grasping. And we see the result of it all: mass confusion. This confusion continues in our own society, when crimes and errors that are clearly against human dignity and goodness have become all but normal and acceptable.

All of our grasping and grabbing for happiness, pleasure, and security is ultimately doomed because we are looking the wrong way. The great gift of Pentecost, the good news of this beautiful celebration, is that the God that we desire is right here. Jesus says in the Gospel tonight, “"Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me." By his Incarnation among us, Jesus has placed the divine life of God within our humanity, and we join our humanity to his by our faith and our Communion with him here at Mass. Thus the real desire of our hearts is right here, flowing from within. It is the living water of our baptism into Christ.

Therefore, let us turn our attention inwards in prayer, that we might notice this great gift of God. Prayer will teach us how to unseal the Spirit God has placed within us, that He might flow forth from us for the recreation and renewal of the world.

His Suffering is our Glorification

(2nd Sunday of Lent, B)

In accord with ancient tradition, on this second Sunday of Lent we proclaim the mysterious event of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Jesus takes his inner circle of disciples to the top of a high mountain, and there he appears to them in his divine glory, conversing with the Moses the great leader of the people of God, and Elijah, their greatest prophet. Here the disciples get a glimpse of the glorified Jesus, of the Lord as he comes to us in his Resurrection. The Transfiguration is a kind of preview of the Resurrection, and so its proclamation today shall be for us, to encourage us to redouble our commitment to observing this Lent and keep us focused on its goal: the renewal of our risen, baptized life during the celebration of Easter.

But, if the gospel we proclaim today is all about the glorified Jesus and the Resurrection, why do the other readings seem to about sacrifice, specifically the sacrifice of the son? In the first reading we hear of the blessing that comes upon Abraham because of his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. In the second reading, St. Paul assures us that the God who also “did not spare his own Son” but “handed him over” for our salvation will also bless us in every way.

What’s the connection here? Well, I think we are invited today to reflect on the link between God’s sacrifice of his only Son—indeed of the self-sacrificing deity—and the glorification of Jesus in the Resurrection. And here’s what it is, I think: The suffering, Passion, and sacrifice of the Son of God become for us our glorification. For what do we see glorified in the Transfiguration of the Lord—what was available to the eyes of Peter, James, and John? It was the Christ they knew as the man Jesus of Nazareth transformed and glorified in the divine light. What they saw with their eyes was a divinely glorified human being. This humanity is the humanness of you and me; it is the human nature that the Word of God borrows from us through the wondrous consent of our most Blessed Mother and that comes into the world as Jesus Christ.

In this event of the Word of God becoming flesh, becoming one with us in our humanity, God in Christ enters into and passes through our human life and experience. Most importantly, Jesus Christ is God joining himself to our suffering. There he is on the Cross, identifying himself with the suffering we bring upon ourselves and each other with our sins, even to the point of the deep pain of feeling forsaken by God: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Jesus joins us even in the bodily death our first parents earned for us with their original disobedience.

But here’s the good news: the goodness of the divine personality of Jesus Christ is more powerful than the evils of sin, suffering, and death. And so Jesus, again in the humanity he borrows from us, bursts forth from his Passion and death to reveal the Resurrection. This is precisely the glorification we witness in the Transfiguration. It’s not so much that we marvel at the miracle of seeing an apparition of the divine person of Jesus Christ, but that we rejoice to know that this is a glorification that is now available to us in our humanity because of Christ’s sacrifice, because of his having passed through and over the suffering and death we have brought upon ourselves with our sins.

So let us renew ourselves in our devotion to the Lord’s Passion this Lent, for it is the end of the power of sin and the fear of death for all humanity.

The New Flood

(1st Sunday of Lent, B)

As we begin this holy season of Lent, the gospel we hear today picks up where we left off at the end of the Christmas season. Seven weeks ago, we concluded the Christmas season with the feast of the baptism of the Lord. Today we hear the result of that baptism: Jesus is pushed into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan. Having fasted for forty days, Jesus emerges victorious over Satan and begins to preach the good news of the kingdom of God.

The other readings we have today help us to remember that these three moments in Jesus’ life go together: baptism, temptation in the desert, preaching the Kingdom. To explore this, the liturgy today invites us to go all the way back to Noah. Surely you recall the story of Noah and his family. God became displeased with the creation and decides to make a fresh start of things. God sends the flood to destroy the earth so that everything can start over with Noah’s family and the animals they brought with them on the ark. After the flood is over, God makes a covenant with Noah in which he promises never to destroy the world again. God vows, “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all mortal beings.”

Now, as we hear from St. Peter in the second reading, the flood “prefigures” our baptism. The flood is like a foreshadowing that helps us to understand what our baptism means. Just as Noah and his family were raised above the flood in the ark, so we who go through the waters of baptism rise with Christ and are saved from the sin that so often cripples human life and destiny in this world.

Recall how God promised never to destroy the world again like he did in with the flood. But it’s not like us who live after the flood are any better than the wicked folks who lived before the flood, those who led God to want to make a whole new start of the creation. So, seeing the world continue to struggle with sin, seeing the world in which we persist in making ourselves and each other miserable with our sins, God again sends the waters upon the world. But this is not the violent, in-your-face waters of the first flood; this is the new flood of our baptism through which God recreates us gently from within.

The flood prefigures the baptism we share with Christ because it is again through water that God seeks to re-create the world. God sends the new flood of baptism by which our lives are re-created in a quiet, secret, and gentle way. But the new flood is no less powerful and insistent than the old. God will not be thwarted in his desire to bring the world to perfection. Our baptism is a quiet, persistent, unstoppable revolution against sin and death.

Lent is an opportunity for us to prepare for the renewal of the promises of our baptism at Easter. As the Spirit drove the newly baptized Jesus into the desert for forty days so that he might contend and have victory over Satan, so may we allow the grace of our baptism to drive us deep into the forty days of this Lent. May we allow the victory of Jesus to take over our lives. In his grace, we may prepare ourselves for the renewal of our dying and rising in the new flood of baptism.

Repaying To God What Belongs To God

(29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

(Mass of Thanksgiving at parish of Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation)

In today’s gospel we see the Jesus of the clever comeback. We shouldn’t miss this simple point; we are meant to cheer for our hero who eludes both the trap and turns the challenge back on his enemies.

They try to trap Jesus, because in the question of paying the tax to Rome he can’t win. Let’s notice who is sent to give the challenge: the disciples of the Pharisees, who, as devout Jews would have been set against the Romans who were occupying their country, and the Herodians who were the ruling class. Now as we all know, the ruling classes are always interested in having people pay their taxes. So Jesus can’t win. If he recommends paying the census tax, he’ll be in trouble with the Pharisees. If he says that the tax shouldn’t be paid, he’ll be in trouble with the local authorities.

But Jesus eludes this rhetorical trap by elevating the whole conversation. He offers a comeback that says: Would that we were so concerned with how we pay our debts to God! And this is a fine reflection us who find ourselves in a pretty intense election season in this country, when there is endless talk about taxes, who should pay them, and how much. (As my father used to say, the trouble is that the United States was founded on the principle that you shouldn’t have pay taxes.) But imagine what the world would be like if we were so concerned as all this for how to pay our debts to God.

To get this point across, Jesus uses a very clever analogy. He asks to see the coin used to pay the tax, and when he sees Caesar’s image on it, he recommends returning to Caesar what seems to belong to him. But then Jesus gives invites his adversaries to repay to God what belongs to God. And so we are invited to reflect on the question, what bears the image and inscription of God in the same way that the coin bears the image and inscription of Caesar? The answer is clear: it is us ourselves, created in the “image of likeness of God.”

This thing with the Roman money is a powerful analogy, and it’s worth some sustained reflection. Let’s bring it into our time though, and replace the Roman coin with one of our standard forms of money, say the $20 dollar bill. Here it is, with the image of Andrew Jackson on the front, and the image of the White House on the back. So if we are paying attention, and even if we’re not, each time we use one of these bills we are reminded of who we are as Americans. The history and the ideals of our country pass through our hands whenever we use this money, and by using it, we remember who we are as a country and what we stand for.

Now, our soul is the same way. It bears the image and imprint of the God who created it. So each time in the course of a day when we use our soul by loving, learning, praying, or just by trying to be fully present to another human being, we can be reminded, we can notice the imprint of God on ourselves. Just by paying attention to ourselves as we relate, work, and pray with each other, we can remember God. In the same way that the images of our secular history pass through our hands whenever we use our money, so the image and likeness of God in which each of us is created, passes into our relationships and becomes a holy communion between persons.

Once we have noticed the image and likeness of God in the loving actions of our own soul, we are ready to fulfill Jesus’ invitation to return to God what belongs to him. But what does it mean to return to God the soul that belongs to him? How do we do that? Well, here’s the really good news: it’s already been done for us.

This is the saving meaning of the Lord’s Resurrection. In his Passion and death Jesus takes our humanity, having borrowed it from us through our Blessed Mother, brings it through the suffering and alienation from God we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, and returns it to God in his Resurrection. So if we want to fulfill Jesus’ command to offer our souls back to God who made them in his own image and likeness, all we have to do is allow our humanity, our hearts and lives, to be caught up into the humanity of Jesus Christ. We do this by faith, by prayer, and especially through the Holy Communion we receive here at Mass. It’s here in the Eucharist that we become what we receive, become who we most truly are. It is here that we become the Body of Christ risen from the dead, offering our humanity back to the God who created us.

Pentecost

(Pentecost Sunday)

(N.B. There are alternate endings for the vigil Mass and the Mass during the day)

Today is the fulfillment of all the mysteries of the Lord we have been celebrating all year, from his Nativity and his ministry to his Passion, death, and Resurrection. They all lead to that most wonderful of gifts to us, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, our minds, our families, and in us assembled as church.

God is not someone who just sits there. It’s not like God just holds court in heaven enjoying his own perfection and the company of his angels and his saints. No! God is a dynamic movement, a perfect process of Love. This is part of what we mean when we say that God is a Trinity, trying to describe this God who is a dynamic movement of Love.

Anyone of us who has been in love knows that love wants more than anything to share itself with the other. And so it is with the perfect Love that we call God. From the most perfect charity which desires nothing more than the pure benefit and good of another all the way down to the most basic sexual desire in which our very bodies seem to reach out and long for the other, in all of these experiences of love we come to know a hint or a shadow of the tremendous passion of God to share his very self with the world.

The overflowing of the love of God, this stretching forth as it were, of God’s love for his creation, we call the Holy Spirit. This Spirit was present in the very beginning: as we read in Genesis, before God even began to create the heavens and the earth, the breath or spirit of God hovered over the waters. From the very beginning it wasn’t as if God sat aloof from his creation. Instead, God was intimately present, loving the creation into being.

This is also what it means when the gospels say that Jesus “was conceived by the Holy Spirit.” The same Spirit, the same divine Love which embraced creation from the very beginning, now accomplishes the perfect unification between God and our humanity in Jesus Christ. God desires so much to be present to us, to love us as we are, that he gives up all the power and prerogative that goes with being God and becomes one of us, vulnerable for sure, but able to relate to us perfectly as our brother.

And now this same Spirit which hovered over the waters in the beginning, which conceived Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary, and which most perfectly of all, raised Jesus from the dead, is given to us. The Spirit is given to us so that we too might be lifted up with Jesus. The Spirit both bids us and helps us rise from all of the violence , depression, anxiety—from all of this approximation of death that we have brought upon ourselves with our sins. The Spirit gives us true freedom. The presence of the Spirit which we have by uniting ourselves to the humanity of Christ in prayer, faith, and sacrament, rolls us up into the dynamic movement of love which is the Trinity of God. In this great Gift we become—obscurely, mysteriously, sacramentally—part of the very inner life of God.

This great gift leaves us with a mission, a mission with which we are sent forth at the end of this Easter season. And this mission is nothing less than the healing of all of human civilization.

Vigil

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the story of the tower of Babel, and how the language of the people working there became so confused that they could no longer work together and were “scattered all over the earth.” So what went wrong with their project? Think back to the beginning of the reading. They said to themselves, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves.”

This is the original sin of every politics and human effort at leadership that leaves God out of the picture. For when we try to build a family, a community, or a civilization for our own glory, it only ends in confusion and alienation. We must learn to run our communities, our society, and our countries for the glory of God rather than ourselves, and according to the Spirit of God rather than the wisdom of this world. That is why the very last scene in the whole of the Bible is the New Jerusalem coming out of heaven and joining itself to the earth.

God entrusts us with the mission of building up this civilization of the Spirit. And when we begin we will find that our differences are no longer confusing and scattering. We will find a new unity for humanity in the love and the Spirit of God, and we will let the Holy Spirit create the world anew.

Day

Jesus gives to his disciples this power to heal the world in the Gospel we hear today. He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is the same Holy Spirit which hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation. It is the same Holy Spirit which overshadowed Mary and conceived Jesus in her womb. And now this Holy Spirit is on us. It is an empowering Spirit, and Jesus describes the power that it gives: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain and retained.”

Today the power of divine forgiveness is put into our hands, yours and mine. And this is power to stop all of the cycles of violence which hinder and injure our personal relationships and break out into the wars which scar all of human history.

After all, the real power of violence lies not in its ability to hurt, but in its ability to reproduce and to grow. You hit me, I hit you harder. Nations retaliate against each other and wars escalate. Those who suffer abuse as children often grow up to be abusers. And murderers are executed to make the point that killing people is unacceptable.

The Holy Spirit empowers us to stop these cycles of violence in their tracks by forgiveness. And this is nothing less than an imitation of Christ’s own Passion, in which he takes to himself on the Cross all the violence and hate that we can dish out, and gives nothing back but the blessing and kindness of the Resurrection.

Let us gladly accept the power to forgive with the very forgiveness and compassion of God. By forgiving let us let go of every bitterness of heart that injures our personal relationships with gossip, detraction, and betrayal. And if we start there, let us have confidence that we are allowing the Holy Spirit to heal the world with the soothing forgiveness that will end all violence and war, and will create the world anew in the love that is the Spirit of God.

This Preview Approved for All Audiences

(2nd Sunday of Lent, A)

Anybody here ever go to the movies? Good. Now when you go to the movies, first you have to watch the previews, right? And in a preview, they show you a couple of minutes of a film not yet released. What usually happens is that they show you pieces of different scenes, all mixed up and cut together in a way that makes the movie look better than it actually is. The purpose of this is to make you want to see the movie, and to say yourself, after seeing the preview, ‘wow, that looks good, I want to see that.’ The preview is there to try to make you commit to going to see the whole movie.

Now I suggest to you today that in this Gospel we just heard, Jesus is providing his disciples with a sort of preview of the Resurrection. He takes Peter, James, and John, the three of his apostles who will be most responsible for preaching the Gospel and leading the churches after his Ascension, and he shows them a preview of the glory of his Resurrection. His face “shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light,” Matthew tells us. Even more miraculously, for a moment Jesus enters into eternity itself, and is thus able to commune with Moses and Elijah.

This Transfiguration of the Lord is like a preview of the glory of the Resurrection. Just as a movie preview is designed to encourage to see the whole movie, the Lord gives his apostles the Transfiguration as a way to encourage them through all the terror and trouble that is on the way: Jesus’ arrest, his trial, and finally his execution on the Cross—the great events we will recall more fully in Holy Week.

Brothers and sisters, as the Lord’s Transfiguration provided encouragement to his first disciples, so this Eucharist is meant to do for us. We are pilgrims in this world, people who are journeying on their way to fullness of the Kingdom of God. Often it’s not an easy road. There are many obstacles and many opportunities for discouragement in this life. Life has its misfortunes. We make ourselves miserable with our own sins and suffer because of the sins of others. Many times in life things go wrong or just don’t work out. The final mysteries of sickness and death hang over us, taking those we love.

That’s why we gather here each week for this Eucharist, so we too can be encouraged on our pilgrim way through life. Everything about what we are doing here right now is meant to be a preview and a foretaste of our destination—our personal destination in the God we will all return to at our own death as well as the final destination of all creation in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

That we gather here in this beautiful church is not just so we can enjoy something beautiful—it’s meant to encourage us in the knowledge that we are on the way to a beautiful destiny in God. The Wisdom of the Word of God we hear at Mass is meant to encourage us to believe in the peaceful Kingdom to which we are traveling. That we sing together in harmony reminds us of the peace and harmony and unity God so desires to give to the world. Most of all, the Body and Blood of the Lord that we receive as our spiritual food helps us to know and believe that God will fulfill every desire and hope, every longing of our hearts. Everything we do here at Mass is meant to be a weekly encouragement and preview of “the life of the world to come” we proclaim at the end of the Creed. And we always need encouragement when we are on a long and sometimes difficult journey.

Our God is an inviting God. Just as God invited Abraham to leave home and journey to a land that God would show him, God invites us to commit ourselves to the journey of faith that has its destination in God himself, in his Kingdom. Abraham didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he went because he trusted God. So it has to be with us and the invitation we receive to the journey of faith. And just as Jesus invited Peter, James, and John up the mountain to be transfigured before them and give them the encouragement of a preview of the Resurrection, so the Risen Lord invites all of us to climb the mountain of faith each week to be fed and encouraged by this Eucharist.

Sin and Salvation

(1st Sunday of Lent, A)

On this first Sunday of our journey of Lent, the sacred Scriptures focus on temptation and sin. In a lot of ways this is an easy topic to reflect on and preach about, because we’ve all sinned and we all know what it’s like to feel like sinners or to suffer on account of the sins of others.

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the archetypal story about sin, of the “original sin” of our first parents. And what was their sin? God had given them the infinite dignity of being created in God’s own image and likeness, but it wasn’t good enough. They believed the serpent who told them that they should want more, that they could “be like gods” if they ate from the Tree in the middle of the garden. They were already like God! That’s how we were created. But their greed for more made them disobedient.

That’s the anatomy of all sin. We try to set ourselves up as gods instead of recognizing that only God is God. We reach out for what is forbidden—and even things we know will make us unhappy and miserable—because we decide in our hearts that we know better what we need than God does. We hurt each other because we take the judgment that belongs to God to ourselves, setting ourselves up as those who know best. And in all these sins, we only reap the same thing our first parents did: shame, misery, anxiety, and depression.

Driving a car provides a simple example of this pattern of our tendency to sin. When someone is ahead of us going slower than we are, we call him a pain—or worse. And if someone passes us going faster than we are, well, he’s a maniac. So the only correct way to drive, the only correct speed is exactly what we ourselves are doing. We are the measure of all things. We ourselves are the standard by which everything else is measured. That’s taking the role of God and appropriating it to ourselves, and that’s the root of sin.

Sin has coursed through human history from our first parents down to us here today. From the little ways we hurt and betray each other with gossip and lies all the way up to the cycles of violence and hate that break out in wars and poverty and scar the whole history of the world, we are all plagued by sin. Because we do not trust and we try over and over to set ourselves up as little gods, we keep hurting ourselves, each other, and the world.

How can we be saved from this vicious cycle of sin? The good news is that God has applied, and is applying, the remedy. To us who are stuck in this sinful pattern of making little gods out of ourselves, God does the opposite—God makes himself one of us. In Jesus Christ the Almighty God becomes one with us and fights our tendency to sin on our behalf, from within our humanity, and thus creates a path out of the cycles of sin.

This is what’s going in the Lord’s temptations in the desert! Remember the Israelites in the desert on their journey after they were freed from Egypt? Remember how they complained to God and to Moses, continually demanding things and putting God to the test? Jesus, in these forty days he spends being tempted in the desert, is re-living the forty years the Israelites spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land. But instead of failing the way the Israelites did and the way we too continue to fail, Jesus succeeds on our behalf. He defeats the temptations and remains faithful to God.

And Jesus’ faithfulness, his righteousness, and his victory over temptation and sin is freely available to all of us, as soon as we get sick and tired of being sick and tired with our sins. All we have is let his divine humanity enter into our humanity. And this is the meaning of our baptism into Christ, and our Holy Communion with his Body and Precious Blood.

This is the greatest of gifts. Jesus defeats sin on our behalf and heals the injury that our first parents brought into creation through their disobedience. But Jesus does more than just fix the situation. As Paul says, the “gift is not like the transgression.” The gift of salvation and freedom from sin in Jesus Christ goes far beyond just putting creation back together. It lifts all of creation into the divine life of God. And so, because of the work of God in Jesus Christ on our behalf, we are even more blessed than our first parents were before they sinned. We are not only created in the image and likeness of God as they were, but we are re-created according to the image of God’s only begotten Son.

The gift, this salvation, comes to us in our Baptism into Christ. At Easter we will renew the vows of our Baptism as new Christians are themselves baptized. And this is a gift so great that we spend these forty days of Lent preparing ourselves to receive it anew.