Faith-Repentance-Living in the Spirit

HOMILY WEEK 29 06 – Year I

Repent, and Live in the Spirit

(Rm 8:1-11; Ps 24; Lk 13:1-9)

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A dishonest painter thinned the paint with water and painted a church. As long as it didn’t rain right away he thought he would be okay. That night there was a big storm. He ran to the Church in the morning and saw that the paint was running down the walls and forming letters. As he got closer he could make out the words and read, “Repaint, you thinner, and thin no more!”

The fact that I am conducting a retreat on Healing Life’s Hidden Addictions today at our Star of the North Retreat Centre adds a contextual flavor to the readings and their invitation to us to repent and live in the Spirit.

Jesus in the gospel stresses our need to repent if we are to live a new life in him. The Greek word for repent is “metanoia” which means not just to turn around, but also to put on our highest mind, to be our best self, to let go of our lower mind or baser self, which is also within us. That is the fruit Jesus wants us to become. We are being called to be willing to let go of an addictive way of life, and open ourselves up to receiving a new life of sobriety, joyous and free.

St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, further describes what that repentance looks like: We are to let go of any and all sin or darkness within us, and allow the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, to transform us from within, to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. To be in Christ for Paul is to be filled with the Spirit and to walk with the Spirit; to let go of things of the flesh and to set our minds on things of the Spirit.

Basically, all this is accomplished by Steps one to three of the A.A. program which can be summed up as: I can’t; God can; I’ll let him! We can come to Jesus, our higher power, for forgiveness of our sins (our wrongdoing) and also for healing of our sinfulness (our defects of character, that which causes us to sin). This is what we cannot do for ourselves, and what our loving God and higher power waits to do for us. As the Messiah, Jesus had a two-fold role – to redeem and to sanctify; to forgive and to heal. What are we waiting for?

The last part of the gospel about a gardener who digs around a fig tree for three years to make it bear fruit brings into the picture steps four and six: a searching and fearless moral inventory of our wrong doing or sin, and becoming ready to have God remove (heal us) of our defects of character or sinfulness, that which made us sin. That is the digging, painful as it might be, that we are called to do which then opens us up to receive the Spirit of forgiveness and healing. We are to “name it, claim it, not blame it, tame it, and then we can aim it” or help others by sharing our spiritual experience with others, which takes us to step twelve of the A.A. program.

I really think all twenty participants in this retreat are living these readings today – aware of our need for forgiveness and healing, we are in the process of repenting, of opening ourselves up to the healing power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish in us what we cannot do for ourselves.

The Eucharist is itself a call to repentance, especially through the penitential rite. It is an experience of forgiveness through the power of the Word, and of healing as we commune with Jesus by receiving the humble gifts of bread and wine transformed in his body and blood by the power of the Spirit.

May our celebration today help us to also be transformed into the Body of Christ, forgiven and healed, and sent out to share our spiritual experience with the world.