Fifth Sunday in Lent, cycle

 John 12:20-33

In the pacific northwest several tribes of native Americans practiced the custom of potlatch. These tribes lived off the land and managed to set aside some of their goods for the future. They also had enough leisure time to make carvings, totem poles, blankets and beautifully decorated tools. Among the various tribal families, some members of course were richer than others. Somewhere in the distant past a unique form of government evolved. Families would gather together, and the leaders of the families would compete in how much they could give away. The winners of this contest were the leaders of larger clans, and so it went. They recognized that a person who could give away the most was entitled to the highest leadership position.

In contrast, i think, is our American culture. We accumulate. I visit elderly people and one thing that seems common is that they have a lot of stuff. The dining room, once undoubtedly the place where a family celebrated special occasions, is now a place to put things that have no other purpose except maybe sentimental value. And the more we have, the less free we are, the more we are tied down.

Jesus is giving us a lesson on how to have a happy life. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”. We know that this is true. All of us have experienced this. If you fall in love and commit your life to someone else, you have to let parts of your old life go. If you are a parent, you know that you have to make sacrifices so that your child can thrive. And if you have a career, you’ve sacrificed for it. We can’t grow unless we prune away things that hold us back.

We see this pattern in biblical stories. Abraham leaves his home and family to become a wandering herdsman, and God makes him the father of nations. Peter and Andrew leave their careers as fishermen to follow Jesus and become fishers of men.

The secret of life isn’t much of a secret. It’s a pattern of loss and renewal, of dying and rising, of letting go and getting back.

The Greeks at the beginning of today’s gospel want to see Jesus. And Jesus gives this strange response. John’s gospel always makes us think. Because i think we all want to see Jesus, not under the accidents of bread and wine, as we will see him today, but as he appeared on the mountaintop to his disciples. We hope someday to see him glorified.

But Jesus tells us the way this hope must be fulfilled. Whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where i am there also will my servant be.

If you’ve changed something about your life this lent, you may have an inkling of what Jesus is talking about. If I've given up something pleasurable and stuck with it, that’s a tiny bit of hating my life. If I've taken on a spiritual practice that I hadn’t done before, that’s a tiny bit of where I act out my love for Jesus. To the extent that my life is disrupted, I've made room for the holy spirit to act in me.

In the second half of the gospel Jesus points to the hour that has finally come, the hour of judgment, the hour when the great process of glorifying the father will begin. And Jesus talks about being lifted up. One writer talked about a threefold lifting up. First is his crucifixion; he is lifted up to the scorn of the world and dies his sacrificial death. The second is his resurrection, when he comes bringing with him the souls of those who have been waiting for him; souls like Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah -- prophets, priests and kings, as well as ordinary souls of the pre-Christian era. The final lifting up is the ascension, when Jesus goes to sit at the right hand of the father, to advocate for us until his kingdom comes and he returns to judge the living and the dead.

So we should ask ourselves today, what is there about my life that I should give up? What is holding me back from being a saint? And what can I do to allow Jesus to draw me to himself when he is lifted up?

Fourth Sunday in Lent, cycle B

 Fourth Sunday in Lent, cycle B

John 3:14-21

One of the things that people of other faiths have a hard time understanding is why we Christians claim that Jesus died for our sins.  And some of the explanations given by Christians don’t help.  In the early days of the church, there were three such explanations. 

The first reason is that because of our sins, we deserve death and hell, and thus belong to Satan.  Jesus offers himself in exchange for us, then having paid the debt, the Father raises him from the dead.  

A second reason is that Jesus gave us a way to become one with him, then allowed himself to be put to death and rose again because he is God, and we go along with him to the extent that we have “put on Christ” as Saint Paul puts it.  

 A third and probably the most popular, was that God demanded satisfaction for the offense of the sinfulness of humanity, and human beings were never going to be able to come up with a sacrifice great enough.  So Jesus, being God and man, offered himself to atone for our sins, to satisfy the anger of the Father.  This view has been commonplace down through the ages, and certainly dovetails with some of the pictures of God in the Old Testament.  During the Exodus, Moses is always trying to get God to calm down and not smite his people.  And the God portrayed in parts of the Old Testament does seem to respond to sacrifices involving the death of an animal, who stands in for the person desiring forgiveness.  Certainly many of our prayers reflect this theology, and every time we hear about Abraham’s almost sacrifice of his son Isaac, we see an obvious parallel with Jesus, whose sacrifice was not held back from happening by an angel.

Today’s gospel passage brings up this issue once again.  If God loves me would he demand my eternal damnation  because of my sin?  It doesn’t make sense.  And if he loves me, a sinner, does he not love Jesus who is perfect?  What human father would demand the death of his son?  Jesus answered that question by asking another question:  Which among you would give his son a stone when he asked for a loaf, or a scorpion when he asked for a fish?

But in the idea of atonement, we have a misunderstanding of sin.  Sin is not the breaking of a commandment.  Sin is the moving away from God, who is our origin and to whom we are supposed to return.  God does not punish us for sin; sin carries its own punishment.  Sin is never a victimless crime; the sinner is always the victim.  The punishment for stealing is maybe getting caught, but always driving a wedge between me and my victim; to steal from him means that I don’t recognize his humanity.  The punishment for carrying around a grudge is that everything I think about is now colored by my anger at someone.  And you can take everything that is a sin and see that sin always separates you from others, from God, and even from yourself in a sense, because sin always diminishes a person. 

But sin is a consequence of God’s greatest gift to us, free will.  He loves us completely, and made us to respond to him with our own love.  But you can’t love unless you are free.  

God makes us free, and even allows for the misuse of freedom.  Because in our state of freedom, we are the ones who have to find our way back to God.  In today’s gospel Jesus compares himself to light, the light of the world.  It’s like a campfire at night in the forest.  You can wander off and eventually lose sight of the fire and be unable to find your way back.  We are like that lost camper.  And God chooses to send His Son after us, who willingly goes all the way to take up the consequences of our sin, which is ultimately death.  The Son and the Father want the same thing, as does the Spirit; the three persons all will our salvation.  God is not an angry king who must be satisfied by his son’s death.  God is not handing his Son over to buy us from Satan in some kind of cosmic trade.  God is not even fooled by us putting on Christ so that when he looks at me he sees his son.  God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit gives us the freedom to choose Love, the love of God, of my neighbor, of myself -- and that is my destiny, that is my salvation.  If I wander into the darkness, I can only find my way back if someone comes for me.  And that’s why Jesus God and Man, lives my human life and dies my human death and then rises, bringing me with him.  

 

Second Sunday of Lent, cycle B

Mark 9:2-10

I WHISPERED, “GOD, SPEAK TO ME” AND A ROBIN SANG. BUT I DID NOT HEAR. I YELLED, “GOD, SPEAK TO ME!” AND THE THUNDER ROLLED ACROSS THE SKY. BUT I DID NOT LISTEN. I LOOKED AROUND AND SAID, “GOD, LET ME SEE YOU!” AND A STAR SHONE BRIGHTLY, BUT I DID NOT NOTICE. I SHOUTED, “GOD, SHOW ME A MIRACLE!” AND A BABY WAS BORN, BUT I DID NOT KNOW. SO I CRIED OUT IN DESPAIR, “TOUCH ME GOD, AND LET ME KNOW YOU ARE HERE.” WHEREUPON GOD REACHED DOWN AND TOUCHED ME, BUT I BRUSHED THE BUTTERFLY OFF MY SHOULDER AND WALKED AWAY. (Marylin Macdonald)

Today we hear the story of the transfiguration of the Lord as told by Mark. The three apostles who witness this are suddenly flooded with a revelation, something that was never apparent when they were walking around Palestine with Jesus. In a flash of insight, they are shown Jesus as he really is, God become man. They see that Moses and Elijah still live, still converse with God as friends speak to each other; the apostles realize that life goes on after death. And they hear the voice of God, and it will be the last time the Father communicates with people directly. And the voice tells them that henceforth they are to listen to Jesus, the beloved son.

The apostles had a mystical experience. I think that’s why we have three different descriptions in the three synoptic gospels. You can’t pin down a mystical experience, you can’t tell other people what went on, really. These experiences aren’t just in the brain. Peter puts it well. “Rabbi, it is good that we are here”. Mystical experiences are gifts in a sense. “Let us make three tents” he goes on to say. Mystical experiences are such that you want them to last, you don’t want to leave them. And “he hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified”. Mystical experiences are always a little frightening, because you go out of yourself, you feel out of control.

I think the little poem I read at the beginning tells us that God speaks to us all the time, and we just aren’t tuned in. We fail to recognize God’s voice because of the noise of this world and our distractions as we go about our daily lives. This is a problem with prayer, which is meant to be a two-way communication. Sure, it’s a good thing to pray the rosary, to pray during Mass, to pray from a prayer book. But what we don’t do is listen;. We don’t sit in silence and let God speak to us. When you read about the great saints, the emphasis is usually on their great deeds, or their martyrdom, or their missionary work. You don’t hear about their prayer life so much. Saint Theresa of Avila wrote extensively on her own interior life, partly so that others could follow her into deeper communion with God. In her book, “The Interior Castle”, she talks about how to reach that state in which we are able to hear God speak to us. I’m not there yet, but I try to be sensitive to all the ways He speaks to me. ON the other hand, I believe all of us have had some sort of mystical experience, or mountaintop event, when God seems to be taking us out of our ordinary lives for a few minutes and tries to get our attention.

Last summer Joan and I had the good fortune to take a cruise from Seattle to Alaska. That was a great vacation. But there was a moment there when we took an excursion out of Juneau to the Mindelheim glacier. IT’s a huge mass of ice sitting between two peaks and feeding into a lake below. They say it will be gone in 30 to 50 years if the climate keeps changing. But when I first saw it, I sensed I was in another world; I felt very insignificant in front of this natural phenomenon that has been there waxing and waning since long before the time of Christ. I didn’t want the moment to end, but it did.

Thomas Merton, the monk who wrote “Seven Story Mountain” had a mystical experience. He describes how he was walking in the shopping district of Louisville after he had come out of his hermitage. As he describes it, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers...It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race...[I]if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

The transfiguration of Jesus means many things. But three stand out. God speaks to us if we only listen. If we could only see people as they really are, we couldn’t take our eyes off of their beauty and holiness. And if we could listen with the ears of our souls, we too would hear the words, “This is my beloved”. During this Lent make time to listen.

First Sunday of Lent, cycle B

Mark 1:12-15

The gospel we just heard seems familiar, and at the same time, strange. Every year we hear about Jesus being led into the desert and tempted. In Matthew he gets into a whole conversation with the devil, similarly in Luke. But Mark uses the term Satan, which actually means adversary, and reminds us of the story of Job, where Satan is not a devil from hell but rather someone who can walk around in the heavenly court and convince God to let him do things to test Job’s faith. I wonder if that’s what Mark is going for here.

Another thing about Mark’s account is that he has Jesus being driven into the desert immediately after his baptism. In fact, the word used is the same as that when an exorcist drives out a demon. Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, say that the spirit led Jesus into the desert, a much gentler way of putting it.

Mark doesn’t tell us about the temptations, only that Jesus was tempted. In Matthew’s version, the angels come at the end of the series of temptations; Mark seems to say they are there from the beginning, and they are ministering to Jesus. And there’s no mention of Jesus fasting. And just as quickly as Mark puts Jesus in the desert, he pulls him out again, and Jesus is off on his ministry, proclaiming the kingdom of God.

In other parts of his gospel, Mark is at pains to show Jesus as a human being, with feelings, who learns things, who gets angry sometimes, who is exasperated when people don’t understand him. I think we can extend that same vision to what Mark is going for here. Is Jesus reluctant to begin his ministry? He seems to be so in John’s gospel, when he tells his mother “My hour has not yet come”. And Mark tells us that Jesus starts his ministry after John’s has been arrested. Later in Mark’s gospel we will hear about the execution of John the Baptist, as Herod wonders about whether Jesus is John raised from the dead.

I wonder, then, if Mark and maybe John are hinting that Jesus was reluctant to dive into his ministry. We can think of many reasons. Maybe he was worried about who would take care of his mother, now that Joseph was gone. Maybe he didn’t feel prepared and would have liked to have more time to study and think. Maybe a part of him knew his relatives would think he was crazy when he abandoned his profession as a carpenter and became a wandering preacher. And maybe he knew that once he started down this road, he would end up on a cross.

Jesus was about thirty years old when he was baptized by John. At that moment God spoke from the heavens assuring all who had heard that Jesus was his beloved Son, in whom he was well pleased. Jesus was outed by the Father, and then driven into the desert. Waiting is over, it’s time to begin the mission. It’s time to begin the march to the Cross.

When you get as old as I am, you will look back on your life and see opportunities missed, choices you failed to make because making one would close off the other. You will regret former friends or relatives that you’ve lost touch with. You will hear about the death of someone you were once close to, but for trivial reasons communication between the two of you stopped. And you can beat yourself up about these things, or you can learn to forgive yourself. And once you do that, you can cast yourself on the mercy of God who will make all things new.

And maybe Mark wants us to see this temptation in the desert this way. It’s the definitive moment when Jesus wrestles with his own plans and desires, and finally musters the strength to cast them all behind him and do the bidding of God. For Mark, Jesus' temptations are not changing stones into bread, or jumping off a tower, or bowing down to the devil so that he could rule the world. For Mark Jesus is tempted like we are all tempted. Are you and I willing to sacrifice anything to do God’s will? Can we give up some of our comfort, some of our leisure time, some of our ambitions and pleasures so that we can more closely follow our Lord?

Lent is a time to reflect on who we are right now and what God wants us to be -- and to think about how we will go about beginning to close that gap. And Lent is meaningless unless we learn how God wants us to change. That’s what repentance is all about -- the changing of our minds, from satisfaction with myself to recognizing that most of the time I don’t hit the mark, I live in a sinful world of which I am a part. Lent is a time to see that I need a savior. And lent is a time when we can rejoice because we have one.

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 1:40-45

Why don’t we see miracles happening anymore?  One of the reasons you hear about is that Jesus worked them when he was on earth so that the faith would get off to a flying start.  You had to pay attention to what he said if he also went around miraculously healing people.  Now he doesn’t have to do that anymore.  So there was a young priest on his first assignment who didn’t believe miracles happen anymore.  He was called to the bed of a very old woman who was dying.  He sat by her bedside and asked what she would like him to pray for.  She immediately said, “Pray that God will heal me.”  The young priest stammered and stuttered because he knew miracles didn’t happen anymore, but finally he prayed as he’d been asked.  The woman sat up in bed, walked down the hall, astonishing the doctors and nurses, and shouting her thanks that she’d been healed.  The young priest went out to his car and as he was fumbling with his keys he looked up to heaven and said “Don’t ever do that to me again!”

Today Jesus heals a leper.  Being a leper is never a good thing but then it was like living death.  The Book of Leviticus says: “When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot and it turns into a defiling disease [leprosy] on the skin of his body…he is unclean.” Now if you had eczema or psoriasis or a rash from poison ivy, you might be  declared a leper and kicked out of town, because Leviticus goes on to say: “The person who has the defiling disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”  And that ancient rule was followed by the Jews as well as the Christians well into the late nineteenth century until it became possible to make a better diagnosis and we had some treatments available.  

Mark tells us that  Jesus was moved with pity;  Mark often points out Jesus’ emotions, unlike the other gospel writers.  Some people think Mark was taking Peter’s dictation, and Peter may indeed have sensed Jesus’ mood because he knew him so well.  And then Jesus reaches out and touches the leper, and with that action, the leper is instantly healed.  Of course Jesus became ritually unclean because of this.  And indeed what happens is that Jesus can no longer come and go in the various towns because of his growing reputation -- he trades places with the leper.  

I think when Jesus walked the earth he loved people passionately.  We see that all through the gospels.  He loved them enough to teach them, to tell them when they were wrong, to heal them, to drive out demons.  He enjoyed eating with them and even enjoyed the companionship of his apostles. And that's not surprising; humans enjoy being with friends, and he was the perfect human. We don’t hear about what went on when he and his apostles were wandering from village to village, but we know they were protective of him.  Misguided or not, they tried to keep kids away from him, they tried to make sure a blind man or an ill woman did not slow him down on his journey.  Thomas, speaking for all of them when Jesus predicted his suffering and death, said to the others, “Let us go and die with him.”   And Jesus showed his delight when they showed insight into his teaching or his person.  “Blessed are you, Simon Peter …”  

When you love someone, you want to be close to them.  If you have a cell phone you can make a video call over the internet, and we all lived through the time when the only way you could attend Mass was through your computer screen.  But it’s perverse.  When you communicate with someone using these tools, you only end up wishing you could be there personally.  

And that, of course, is what Jesus, being God as well as man, did.  He made a way to be physically present to all his disciples down through the ages -- the  Holy Eucharist.  They say that the majority of Catholics don’t believe in the real presence -- when asked, they answer that the Eucharist is a sign.  That’s not wrong, but it's a sign of what?  A sign of the real presence of Christ.  Thomas Aquinas distinguished between proper presence -- Jesus walking around in his body 2000 years ago -- and sacramental presence -- The word of God has made what was bread and wine into the real presence, the real body and blood, soul and divinity, of Christ.  Jesus made this very clear at the Last Supper, and again when he insisted that unless we eat his body and drink his blood we will not have life.  And it makes sense.  If you wanted to be with your friend and could make it happen in some way, you would.  And Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper, “I no longer call you servants … but friends…”  Jesus wanted to be present to us, and he made it happen.  Like the leper in this story, his touch heals us and makes us whole if we cooperate with his grace. And that’s a miracle we can experience at every Mass.  

Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 1:29-39

In the gospel of Mark, the first miracle of Jesus was the one we heard about last week, the exorcism of a demon from one of the people in the synagogue. But the first time, according to Mark, that Jesus cured someone’s illness was when he healed Simon’s mother in law.  You can find humor in this passage, I think.  Maybe the mother in law had the flu or something; what she might have really appreciated would have been someone to bring her some chicken soup and fluff up her pillow.  But, no, Jesus and at least four grown men enter the little house and Jesus cures the mother in law so that she can get up and wait on them.  And we can look at this story through modern eyes and wonder why this woman, probably older than Peter, is expected to wait on them. It’s the patriarchy, I suppose.

But consider how this miracle might have looked to someone in those times.  Because Jesus doesn't just heal her, he restores her to wholeness, to the function that she probably enjoyed, and made her feel and be useful.  That’s the kind of healing Jesus offers -- restoring us to wholeness.  And what might that mean in our day and age?  We don’t see a lot of miraculous healings, although I’m sure they exist.  But we don’t know how God is acting when someone is healed.  There are many reasons given for why we don’t see miracles of healing much.  The reason I like best is that as the human race matures, and you can question whether it actually ahs matured much, God leaves more and more in our hands.  And we have powers of healing today that would seem miraculous in Jesus’ time.

But our healing heals the body.  We give radiation for cancer,  put stents in hearts to open up blood vessels, and give antibiotics for infections.  But restoring someone to wholeness, that’s not part of medicine’s bag of tricks.  And Jesus desires that we live lives filled with purpose, with joy, with gratitude and generosity, and he restores that possibility to the mother in law, who demonstrates that she gets it.

And then Mark draws back and shows us a pattern of life that Jesus follows;  he works, driving out  demons, curing the sick.  Then he withdraws to be with the Father, to rest in the Father in prayer.  His disciples try to distract him from his mission -- It would be tempting to return to that town and keep doing good things for the people.  We all like to be appreciated for what we can do.  But Jesus knows why he has come and does not allow himself to be distracted.  

But another thing we might miss in this story is that Jesus says, “Let us go into the neighboring towns and villages…” Jesus didn’t spread the good news alone; he took along companions. I imagine in the beginning they simply followed him and listened, and as time went on they took on more and more of his mission for themselves.  We will see Jesus sending them off later on, without anything except the good will of the people they visit -- and they will return with joy since they have been preaching and teaching and yes, working miracles themselves.  

To answer God’s call to follow Jesus, we need several things.  First, we need public time gathered around the word of God and the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  Second, we need the support and conversation of like-minded people.  I think we truly miss this aspect in our busy American lives.  We need to talk about our faith with other members of the faithful.  You remember when the two disciples on the way to Emaus had been speaking with Jesus, and they remembered, “Were not our hearts burning within us?”  That actually happens when you are deep in conversation about your faith.  The third thing is that we need private prayer and meditation.  Sounds difficult, but it’s not.  If we are serious, we set aside some time every day, even a few minutes, to just pray to Our Lord about our concerns, and then listen for a bit before diving back into life.  The more you do this, the easier it is.  That’s why the rosary is such a great prayer.  When you are saying those hail mary’s, thoughts come to mind.  Distracting thoughts, sometimes, but sometimes you remember someone you haven't’ thought about for years, or you recall something that you’ve been meaning to do but keep putting off -- I think God finds ways to get our attention if we let him.  Finally, we need to be out in the world sharing God's love in word and deed.  Everyone needs God to fill up the empty places in our hearts.  And when we master this rhythm that Jesus demonstrates for us, like Jesus we will be doing what we have been sent to do.  

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 1:21-28

Do you believe in demons?  When we hear that word, we probably picture a red-skinned guy with horns and a tail.  And that’s a comic figure, even when we see it about to be stabbed by Saint Michael.  But there are such things as demons.  It’s a matter of faith.  And certainly  Jesus knew about demons -- in the gospel of Mark we have four separate exorcisms described, in addition to the statement that Jesus went about healing the sick and casting out demons.  Many years ago there was a comedian, Flip Wilson, who portrayed a character that was always getting into trouble, and had an answer ""The devil made me do it.” And I suspect we modern people say similar things -- I can’t help it, it’s my upbringing;  or He made me so mad that I just lost it!  You can think of your own excuses for behavior that you're a bit ashamed of.  I know I have my own.  But is our sinful behavior caused by demons?  I think most of us would not agree -- we are sinful enough to cause our own bad behavior.

But here’s the thing.  It doesn’t matter whether some terrible evil is caused by demons or nature or just sinful human beings.  And we don’t have to parse it out.  Sure, the Church continues to train exorcists, and every diocese is supposed to have one -- we do in this diocese.  And when you talk to an exorcist or people who work with one, you hear about some very strange things, seemingly supernatural things, things like levitation, hearing a demonic voice, superhuman strength, speaking in languages that the person had no knowledge of before.  I’ll accept that there are cases where demons possess a person, or more commonly, and I've seen this, “oppress” a person.  This last term refers to people who have thoughts they can’t get out of their heads -- like one person I’ve met who is convinced she is damned and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.  Is that demonic? Or does she have a psychiatric illness?  

In today’s gospel, Jesus teaches with authority, which surprises the synagogue people.  Because rabbis always quoted scripture or other authorities when they taught.  That’s still true today, not just with rabbis, but also with university professors, with clergy of other religions and denominations.  When we teach authentically, we try to build on what has gone before.  Jesus was and is different.  In the Gospels he frequently makes authoritative statements; in Matthew, he gives a whole list of things in which he says, “You have heard it said…. And then “But I say to you…”  And the parables he told were often surprising and showed his originality.  The sewer who sowed seed on pathways and rocky ground and into thorn bushes -- no real farmer would do that.  Or the priest and the levite who passed by the beaten man, leaving a Samaritan to come to the rescue.  Jesus’ authoritative teaching often shocks.  

But Jesus not only spoke with authority, which made people stop and listen, but he demonstrated his authority in the miracles he worked, including his exorcisms.  Now this man in the synagogue, was he truly possessed?  Or was he a madman, a schizophrenic perhaps?  How much of our troubled world is caused by demonic forces as opposed to just plain evil people?  We can see potential demons all around us -- those suffering from addictions might be from demons, those people who are trapped in pornography, those  people who cause and propagate wars.  Was  Hitler possessed?  Is Putin?  And what about our own failings?  Are they sometimes demonic?  Saint Paul lamented:  “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”  Saint Paul and Flip Wilson may have something in common. 

So let’s face the fact that there is lots of evil in the world, some caused by real supernatural demons, much caused by our fallen humanity, and even some caused by indifferent nature.  People are born with genetics that results in cancer or heart disease decades later.  Hurricanes wipe out neighborhoods.  But we Christians don’t have to sort through all that.  One of the doctors of the Church, and unfortunately I forgot which one, said something to the effect that the best way to deal with the evils within us was to allow ourselves to be filled up with Christ.  If Christ lives in us, then regardless of the evil, whether caused by the world, the flesh or the devil, it will be overcome.  Jesus predicted that his disciples would suffer and even be put to death, but at the end of those predictions, he said, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

Jesus has overcome the world.  And he lives in you and lives in me.  We have nothing to fear.