Friday of First Week of Lent

March 14, 2003

Before you bring your gift to the altar, and recall that another has anything against you, go first and be reconciled before offering your gift.

Not only do we use the sign of peace at the wrong time and place in the liturgy but it has become void of its great significance--reduced to a gesture of good will at best. Does God really demand that we be the ones to take initiative to straighten out difficulties when the other person has the angry feelings against us? The answer that we do not want to hear is, unqualifiedly, yes!

God is not trying to make things more difficult for us, but rather, wants us to share in his wonderful vision that what we are destined to be is nothing less than the best‑‑not content to be good‑‑anything less is not worthy of our dignity of being in the image of God.

As the priest standing at the altar, I do not leave; while members of the congregation exchange this ritual, I prepare myself, making peace with God. Every day I kneel before the consecrated species praying: “By the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit your death brought life to the world, keep me faithful to your teaching and never let me be parted from you.”

An awesome prayer and challenge, and I wonder, as I ask myself, how can it be possible for me to be receiving this precious gift of God's body and blood, even as I know my sins and know that God knows them. Is there something wrong in this picture?

But I know in my heart, in a deep place inside, where my faith resides, that something is very right. That Christ came and died not for the healthy, but for those sick in sin and desperately in need of a cure, which only Christ could provide.

I recall my sins, I do not deny them but I rejoice in the fact that God loves me even in my sin, in my imperfection, because it is perfectly human to be imperfect. Only God can be perfectly perfect and I am not and I have no desire to be God. He can do the job far better than I.

And so I stand and I invite all to join me and say—“Happy are those who are called to His table.” Then you join me in acknowledging your own unworthiness and sinfulness and submission to the word-‑the healing word that forgives and fills us with peace.

This is the real sign of peace. I would hope it would never be as casual and as nonchalant as the one with which you are perhaps already too familiar.

The lessons of this first week of Lent have been awesome, repetitious, but not boring, as they call us to an ever deeper life.