Fr. Gerry Creedon's homily delivered at St. Charles on February 17, 2002, the first Sunday of Lent
There are three traditional practices for the season of
Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
Prayer and Study
Prayer has to do with spiritual renewal, renewal and
rebirth in faith. Our banner, "Catch the Spirit" picks up
on our parish theme, "Feel the Spirit". "Catch the Spirit:
Pass It On" is a theme of our evangelization mission
starting on St. Patrick's Day, the feast day of a great
evangelizer. During these five days, we'll focus on a
mission of renewal. But the church is always involved in
the process of spiritual growth, renewal, and faith
sharing. Particularly today as we send our RCIA candidates
to the bishop as they journey toward Easter sacraments, we
remember that we're always called to share our faith.
Michelle Miller and her team do such a good job all year
long in our name, handing on an understanding of our faith
to those who seek to join us. But as we hand on the faith,
we are also called to renew our own faith, to keep the
faith. And so prayer is one of the Lenten disciplines that
renews faith. This is why we have extra Masses such as the
noon Mass during Lent. We also have stations of the cross.
There are pamphlets that are available about scripture
sharing with your household.
Another area of spiritual renewal involves study. On the
Tuesdays during Lent we'll have a special adult education
series in which we will be taking the faith and seeing how
we apply it to issues in our lives. This coming Tuesday
night we look at restorative justice. All year long, we
have a jail ministry where we reach out to our detention
center here in Arlington. There are at least 500 residents
who depend on us for ministry and prayer and support. It
is also a good time to study and ask, What are jails for?
Do they work? The bishops have written a document on
restorative justice. How do we find a way of applying
Christian concepts like justice, redemption, and
forgiveness to the area of jail ministry.
Fasting and Almsgiving
We have discussed prayer and study, let's now look at the
other disciplines of Lent - fasting and almsgiving.
Fasting and abstaining cut down on our consumption. We can
do with less. God knows we can. I was talking to the
children at the school the other day. Some of them are
giving up meat for the whole of Lent. Others were talking
about giving up chocolate, potato chips and television!
Now we are going to associate our fasting and our
abstinence with giving. Fasting, prayer, almsgiving; there
is an association. When you eat less it costs less. If you
have soup for supper (especially if you have it prepared
for you on a Tuesday evening by the parish which costs
nothing at all), think about what you would have spent to
buy food for that evening, especially if you have steak or
if you were going to go out to McDonald's as a household.
Then get your Enron accountants to calculate the difference
in cost of going out for supper and having free supper or
having a Lenten meal of soup or something simple in your
own home. Compute the difference honestly and contribute
it toward a fund we are developing for our sister parishes
in Haiti.
When we visited there, we met children on an island who
travel by boat and then four-and-a-half hours walking to
get to school every day. What happens if they arrive in
school and they have no food and they are hungry? Do you
think they learn much? They get listless. We have two
hundred or more households supporting children, giving
funds for schooling for those who couldn't afford it. We
should now go one next step and provide them nutrition. It
costs $800 a month to provide nutrition for 500 children.
They come, each of them, with half a gourd to pay for a
quarter of the cost. A half a gourd equals 20 cents a day.
How can we accompany and support them? We will contribute
donations from the Tuesday soup suppers to a nutrition fund
for our sister parishes in Haiti. Children in the
classrooms in St Charles school are doing the same thing.
We will also give through the rice bowl program, which is a
traditional almsgiving effort organized by Catholic Relief
Services for world hunger. If you do a Lenten meal at
home, you can contribute the difference to world hunger. A
quarter of rice bowl contributions will be kept for our
hunger program in Haiti.
And so prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are given a kind of
local and practical meaning.
Our giving up bread enables us to give bread to the hungry.
There are a variety of other forms of sacrificial giving.
The Bishop's Lenten Appeal is supports diocesan needs.
Last year we raised 112% of our diocesan goal which is
fantastic, especially given the fact that we are also
giving to our community center. And that can't stop.
The Purpose
You can ask yourself, what is the purpose of all of this
praying, studying, fasting, almsgiving? What motivates all
of it? The scriptures tell us it's about sin and grace.
The first reading tells about Adam and Eve and their sin.
The scriptures embody some of the sexism of the context in
which they are written. Eve made him do it. She tempted
him. It's like the woman taken in adultery. Where was the
guy? And the sin is often times presented as some sort of
sexual peccadillo, some sort of sexual excess. Today's
scripture clearly indicated that sin was temptation to
power. They wanted to be as gods, knowing it all. They had
a sense of arrogance. That is the sin the Gospel is
talking about. The devil's tempts Jesus to power,
spiritual power, by taking him to the parapet, the top of
the temple. And then he lures him to temporal power,
success, making it. What's underneath all of this? Ego.
Ego surfaces in all kinds of ways in our lives. It creates
a sense of turf and defensiveness even in the life of the
church community. It happens in the world of work when the
material values begin to dominate ethical principles.
The disciplines of Lent strip us of our ego and pride so
that we may become poor and vulnerable. A cup that's
already full, full of our own selves, has no room in it for
God. So let us embrace sacrificial giving with prayer and
fasting, so that we may become open to the newness of God's
spirit. Let us, like Jesus, allow our motivations to be
tested. Let us be pure of heart, a people who are open to
the power of the spirit that gives us life.
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