Fr. Paul Weinberger
St. William’s Catholic Parish
Greenville, Texas
March1, 2006
Ash Wednesday
Your Father Who sees what is hidden will repay you.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Twenty-three years ago I was twenty-three and I was just a day or two away from entering the seminary so I had some last minute errands to run before I left for seven years. Talk about long engagements! Anyway, I had to get some things done in Dallas so I got into my car going to downtown Dallas and headed north on the old Central Expressway, which had two lanes going north and two going south. There was what amounted to a piece of paper as a guard rail in the middle.
I was on the expressway and I thought I was by myself in the car. It wasn’t rush hour and when it isn’t rush hour you really have to hurry before it becomes rush hour. The only place worse than Dallas when it comes to traffic is Austin.
Every time a slot would open up on the freeway I naturally wanted to move forward and I was always successful, but on this day when I was about to accelerate it felt like there was a hand right here on my shoulder pushing and saying,
“NO! Lets don’t do that.”
I thought to myself,
“Man, I am twenty-three, am I losing my edge already?”
I wasn’t even forty yet. Of course now I am forty-six. Anyway this happened two or three times so I was going a lot slower that day than I normally would. I was going to go to 635 where I needed to be to run the errands, but I got off on Walnut Hill Lane and coming the other direction was a full dump truck, which crashed into the guard rail and ran into all these cars then went down into the grass and up onto the service road before stopping. The "first" car was not damaged and the person in it was not injured or killed.
I could have died that day. Maybe like the Twilight Zone, I had a new lease on life. I was twenty-three and now twenty-three years later I am going to die. Well, I don’t think that is going to be a twilight zone but my time in the seminary would make a lot better Twilight Zone episode...that is yet another story. But, I do know that I am going to die someday. You are all going to die; everyone who has ever been created will die. All those people who have had themselves frozen are going to die. If they live, they are frozen but everyone else dies so who will thaw them out? If they thaw out on their own what are they going to do when everyone else is dead?
Our Lord tells us that this world is passing away. Father raps on the pulpit We look at this world and it appears so firm and solid but it is indeed passing away. The Grand Canyon will be gone, the tremendous mountains in West Texas will be gone as well as Sherman and Denison Texas. Everything that we see is going to pass away and yet, we act as though this is the life eternal here on earth and we spend our days here caring for these “things”. The things that we have and the beautiful things of the world absorb us. For example, we spend our lives worrying if the roof is leaking or making sure that the car has gas and the oil is changed every 3,000 miles. We worry if there is enough food in the house and if we buy new food we have to make sure and use the old food first or it will ruin. Then we have to throw it awayand someone has to take out the garbage. We try to make sure there is money in certain accounts and if there is not, we have to make sure and transfer it. If we don’t have any money then we call dad. These things absorb us. We have to pick up the kids from the babysitter...some day.
All of these things we have to do are endless and year after year we repeat this list. It is kind of like a hamster on one of those little wheels. He just runs in circles and when he gets off he is huffing and puffing. He goes over to his cage, looks in the mirror and yes, he is still a hamster. How depressing; all of that work and he is still a hamster. We are just like the hamster in being absorbed; running in circles and doing these things when this is not reality.
When you hear these words today they will grab you.
Remember man that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
Thinking about our death will really grab us. Today we are able to say another phrase. Instead of the one I just quoted, we can say,
“Repent and believe in the Gospel.”
I am waiting for the one that says,
“Have a nice day.”
It doesn’t really do it for me! But when you hear that you ARE DUST and unto DUST you SHALL RETURN, it reaches in and grabs each one of us. We know we are going to die but we just don’t want to die today because we aren’t ready.
Yesterday I got a phone call from the hospital and I was asked to go and see a new family that just had their first little baby, a girl who was born yesterday and she died yesterday. Please keep that whole family in your prayers.
Last Saturday a friend of mine told me about her friend up in Frisco. He is thirty-eight and has a wife and kids. Last week the doctor told him he had stage four cancer. The guy had no signs of illness at all. The doctor gave him from two days to a week to live. Now, they could start extensive chemo to extend his life another fifteen minutes. That is not going to happen, right? When we hear about real cases of people dying or cases of near death like the story I started with…if I had gone ahead I would have been one of those cars crushed and one of those people killed by the dump truck. It wasn’t my time.
