Pastor's Letter

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Third Sunday of Lent

Pastor’s Greetings,

From long experience with funerals I am very aware that in the space of a week any one of us can be dead and buried.  To me this is a sobering but not a morbid thought.  I myself have had some close calls, the most recent being a rupturing appendix.  After the CT scan Tuesday night, February 2nd, it was clear to me as I went to surgery that without the operation I could not possibly survive.  I prayed, of course, for God’s will to be done and was at peace in that will.  I finally knew how acutely ill I was.  However strange it may sound, instead of fear or anxiety it all felt like an adventure to me.  I was at peace.  My brother, Fr John, joined me at OMHS admissions and later anointed me in the Sacrament of the Sick (my first time ever).  He stayed with me until I went into surgery.  Altogether, the whole experience was one of blessing.  I know and knew that I could have died and by now be almost three weeks buried.  The Lord desired for me another outcome.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.

The gospel of this day, Luke 13.1-9, recognizes the precarious nature of our lives on earth.  Jesus comments on news of the deaths of some from political violence in Galilee and some from a building collapse in Jerusalem.  Today he could illustrate his same point by reference to a car bomb in Iraq, a suicide bomber in Kabul, or by reference to the earthquakes in Haiti or Chile.  It is not because the victims of these events were more than normally sinful or more sinful than the survivors that they died.  All of us potentially are exposed to mortal dangers on a daily basis.  It is the state of our lives on this earth.  So Jesus taught, “Unless you repent, you shall likewise perish.”  But what does this mean.  What sort of repentance does he prescribe.  Surely, because he does refer to our being sinful, he must be calling us to repent of our sins.  So we pray, “Our Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive.”  Still, there is more.  He is also calling us to a conversion to have an attitude and presence of mind that prays, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

With the lens of the Lord’s Prayer, both aspects of the repentance to which Christ invites us become clear.  Since we are much more familiar with the call to repentance from sin by way of forgiveness and deliverance, I want to focus on the repentance through prayer for “our daily bread.”  Our daily bread today teaches awareness of the immediate providence of God, our heavenly Father.  From long before the time of Jesus, “bread” symbolized inclusively all the earthly things that we need to live.  God is then giving me my breath, heart beat, food, clothing, safety, shelter, in fact, all my wherewith all.  As I ask all these things, I gratefully recognize them all as being directly or indirectly supplied by God.  I also am taught by Jesus to pray not just for myself but for “our daily bread today.”  The blessings to each are blessings for all.  Each moment is a gift from our heavenly Abba.  Should then some evil come our way and we be its victims, it will be powerless to snatch us from our heavenly Abba’s hands.   Likewise, abiding in those hands, we will bear much fruit. This is the attitude Jesus himself demonstrated when he embraced the cross, a victim of injustice, torture, and execution.  He died into the Father’s hands.  Neither Death nor the Grave could deprive him of Abba’s providence that day.

We are taught to begin each morning with an offering of ourselves completely that day in Christ to our heavenly Abba.  Likewise, we end each day entrusting ourselves and all that has been that day into the hands of God.  Then we sleep or pass the night in God’s hands.  I want in my mind and soul to seek and to have each moment from God and to God who gives us this day our daily bread.  Each moment then brings gifts to a consciously grateful child of God who returns all to God generously and in a neighborly way.  I then receive any illness or misfortune while standing in the hands of Abba and respond to the calamities around me offering the gifts I have received from God.  Abiding in those hands neither I nor we can utterly perish.  Although just like you I may, and some day will, die on this earth, I hope to do so obedient to our heavenly Abba’s will, falling into his hands.  May our prayer be, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.  Amen.”

Fr. Richard