Sin & Temptation

1st Sunday Of Lent
Cycle A
9 March 2014.
Matt: 4:1-11
Genesis: 9.3:1-7
Tony van Vuuren

For most people, reality is that which we can see, touch, hear, smell and taste; it is the world around us. For the Christian, however, reality extends beyond the physical environment and encompasses a whole spiritual realm as well; both the glory of heaven and Satan’s realm of darkness.

The devil is a reality of our world, and he challenges us, by waging war against us day and night!

The two themes in today’s readings that ring out loud and clear are Sin and Temptation. Both are most appropriate to reflect on for this first Sunday of Lent, as we begin our Lenten observances.

A time for us all to be encouraged and inspired to get tough and aggressive with whatever sins or temptations we may be facing in our lives. What better time than the forty days ahead for us to prepare and equip ourselves to start this journey into the desert of Lent and of our lives? And what better readings are there to break open this topic of sin and temptation than today’s selection? We all battle with sin and temptation.

No one who has ever lived on earth has been exempt from this day to day challenge. Even if one is sinless (Jesus, Mary), the fact of facing the temptation of sin remains. We all need help battling sin. We all want to live a life that is less sinful than the day before.

The book of Genesis presents the tragedy of wrong choices in front of good and evil; an evil that is born in the heart of mankind, from our choices, our refusals and our stubbornness in using our own criteria instead of those of God.

Do we recognize ourselves in every character in the first reading from Genesis? As we all know too well from our own bad choices, the lines between good and evil are not exactly easy to determine sometimes and we are all too eager to let our vision be blurred.

We might wonder why the serpent was even allowed to exist in the Garden of Eden where all things were presumably paradisiacal. We wonder why God would have allowed such simple innocents as Adam and Eve to be tempted. Adam can blame Eve for handing him the apple. Eve can blame the serpent for tempting her.

The serpent can blame God for allowing him to exist and to tempt such unsophisticated innocents. Like Adam have we often entered into sin by simply following the behaviour of another? No deep thought processes, no moral deliberations. Have we simply followed another blindly?

Like Eve we have all faced temptations. We have entered into a conversation in our minds about right and wrong and we have rationalized our decision to give into temptation by pretending to find some good in it — some advantage in it — some power in it. Like the serpent how often have we seduced others into sinning?

Whether we, as children on a playground, have taught a younger child a swear word or a rude gesture or whether we are adults gossiping about someone else, to their detriment. Can we all find moments in our past where we have caused another to sin?

Pope Francis was quoted in last week’s Southern Cross that if everybody stopped gossiping we could all possibly be saints! We may also consider the absurdity of sin. St. Paul writes to the Romans (7) – “I do not understand my own actions. For the very thing that I do not want to do, I do, and the very thing I DO want to do, I do not do.”

Who amongst us has escaped that scenario in our lives? In the passage from the Gospel, Matthew presents the same temptation of Adam and Eve, but shows how Jesus is victorious and points out the way to live a life faithful to God and free from the profound evil that threatens us.

But the temptations also represent important categories to consider in our own lives. The first temptation is to provide more comfort for ourselves than we reasonably need or choose to have.

It may seem silly for us to equate Jesus being tempted to eat a bit of bread in the middle of his fast as overindulgence, but in the strict sense of the word that is what Jesus would be doing.

Jesus would be taking for himself more than he sees reasonably fit to take at a particular time in a particular place in his personal history.
We have all overindulged.

We are both temporal and spiritual beings and Jesus reminds us that there is a balance between these things. How many times have we caught ourselves trying to fill a deep need for comfort and intimacy with things that will never ultimately satisfy?

Food, Drink, Sex, Exercise, Clothes, Cars, Houses, Drugs, etc. Balance is required. Moral behaviour is required. And, a strong dependence upon God is required the most, when we have to struggle through our personal deserts with only God’s word to assure and sustain us.

Let’s rewrite a sentence of St. Augustine:” When you’re caught by the pangs of hunger – (and we can add of temptation) – let the Word of God become your bread of life, let Christ be your Bread of Life.”

The second temptation involves putting oneself in a situation to see how far one can go with God. By putting ourselves in a situation that is deliberately threatening and then we expect to be rescued by God. Risk taking in life may be required to fulfil the will of God, but what Jesus is being asked to do is to take a risk for his own prestige — for his own gain.

Jesus simply responds – “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” How many times have we put ourselves in dangerous situations and have then remorsefully prayed for and relied upon the help of God to keep us out of trouble; Irresponsible drinking and driving, financial mismanagements, promiscuous sexual liaisons, cheating, lying, criminal behaviours?

Finally, Satan tempts Jesus with the possibility of immediately gaining immense power. Jesus’ response is – “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.”

We can so easily be lured by prestige and titles while we slowly lose our dependence upon the one true God.