Our Lord tells us how we are to change. What cancer does to the body sin does to the soul. So, He gives us His prescription for spiritual chemo. It is prayer, fasting, and giving to the poor. He wants us to administer this spiritual chemo in secret. Isn’t that what He says? He says do it in secret. You pray in secret, fast and give to the poor in secret. Secret, secret, secret, what is all this stuff about secrets? Well, think about it; think about how many times we have sinned and no one has been around. This could include things we have seen and thought, things we have done.
“Well, no one is around so it is ok.”
No one? HE is no one? He is our Father and Jesus is telling us that, in a sense this is a way of doing something good in secret that is just between you and your Heavenly Father. This is going to go after that cancer, which is sin in the soul, before it spreads throughout your whole life and others around you. This is what He wants from us. Think about it; after we are dead what are we going to do about sin then? Is someone going to hand us a quarter so we can call mommy? It is not going to happen. Will we be given a quarter to call our lawyer? Most of them can’t answer the phone; it is too hot down there. [Laughter] What good would they do, right?
“God, my lawyer is on the phone. He has put me on hold for a while.”
The fact is, that God wants to see His children act as they should. My father, God rest his soul, would come home from work but he wouldn’t come home frustrated. He was looking to come hone to his four children but about ten or fifteen minutes…excuse me, ten or fifteen seconds in our exalted presence, would make him frustrated. I am sure my father was thinking something like this,
“Why do I have four kids but on TV there are only “Three” Stooges?”
We were always at it and you would think it was the WWF. Wasn’t that what we were supposed to do as kids? No! Like boxers, my father would send us all to the corner. Frustrated as could be, he would say,
“Kids, why don’t you treat each other as you would treat your friends? Why don’t you treat your brothers and sisters like you treat your classmates”
Classmates may not have been your “friends” but they were your associates, right? That was a real zinger. Or he would ask why we didn’t treat each other as we would treat perfect strangers. Three strikes and we were out; our father knew us very well. No one knows better than Our Father in Heaven and this spiritual chemo that Jesus wants to administer, He wants to administer it during Lent. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, a Doctor of the Church, who lived centuries ago writes this about Lent.
Have you run so many circles of the years bustling vainly about the world and yet you don’t have forty days to be free for prayer for the sake of your own soul?
For the sake of your own soul! Doesn’t that reach out and grab you? It grabs us right up there with our own death. We have to face this fact, that we have offended God by our sin. But, Jesus tells us about the spiritual chemotherapy. Remember the spiritual chemotherapy He personally applied to St. Peter before he ascended into Heaven after the Resurrection? He said to St. Peter,
Peter, do you love Me?
Yes Lord, I love you!
Feed My lambs!
Jesus asked Peter this question again and Peter gave the same answer. Once again Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep. When the Lord asked Peter this a third time, Peter was sad because Jesus was asking a third time. He said to Jesus,
Lord, You know everything. You know that I love you.
Jesus again told Peter to feed His sheep. Now why was Jesus doing this? Was this making Jesus more God? No, He was doing this for St. Peter, who had denied Jesus three times the night before He was killed.
When they asked St. Peter if He was one of Jesus’ followers Peter said he didn’t even know the guy. He was asked again and said he didn’t know the “blankety blank” guy and told them to leave him alone. He was asked a third time if He was a follower and he told then no and not to ask again or he would knock their head into tomorrow.
So when Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved Him, it was giving St. Peter a chance to verbally express his love for Christ so that he could be freed of that terrible sin of rejecting Christ and move on. Isn’t that what every sin is? Isn’t sin rejecting Christ?
So here we are at the beginning of Lent and we could actually free ourselves up to focus on our soul or we could do what we do all the time; get on the treadmill and go round and round and get no where protecting and conserving these material things and being absorbed by them and pulled down by them.
I am going to pray a prayer now and at the end of the prayer I am going to ask you to say “Amen”. I can’t force you to say it but I would encourage you to say, “Amen”. This prayer is based on John 16:23 when Jesus said that whatever you ask the Father in His name, it will be given to you.
God the Father, in the Name of Jesus, please send down Your Holy Spirit upon everyone here. One by one, come into our lives and wherever we have sinned against You, O God, please reveal it to us, especially those sins that we have already classified as "not sinful." Please reveal our sins to us now while we live, so we can express sorrow now for them and confess these sins and turn from them and avoid sin in the future. Help us to do Your Will, as we should try to do every day. We ask this prayer in the Name of Jesus. Amen
Your Father Who sees what is hidden will repay you.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen