The Reader's Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent
“Brethren: we beseech you and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would abound more and more” from the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In today’s Epistle reading, St. Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to pursue true and utter holiness and sanctity of life and body. To possess ourselves rather than to be possessed by the desires of the flesh – and, as St. Paul describes elsewhere, to not be enslaved to those desires. He initially warns against fornication, calling us to true chastity. For in such sin, instead of reflecting the Divine likeness in our lives and conduct, we rather trade it for the beastly visage, modeling ourselves not after God, but after the animal in its instinctual search for food and sex. For where concupiscence and our sexual appetites reign, so there also do we not only trade our freedom to live and love selflessly, but even worse, we mutate other-focused charity into inward-looking, self-serving narcissism.
However, Paul’s exhortation is not solely sexual sins, for next he discusses how the kind of inward twisting that sin effects in us reaches into our dealings with our neighbor. St. Paul beseeches us to not “defraud [our] brother in any matter,” for in so doing, we prefer ill-gotten gain over our brother’shonest reward – really saying that we deserve whatever we like, while others deserve nothing but what we scorn. In reality, there is no core difference between fornication and defrauding: both seek to maximize animal comforts, while demeaning our bodies and others bodies, our lives and others lives. Fornication reducesus to mere bodies without a rational, divinely-likened soul and mutes our ability to care for and serve others in charity. Defrauding provides whatever comforts we determine we deserve and we in essence raise ourselves up to god-status: we give ourselves the license to decide who deserves and doesn’t deserve what – never, of course to our own detriment, lest we be lacking an easy life.
But there is hope. In this Lenten season where we “bewail our manifest sins and offenses” against God and neighbor, God’s invitation to repentance remains open as it always is. St. Paul doesn’t in vain call us to walk in sanctity of life, avoiding sin, but rather we ought to take firm hold of the commandments of God, “not turn[ing] aside from any of the words that [he has]commanded, to the right hand or to the left” (Deut. 28:14). But brothers and sisters, we cannot do this on our own, as the Canaanite mother in the Gospel reading, we must continually cry out to Jesus “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David” and “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). This is not because God has to be cajoled into answering our pleas, but so that we would throw all of our cares and our entire lives upon Jesus for healing and righteous living. So, seek that healing, seek that forgiveness, seek Christ, seek him and never cease from calling out for mercy. He who turned away not the Canaanite woman, will in no way turn away his bride the Church. And even if we are no better than she – and we truly are not – we need no more than that crumb of the Blessed Trinity to be saved – and take heart! He willingly gives Himself to us that we may know Him to our nature’s full capacity. Keep the fast, Keep the prayers, Seek holiness this Lent and forget not, that in walking in God’s ways is freedom and true charity by the grace of the Most Holy and Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirt. Amen.
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