1st SUN LENT – Homily #2 / audio

 The Third Temptation – Our daydreams about our/my greatness, to control for every outcome, can help us be situated with Christ in Lent.

So, “How did you Marquette University fans prepare for the game against Creighton, to prepare against loss?”

Should I wear my lucky Creighton sweatshirt or not?  I was seeking a way of managing my anxiety to ward off loss, humiliation, and having my expectations turned upside down.

I try to control for my anxiety by worrying about how I will be accepted.  “How did I do?  Was I good enough?”  And I made the folks at 7:30 am Mass pay for said anxiety by thinking of them as judging how I did.

In controlling for anxiety, I make others pay the price – anger, impatience, withholding, gossip, etc…

Jesus, however, opted for vulnerability, insecurity of the human condition – so he didn’t make others pay the price for his humanness creatureliness.

Good News: Can we learn from our precious and terrible mortality, within which Christ is already situated, how Christ is making salvation for us and the world?  Pray about this:

Preface for Sundays III: For we know it belongs to your boundless glory that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself, that the cause of our downfall might become the means of our salvation through Christ our Lord…”