Evil thoughts, evil behavour - