March 19, 2006 At Saint Philip Neri Church in Midwest City, OK
Opening of Parish Mission at Saint Philip Neri Catholic Church
Midwest City, Oklahoma
Exodus 20: 1-17 + 1 Corinthians 1:22-25 + John 2: 13-15
“All of us are engaged to one degree or another in a personal, ongoing battle with sin and vice, although we may not think of the conflicts with our nature in those terms. Although our anger doesn’t make most of us murders, our lust doesn’t make most of us rapists, and our greed and envy don’t make most of us outright criminals, they together with gluttony, arrogance, and sloth, often make us and those who have to live with us miserable. Moreover, when we give in to our low passions we debase our humanity. Our failure to live up to the best we can morally be is as tragic as the unhappiness our evil causes.”[1] There is a social dimension to all of this as well for which we are responsible. It works its way through our commerce our entertainment, and our whole culture. Pride, greed, and anger profoundly influence domestic and foreign policy. If we truly had generous and compassionate leaders who were imbued with the value of social stewardship rather than greed and ambition, we would not have tolerated the corporate scandals we have endured in the last ten years. “Every deadly sin fuels harmful social phenomena: lust-pornography; gluttony-substance abuse; envy-terrorism; anger-violence; sloth-indifference to the pain and suffering of others; greed-abuse of public trust; and pride-discrimination.”[2]
These sins are about what it means to be human and humane, not about what it means to be perfect or “holy.” This is basic stuff. It concerns the core of what we are, of what we can become, and most importantly, of what we should aspire to be.[3] In the end, the question of what we want to be has an answer most of us would quickly give: happy. We want to be happy. What those of us who share a common faith believe is that happiness is not dependent upon physical or material pleasure. In fact it is often hampered by it. “Our culture teaches that pleasure and possessions are happiness with the result that pleasure is often substituted for happiness and meaning in life.”[4] When a crisis comes along that pleasure cannot resolve a secular person runs to the psycho-therapist. It is not so for us. We have a treasure of wisdom and tradition, teaching and revelation that leads us to a life of virtue and balance, holiness and joy. It is not that pleasure is inappropriate, but that it comes from character and virtue, and a right relationship of one’s self to others. That is where we shall find pleasure.
“If we do not take seriously our capacity for evil, we are unable to take seriously our capacity for good.”[5] There will be no taking credit for the good that we do if we fail to accept the blame for the evil. The tradition we shall reflect upon from now until Wednesday, “The Seven Deadly Sins” does not allow us to compartmentalize our lives. It reminds us that our lives are ours to make. Unlike our bodies so influenced by our genes, our souls, our spirit, and the lives they animate are free to be shaped by our choices. We can choose to be whole. There is more and better in us than we have chosen to become. Accepting the fact that we sin is a summons to life. [6]
We are always inventing gods. It seems to be a characteristic of our age and perhaps every age. The god most popular this day is a god who does not demand much of us, is certainly not a god that punishes, although we don’t mind a reward now and then. The sentimental god of most sappy religious pop music is a god that just pats us on the head like grandpa and sends us on our way. With a god like that, there is certainly no need to trouble one’s self about the devil but there’s the trouble. The devil’s best trick is to convince us that there is no devil.
We recognize evil in others, but if we ever want to see the face of sin, we must look in the mirror. All we see in others is it’s reflection from ourselves. The honest among us know that what we always criticize first in another is the very thing we dislike in ourselves. Sin is our secret from others. Only we know where and how deeply it has taken root in us. Saint John says: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
The last words of today’s Gospel speak the truth about us. We are sinners. Sin is in our nature, and so John says: He needed no one to give him testimony about human nature. He was well aware of what was in man’s heart.”[7] When we recognize and confess that sin and our inclination toward it is a part of our nature, and that we alone will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd. We can make sense of our lives because the existence of evil presents us with moral choices, and in making those choices, we form our character. We have been given our nature, but we choose our character. When we say someone is a good man or a good woman, we do not suggest that they are people in whom there is no inclination to evil, but rather that they are people who have wrestled and still wrestle with it and never give in because their quality and their goodness comes from the struggle. Those people are truly noble.
“Morality is like art, said G.K. Chesterton, “it consists of drawing a line somewhere.”[8] We live in an age in which no lines seem to be drawn at all, or those that have been there are being erased. As a result, our humanity is losing much of its real glory and beauty. It is less and less a mirror of the creator. I want to propose to you that if we can take our sinning seriously we might at least find that we can be interesting again, and so can life itself.
I invite you to give four evenings this week for the sake of the truth, four evenings in this church in front of the mirror for the sake of life itself, your life. Tonight it will be about Pride and Envy. Monday night about Anger and Sloth. Tuesday night about Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. That leaves one night left over, Wednesday for the sake of repentance and healing, for the sake of committing ourselves to the virtues with which we may oppose those sins, and in so doing, rise to life again. 7:00 o’clock.