Homily for Ash Wednesday
March
2, 2022
Collect
Christian
Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, New Rochelle
The news media have highlighted that the 2022 election campaign began in earnest yesterday with primaries in Texas. More seriously, for a week we’ve been watching Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine. The collect today speaks of a different kind of campaign, a “campaign of Christian service.”
We Christians aren’t
battling political opponents or Russian thugs.
“We take up battle against spiritual evils.” Those evils are our personal sins, in the 1st
place—whatever tends to prevent us from offering Christian service: our worshipful service to God our Creator
thru his Son Jesus Christ, and our service to our brothers and sisters. But those evils also include the sins of society—very
graphically, the unspeakable sin of war, but numerous other social evils that
people consciously or accidentally inflict upon one another.
Our campaign aims at
enabling our purer service of God alongside Jesus and at inspiring others to do
so by defeating whatever is sinful in our own lives and in the world around us
so far as we’re able to influence the world for the better.
The collect identifies our
arms: we are “armed with weapons of
self-restraint,” which begins with “holy fasting.” Our fasting may be bodily, concerning food
and drink. More important is that we
should fast from any form of selfishness.
We should practice self-restraint especially in our impatience, anger,
self-righteousness, lust, our readiness to turn away from a brother or sister
in need. An article I was reading this
morning in Priest magazine observes:
“Sometimes our words can be misdirected and hurtful, especially when
they tear down a brother. . . . In an
attempt to make ourselves look good before others, we can say nasty things
about [one of our brothers].”[1]
The sacred season on which
we’re embarking today challenges us to practice self-restraint also by giving
the Lord more of our time in sacred reading and prayer. The more we connect with the Lord, of course,
the easier will it be to connect heartfully with our brothers.
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