Monday of the Second Week of Lent

Lectionary: 230

"Lord, great and awesome God, you who keep your merciful covenant toward those who love you

and observe your commandments! We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.

We have not obeyed your servants the prophets...."

"Whatever became of sin?" the psychiatrist Karl Menninger asked in 1973. The word has certainly not enjoyed a resurgence though the reality remains. Columnists spill oceans of ink on sexism, racism and clericalism, plus drug addiction, gun violence and suicide, without using the word sin. They don't want to appear judgmental. Opinionated perhaps, but not judgmental.

Lent invites us to stare at sin, to consider its intractability and ponder its enormity.

Genesis tracks a history of sin from Adam and Eve through the Tower of Babel. It begins as the First Couple's flagrant disobedience, complicated by Eve's blaming the serpent and Adam's betrayal of his wife and denial of all responsibility. Unfortunately, there is no great leap from this couple's miserable behavior to Cain's murder of his brother, though most common sinners like you and me insist we would never commit such a crime.

We soon find that God is disappointed with the human race in general. The only exceptions are Noah and his family, who prove themselves unexceptionable soon after the Wrath of God subsides. The Deluge as remedy failed. The sequels -- the accounts of Babel's confusion and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah -- underline the hopelessness of the human condition. Without God's direct intervention the human race cannot live up to its own dignity. Unlike the graceful gazelles and the peaceable pigeons who live in perfect conformity to God's purposes, human beings consistently opt for mutual and merciless violence.

(But we don't call it sin.)

Genesis records a new beginning with the history of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. It's not a clean break with the past, as our first reading today from the Book of Daniel attests. "We have sinned, been wicked and done evil...."

What is new is God's self-revelation and personal guidance. The Chosen People should be holy as God is holy; they should live in the tranquil presence of God even in this untranquil world. Knowing God's purposes and enlightened by God's spirit they will do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with their God.

It sounds simple and sometimes it is, but the life and death of Jesus will prove that virtue is never easy. Living gracefully as a human being requires Godlike courage.

Without the Holy Spirit we cannot become what we were meant to be, no more than a vacuum cleaner can run without electricity or a semi without diesel. Vacuums and trucks might be pretty objects but without energy they are useless. So it is with the human being; we are useless without the animating Holy Spirit. This was God's intent from the beginning. That "God-sized emptiness" in our being cannot be filled with anything smaller than God. Neither possessions nor power, neither popularity nor respect, neither pleasure, freedom nor security can satisfy. Our sin is to keep trying everything and anything but God.

Lent invites us first to experience that emptiness within our being by fasts and abstinence from certain foods, drinks and activities. By prayer and acts of charity we invite the Lord to provide a satisfaction which is otherwise unattainable.
Sin is not going away. But in recognizing it we allow the Shepherd to guide us back to him.