The season of renewal
Archbishop George Niederauer delivered this homily at Ash Wednesday Mass, March 9, at St. Mary’s Cathedral.
“Is there a difference between a crime and a sin?” A pollster who asked people that question would hear lots of “yeses” and lots of “noes.” When people in the public eye are accused of wrongdoing, they often say, “Everything I did was perfectly legal.”
But there is a big difference between a crime and a sin. People who believe in God and people who do not can agree that robbery and murder are crimes. But only people who believe in God believe in sin, because “sin” means an offense against God.
For instance, Pope John Paul II taught us the priceless value of human life as a gift from God. Contrast that with the civil government’s “legalizing” of abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. For believers these actions are still sinful, whether or not they are legal.
Sin, then, has to do with our relationship with God and so does Ash Wednesday. A good way to begin to understand your relationship with God is to think about your other human relationships. You cannot be unfaithful to a stranger in the same way you can be unfaithful to someone you know and love – and who knows and loves you: a friend, a husband, a wife, or a parent or sister or brother or child. We Christians believe our profoundest relationship is with God in Jesus His Son, because God has created us and given us all those other relationships. We believe that God our Father created us out of love, gave us our loved ones and all our gifts, and sent His Son, Jesus, to give us a share in his life, and to call us to live with him forever in eternal life.
Because we are imperfect and weak, we commit sin; that is, we act selfishly against our love for God against our love for our neighbors, our sisters and brothers in Christ. Lent is a season devoted to renewing our relationships with God, individually and together as a Catholic family of faith. On Ash Wednesday the church reminds us of our need to be renewed, to let Jesus renew us. We need to experience conversion, which means to turn back again more completely in the direction of God’s love for us. In the first reading today, the prophet Joel speaks for God to the people: “Even now return to me with your whole heart.” Why? The prophet continues, “For God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, rich in kindness and relenting in punishment.”
In our second reading today St. Paul writes to his friends at Corinth, to remind them that God has reconciled them to himself in Jesus, his Son, their Brother. God has turned these people back toward himself through their relationship with Jesus Christ. You and I don’t earn salvation or reconciliation; it is a gift given us by God through Christ. We don’t earn it, but we must accept it and respond to it and use it. So St. Paul says, “Do not receive the grace of God in vain.” St. Augustine explained it another way: “God who created you without you will not save you without you.”
When should all this happen? NOW! Listen to St. Paul again: “Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!” The most dangerous word in the Christian life is “tomorrow.” (That’s true for dieting, too, of course.) For instance, “I’ll start praying tomorrow, or next month.” We get so wrapped up in our efforts to stay alive physically and academically and socially, that we forget the most important kind of “staying alive” – spiritually – staying alive in God, in Christ’s Church. We need to stay alive in Christ all our lives long.
That’s one reason the Church puts ashes on our foreheads today: “Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” The Church is not being morbid, merely realistic and truthful. Our lives will end; diamonds may be forever, but you and I are not. So the church challenges us to center our lives in Christ rather than in ourselves. Why? Because being self-centered is a dead end – literally (think “ashes”). Being Christ-centered has a great future, here and forever. The ashes are meant to make us truthful, humble, and hopeful about ourselves and Jesus – not to make us feel spiritually superior to all those mere mortals around us who don’t have ashes on their foreheads today.
The church recommends three practices for us during Lent: prayer (listening to God’s word and responding from the heart); fasting or sacrifice (saying “no” to ourselves in some way that frees us for a “yes” to Christ in others); almsgiving (giving and sharing what God has given us). We do these Lenten actions NOT for their own sake, to make ourselves look good – Jesus is clear about that in today’s Gospel reading.
So, let’s live a good Lent: Let’s center on Christ, not on ourselves; let’s try to do that each day, and not save it for some tomorrow that never comes.
From March 4, 2011 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
