Sacred Heart Parish

Homilies

Announcements

We are looking for persons able to transcribe the audio portion of our town meetings.
Please call the rectory if you can help.


1ST SUNDAY OF LENT (C)

  1. St. Luke in our Gospel reading tells us that Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from his baptism in the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert where he was tempted by the devil. During that time he ate nothing and, obviously became hungry. You and I, baptized in water and the Holy Spirit, are called once again by the Spirit into the desert of another Lenten season. Our discipleship is to be put to the test as to how well we are to make preparation to celebrate the Easter Mystery with minds and hearts renewed. What is a desert? It is a lovely place of silence and solitude – characterized by the absence of the ordinary exchanges that constitute our daily activities. The desert is a place where ultimate questions can be raised, where radio and television cannot affect us, where we can be alone with God. A desert, of course, is scary. First of all, it is life-threatening because food and water are in scarce supply. A desert is a place of temptation where we can experience our weakness, where nothing distracts us from reflecting on the brokenness of our lives and, at times, their flawed relationships. Paradoxically, the desert is the place where we can experience the real presence of God. The Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert. Moses spent forty days in the desert – face to face with God in prayer. The prophet Elijah wandered forty days in the desert on his journey to the mountain of God. And so it was with Jesus who, as God’s innocent Lamb, carried our sins into the desert; and so it is with ourselves who now share in this long history which the Holy Spirit helps us make our own in sacramental mystery.

  2. The Latin word for Lent is “quadragesima”, meaning “the forty days”, a forty-day period of prayer, fast and almsgiving in preparation for Easter. The English word “Lent” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word which means “to lengthen”; so Lent in the Northern hemisphere came to mean “springtime” when the days begin to grow longer. The Church speaks of Lent as the great springtime retreat. Lent is not an end in itself. It exists only to lead us to the Easter feast. Thus the season of Lent had a two-fold character by recalling our baptism and by penance, both virtue and sacrament. Lent disposes God’s faithful people, who more diligently hear the word of God and devote themselves to prayer, to celebrate the Paschal Mystery of the Lord’s dying and rising which has become the sacrament of our dying to sin and rising in the Lord to the newness of life.

  3. Four centuries ago, in expressions characteristic of his day, St. Ignatius of Loyola began his “Spiritual Exercises” with these words – “Man is created to praise, reverence and serve God and, by this means, to find salvation. The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him to attain the end for which he has been created.” The Season of Lent has a lot to say about these “other things”. In regard to these “things”, Lent is a time to test our hearts, to control our desires and to learn how to serve God in freedom. Lent is not some collective hatred for possessions. It is a time for Christians to be sensitive to the sufferings and poverty that characterizes millions in our world and to be sensitive to the truth that the good things of the world are only ours on temporary loan. All the while Christians must love the things of God’s bounty. Loving things of the world needs no apology; not to love them is an insult to their Creator.

  4. This raises an interesting question with regard to worldly possessions – What distinguishes a Christian outlook from one that is purely secular and materialist? The difference is found in the importance we attach to possessions and in contrasting reactions to the temporary or permanent denial of possessions. Lenten observance seeks to promote a true poverty of spirit. We must learn to delight in good things without becoming slaves to their possession. Therefore, we ought to learn to experience being deprived of good things without anger, without envy, without thinking that our lives our worthwhile not measured by what we have, but measured by who we are and what we have become in Christ the Lord. “It is to accept with tranquility”, as one author puts it, “that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and sometimes the Lord does not give at all”.

  5. I have on my desk for years a Christmas gift from a parishioner who is skilled in calligraphy. She took a saying that I used in a homily and scripted it on a piece of old brown paper bag. It was then framed in a simple green painted frame. The saying was from Calvin Coolidge. The Connelly children had frequently heard Calvin’s golden words from our father who admired President Coolidge for his sayings but not necessarily for his politics. The saying, as you will note, contrasts remarkably with the spirit of industrial advertising. The saying goes as follows: “Eat it up; wear it out; make it do; and do without”. The Connelly children used to groan whenever we heard it – but, however, I think of it as an excellent motto for Lent.