Overindulgence, putting ourselves in dangerous and irresponsible situations, and wanting to exercise power over others are three major categories of temptations that we are faced with every day.

Jesus does give us a way out — a way to defend ourselves; and that has to do with dependence upon God. We may never be completely sin-free but if we focus all of our energies upon being completely dependent upon God, we are guaranteed to be tempted less.

Let us remember that Prayer, alms giving and fasting are significant and lasting ways for us to become closer to God.

The temptation scenario described by Matthew is no pretend-temptation. Jesus couldn’t just brush aside the choices placed before him, not if he were, as the Scriptures tell us, “fully human.”

But Jesus comes out of the desert as the one who has overcome Satan; he faced real temptations and rejected them in favour of God and God’s ways–as mysterious as those ways can seem at times.

We pray today for a renewed gift of the Holy Spirit, so that we can remain faithful to our calling and, as Jesus says to us today — worship “the Lord your God” and serve God alone.

By trying to make some meaningful change to our lives we are all faced with a serious but joyful challenge for Lent 2014.

Put down your stones

5th Sunday Lent 2013
17 March 2013
Deacon Les Ruhrmund

As we begin these last two weeks of Lent we are reminded in the readings that when we exercise power as if God were doing it, cruelty and suffering surely follow. God’s ways are not our ways and God doesn’t see the world through the myopic lenses of humankind.

In the first reading from the Book of Isaiah, God tells his people that while they have already experienced his favour in their escape from Egypt through the Red Sea and their deliverance from captivity in Babylon – they haven’t seen anything yet!!

He cautions them not to get so lost in the past that they miss the signs in the present.
“I’m doing a new thing” he says.
What is to come will be considered impossible!
“I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

That new way is Jesus Christ.

In the extract we heard from Paul’s letter to the Philippians he says “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Paul is saying that compared to the personal experience of knowing Jesus, everything else is worthless.

In the previous verses he says that before he knew Jesus he was a righteous Jewish man;
circumcised and faithful to the letter in the law and that in the name of righteousness and God’s law, he had persecuted the church of Christ.

But now, he says, I realise that that was just garbage.

In the Gospel we have the incident of the woman caught in adultery.
In terms of the law the woman was facing death by stoning.
Where do we see ourselves in this story?

Are we the executioners? Or the bystanders? Or the sinful woman?

The executioners have religious law on their side. In terms of their religion they are justify to kill the woman. In terms of their law, they felt justified in having Jesus killed. It matters not that inside they may be boiling with hatred, jealousy, revenge or lust – as long as they do the right things, virtue has been achieved.

The executioners measure their virtue by the things that they do.

There are Christians too who measure their virtue purely by their actions. They have a check list of mandatory prayers and practices in their head and as long as they tick the boxes they’re happy that they are living a virtuous Christian life – even though they may carry in their hearts strong prejudice, intolerance and anger.

Being a disciple of Jesus is much more difficult than that.
Our Christian mission is to be the body of Christ on earth;to be the hands, feet, eyes, ears and mouths of Jesus.

Every time we reject or condemn someone for example because of their race, religion, education, health status, possessions, age or sexual orientation, we are executioners.
Jesus says put down your stones.

The bystanders are attracted by the noise and the spectacle; perhaps they’re curious and have never seen an execution before or alternatively they’re unmoved by witnessing someone having their flesh and bones smashed with rocks.

We have bystanders in the Church as well. They come to Mass every weekend but their religion has little or no impact on their daily lives; they’re unmoved by the sacrifice of the Mass. Lent comes and goes with little effort to embrace penance, prayer or charity.

When we allow others to play the role of executioner in our presence, we are a bystander.

When we for example allow people in our presence to take the Lord’s name in vain or to insult someone because of their race, religion or sexuality, we are bystanders.
When we ignore acts of dishonesty or malice we are bystanders.
Jesus asks us not to remain passive but to act as he would.

And then we come to the woman caught in adultery.
Imagine if every time we sinned we were publically punished. Is there one of us here I wonder who would not suffer punishment this very day? We can all identify with the woman;
perhaps not in sexual infidelity but in unfaithfulness never the less. Every uncharitable thought, word and deed stands as witness to our unfaithfulness.

Jesus says “I don’t condemn you; go and do not sin again.”

Being a Christian is hard work.

Quoting Francis Spufford, a contemporary English author and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London:
“We are supposed, always, to be trying to love what we don’t like or understand or want to touch; we are supposed to be taking as little notice of boundaries to love as we believe God does. We are supposed to be looking at each other in guilty brotherhood and sisterhood.
We are not supposed to be assigning guilt according to who does what with whom…..

“We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.”

In this coming week we can consider the many times that our thoughts, words and deeds have reflected those of the executioners, the spectators and the woman caught in adultery.
We are encouraged in this week as we approach Easter to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation seeking God’s mercy, his forgiveness and the grace to do much better.

God’s Covenant

2nd Sunday Of Lent.
Cycle C
24th February 2013
Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18;
Luke 9: 28-36
Rev. Dcn. Tony van Vuuren

This weekend’s readings testify to the strong and constant desire God has to make contact with us, to invite us into the mystery of his life, to raise us to holiness. He reveals himself and calls us into a Covenant of faith with him. The great biblical figures who responded to God’s call nevertheless remain very human and fallible individuals, and from that fact we should ourselves feel encouraged in our efforts to live up to the exacting demands of the Gospel.

Abraham, in the first reading, and the disciples Peter, James and John in the Gospel, experience something very similar: a mysterious, dramatic, frightening, but unequivocal revelation of God.

The reading from Genesis tells of the solemn covenant God made with Abraham. The story of our redemption could be said to begin here. God did not abandon his fallen people, but through Abraham entered into a special relationship with them.

It was not Abraham, but God Himself who took the initiative and stooped down to enter into a Covenant relationship with Abraham; and even though thereafter the people broke this covenant He did not abandon them.  Abraham himself often failed to keep to his side of the bargain, often lapsing from his original commitment. Even the memory of the overwhelming experience of God’s presence, described in today’ first reading, wasn’t enough to prevent Abraham from being tempted to put his faith in other things and not to trust completely in God. He was tested on at least ten different occasions by God.

What does become clear very quickly is that God doesn’t only make his existence known and leave it at that. As Abraham discovers, in the very act of revealing himself God draws us into a relationship with him, a relationship which makes demands on us. We can either answer “yes” to God and put our faith in him, or we can answer “no” and refuse the vocation or the journey into his life that God invites us to embark on.

We are given this incident from the Old Testament to help us interpret the Gospel account of the Transfiguration and by placing these two events together we see a parallel between Abraham and the three disciples. When the disciples first met Jesus, His miracles and His preaching won them over. Peter, characteristically, was the most fulsome in committing himself to Christ.

Then they witness Jesus’ transfiguration, this strange, terrifying revelation of Jesus’ divine nature and his unique closeness to the Father. And again it’s Peter who responds with the greatest excitement and the most inflated language.

But of course, as we know, even after this mountain top experience, the disciples’ greatest failures and betrayals – especially Peter’s – still lie ahead. As in Abraham’s case they go back on their original decision to put their faith in Jesus.

In the context of Lent, with its extra emphasis on repentance and the searching of conscience, there are maybe a few things we can learn from these great biblical figures, separated by thousands of years but joined by faith in the one true God.

God does not ask for consistent and unfailing perfection from the moment of our first conversion. He knows full well the weakness of our nature and our tendency to become distracted from him and to allow our attention and our devotion to be divided.

What God does ask is that when we fail, we should always recognise what has happened and turn back to him. As both Abraham and the disciples discovered, we may break faith with God several times, abandon the discipline of spiritual life through tiredness and a sense that our failings are too deeply-rooted and that we never make any progress, or simply because we hanker after other goals in life, which the values of the Gospel obstruct.

But God never ceases to call us, to wait for us, and never ceases in his willingness to renew his Covenant.

In our spiritual and moral life it’s important to persevere and never to sink into resentment of the fact that we feel trapped in a cycle of sinning and presenting ourselves, with a sort of simmering humiliation and wounded pride, before an all-perfect God: saying over and over, “it’s me again God, same sins, same flaws”.

The keynote perhaps in our relationship with God is humility, rather than humiliation.

Our Covenant with God involves on our side a clear recognition of the fact that we are creatures, made by him with a purpose and vocation determined by him, which we must discover with prayer and searching and quiet thoughtfulness.

We are all put to the test; but it never comes in the form that we would prefer!

Abraham, Peter and the other men and women God approaches and chooses, were people like this: not heroes, but in many ways frail and all-too fallible. But they were men and women of faith who gave their basic allegiance to God and – despite personal failings – abandoned the pride and self-affirmation that alienates us from God.

And since this is our basic stance concerning God and concerning our purpose and direction in life, even our faults often become the occasion for greater growth – through honesty, through knowledge of God, through  integrity and holiness.

Let’s not forget the conviction found in both the Old and New Testament that even our human sin and evil work towards salvation, if they bring about thoughtfulness and repentance in us, and lead us by way of contrast to a deepening appreciation of goodness, holiness and salvation.

So as we continue in the spirit of the Lenten season, and in a sense accusing ourselves of wrongs done and good undone, let’s feel heartened by the deep meaning that today’s scripture readings give to God’s unfailing fidelity to his Covenant, and the example of these great figures of faith, who turn out to be more like us, perhaps, than we might realize!

Ref: Fr Ken.
Fr Alex.

Ash Wednesday

13 Feb 2013
 Les Ruhrmund

In Lent this year we could be giving some thought to how we can be more effective witnesses to our faith, in this Year of Faith. I have some practical suggestions that we could consider but before I get there, I think it’s worth revisiting the basics of Lent; the whys and wherefores.

Lent is preparation, body and soul, for the celebration of the great feast of Easter; the better the preparation, the better the celebration. Lent begins today and concludes on the evening of Holy Thursday at the start of the Triduum – the three days marking the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday.

As Catholics we are obliged to do penance throughout the season of Lent and today and all Fridays are days of abstinence from meat. Fasting on all weekdays during Lent is strongly recommended but is not obligatory. We seem to have lost that real sense of fast and abstinence during Lent. And yet these are ancient traditions of our faith and we should embrace them proudly. I’m always impressed how sincerely and completely my Moslem friends and colleagues keep the month of Ramadan and fast from eating and drinking, without complaint, from sunrise to sunset.

Pope Benedict spoke about the need for fasting at the beginning of Lent in 2009 saying “Denying material food, which nourishes our body, nurtures an interior disposition to listen to Christ and be fed by His saving word. Through fasting and praying, we allow Him to come and satisfy the deepest hunger that we experience in the depths of our being: the hunger and thirst for God.”

The liturgy of the Mass expresses this season of fast and abstinence during Lent; there are no flowers, there are no Alleluias, we don’t rejoice in the ‘Gloria’, and music is kept to a minimum; permitted only to sustain singing. The readings focus on temptation, trust in God, repentance, forgiveness and conversion; turning our lives more completely over to Christ. That always involves giving up sin in some form. The goal is not just to abstain from sin for the duration of Lent but to eliminate deep-rooted sin from our lives.

For each of us, the challenges are different because our typical sins are different. But we nevertheless journey together because we have a shared destination.

In a nutshell, Lent is a time for confession, fasting, abstinence, prayer and works of mercy.

Here are some suggestions for Lent using the three traditional pillars of Lenten observances: prayer, fasting and charity.

Prayer takes many forms but the objective is the same; to draw us into closer relationship with God. Prayer is the most intimate form of communication we have with God.

More prayer could mean:

• Receiving the Blessed Sacrament more often during the week,
• Reading Scripture (perhaps re-read the Gospels over the next 6 weeks);
• Meditate on the Rosary;
• Read Pope Benedict’s encyclicals on hope and love
• Do a pilgrimage to one of the designated churches in Cape Town
• Say a novena for the Church as she prepares to elect a new pope
• Buy a book of spiritual readings for each day of Lent
• Listen to some of the beautiful music that has been written to express our love for Christ (classical and modern)
• Spend some time in the chapel of adoration
• Join the community here on a Friday evening meditating on the Stations of the Cross
• Participate in the mini-mission starting in the parish next Wednesday
• Set up a prayer circle with friends that you each say the same prayer, at the same time, every day, no matter where you are.

To make this possible, we’re going to have to give some things up:

• Sacrifice some idle time
• Give up reading scandal mags
• Less time surfing the net
• Less television
• Less pop music in our homes, cars and on our ipods
• Less time trawling the malls

Fasting is next and this is often an aid to prayer.

Fasting is no just about eating less – although that’s a good place to start.

We could choose to give up eating a favourite food or drink. Or we could choose to give up a complete meal every day. The very awareness of our sacrifice should draw us to remember that we are in a time of purification and penance; draw us into prayer; remind us of our hunger for God. It is a time of deprivation; giving up meat while feasting on crayfish misses the point.

Abstaining from meat traditionally also reminds us of the poor, who can seldom afford meat for their meals; those who are forced to fast by their poverty.

But we can fast from other pleasures too.

We can fast from some entertainment, leisure or social activities; fast from shopping – buying only essential necessities for the next six weeks; fast from our favourite sitcom or favourite TV or radio program.

Through our sacrifices and fasting, we should have an excess – we should have saved food, money and time – and we should add that to our contributions to charity and almsgiving; food to the hungry, money to the Lenten Appeal and time to those in need of our company, counsel and comfort.

In Pope Benedict’s Lenten address for this year he addresses the question of faith and charity and says “Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it; charity is “walking” in the truth. Through faith we enter into friendship with the Lord, through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated. Faith causes us to embrace the commandment of our Lord and Master; charity gives us the happiness of putting it into practice. Faith enables us to recognize the gifts that the good and generous God has entrusted to us; charity makes them fruitful.

“Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity” to solidarity or simply humanitarian aid. It is important, however, to remember that the greatest work of charity is evangelization, which is the “ministry of the word”. There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce your neighbour to a relationship with God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.”

Lent invites us to nourish our faith and witness to our faith in our actions and words by receiving the sacraments, and at the same time to grow in charity and in love for God and neighbour, not least through the specific practices of fasting, prayer and almsgiving.