1st Sunday of Lent

The purpose of the Lenten Season is to allow us to refocus our spiritual lives. It is easy enough to have our spiritual lives distorted by so many distractions. We easily allow our spiritual lives to become secondary as we are preoccupied with the material world and its allurements. The distractions of self-gratification, avarice, and pride lead us away from our true selves. We develop attitudes that separate us from God. These next forty days are a time to set aside our distractions and change our attitudes about life. Lent is a time for an attitude adjustment.

Attitude adjustment will be a theme for my Lenten homilies. From now until Easter, I'll focus on how one particular virtue shapes our spiritual lives. So, you'll want to be here in church every weekend to hear how developing this virtue will improve every aspect of your life. Invite your family, neighbors, and friends to be here too. The latest COVID surge is subsiding. It is a good time to rejoin the parish community in person to receive the Eucharist.

A virtue, St. Thomas Aquinas defines as a habit or a stable quality of the intellect, will, or passion through which an individual can do what is morality demanded at a particular moment and do it in the right way with appropriate motivation. One of the most fundamental virtues is humility.

We often misunderstand humility and equate it with weakness, low self-esteem, a lack of ambition, or a tendency to play down our accomplishments. That isn't humility at all. Real humility isn't a low opinion of ourselves but a clear opinion of ourselves. Humility has been defined as knowing yourself as you are and being grounded or rooted in your true self. That isn't a definition developed by a modern self-help guru. It came from St. Bernard back in the 11th Century.

Today's scriptures give us some crucial insights into how we can experience an attitude adjustment by developing humility. The first reading came from the Book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is one of the books of that section of the Hebrew Scriptures referred to as the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is the core of the Hebrew Scriptures and includes Genesis, which tells of the origins of the Jewish people; Exodus is a history of the Jew's slavery in Egypt and their deliverance from it. The third and fourth books of the Pentateuch are Leviticus and Numbers, and they tell the history of the Israelites wandering in the desert. Deuteronomy gives the account of the final teachings of Moses before he died and the people entered the Promised Land.

The Israelites had been wandering in the desert for forty years, even though the distance from Egypt to the Promised Land should have taken only a few days to travel. It was their impatience, ingratitude, arrogance, sinfulness, or in other words, their lack of humility that kept them walking around in circles. The Israelites' lack of humility caused the first generation of escaped slaves denial of the opportunity to enter the Promised Land.

Today Moses instructs those entering the Promised Land their first obligation is to show humility by showing gratitude to God. Their first action must be to offer the first fruits, their first margin of profit from the land, back to the Lord, and remember they are indebted to God.

Moses teaches the people they must remember their humble origins. They must say:

My father was a wandering Aramean

who went down to Egypt with a small household

and lived there as an alien.

Moses describes the situation of their ancestor Jacob. Jacob and his family had lived a nomadic existence until drought and famine caused them to settle down in Egypt. There they had become such a strong and numerous people the Egyptians became fearful of them, causing them to enslave the Israelites. So, a humble beginning becomes even more humbling. So, the Israelites turned humbly to God in their oppression, and God heard their cry.

Moses reminds the people God brought them out of Egypt with a strong hand and mighty signs and wonders. It wasn't by their power they escaped Egypt but only because God had helped them. God parted the Red Sea and provided them with food and water in their desert wandering. Now God will give them blessings and abundance as they enter the Promised Land.

The Israelites called themselves the Chosen People, and on the surface, that can sound like boasting, but they meant just the opposite. They said that while other groups of people could boast of accomplishments, the Greeks their wisdom and erudition, the Romans, their military prowess and administrative skills, the Jew's only boast was that God had specially chosen them. All they had to offer the world was what God gave them.

Honestly, humility is difficult for most of us. I know it is difficult for me. It is too easy for our pride and ego to get in the way. Rather than practice humility, we don't want to look bad, lose control, or admit we might have been wrong. If I have been disrespected, I don't want to be humble. I want an apology. If I have been offended, I don't want humility. I want a chance at payback. If I have been humiliated, I want to get revenge. That is why we need to work at an attitude adjustment this Lent. It is why we need to use this Lent to grow in humility.

This Lent, we need to recognize humility, not as something that weakens us but instead shows our strength. The virtue of humility helps us become the person God created us to be, and humility causes us to recognize God is in charge and not us. Humility allows us to recall our success isn't of our own making but a gift from God. Please don't take that wrong our efforts matter, but we need to recognize God as their source.

Humility helps us recognize that we are wired for relationships, and we need one another. Humility helps strengthen our relationships, and it is necessary for successful ones. Humility contributes to our development of other virtues such as kindness, mercy, forgiveness. Humility contributes to our recognition that we have faults and failures so we can be more compassionate to others. Humility has tremendous power to strengthen our relationships.

Humility is essential for a close relationship with God. We don't need to be extremely intelligent, physically attractive, a skilled athlete, or successful at business to have a relationship with God. What we need is humility. The scriptures warn us God opposes the proud, knocks down those who exalt themselves, but lifts the lowly and gives grace to the humble. That is the way it works with God.

So, over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a close look at humility. We'll see how prayer is essential for growing in it. We'll reflect on the obstacles to growing in humility. How practicing humility can make our lives even better. Towards the end of Lent, we'll see that God favors and blesses those who practice humility. So, commit yourself to attend Mass throughout Lent. Remember Holy Redeemer Livestreams every Mass. The Livestream of our 4 pm Saturday Mass is archived, so if you would like to listen to this homily again, you can do it at your pleasure anytime in the coming week.

Fr. Michael White is a priest in the Baltimore area and is the founder of the Rebuilt Parish movement to revitalize parish life. Fr. White tells a story about an encounter he had with Pope John Paul II. Pope John Paul accomplished much in religious and secular fields during his pontificate and is one of the greatest popes the Church has known, and it has already canonized him.

In the 1990s, Pope John Paul visited Baltimore, and a young Fr. White was on the committee to plan the visit. He was in charge of providing hospitality to the pope and his entourage. A mid-day rest break was part of the pope's schedule, and Fr. White was responsible for setting up a suite of rooms where the pope could relax and eat a meal in quiet.

White says he didn't have particular instructions on arranging the accommodations, so he did the best he could. He tried to see the rooms were comfortable and attractive, and he arranged a cold buffet for the group. The pope and his assistants came into the room, and Fr. White and the Secret Service officers left so the pope could have privacy.

After about fifteen minutes, Pope John Paul's private secretary stuck his head out of the door and called Fr. White over. White says his heart sunk. He thought to himself, "What have I done wrong?" Have I breached some protocol or committed some faux pas?" He rushed over to the priest and asked what was wrong. The secretary asked, "Father, the food in there." White immediately thought, "Oh, no, it isn't good enough. There isn't enough. It isn't what they want to eat. It should be hot and not cold." White said to the secretary, "Yes, Yes, what about the food? What is wrong?" The secretary responded, "The pope wants to know if we can have some." Humility, it is often said, isn't thinking less of ourselves but about ourselves less.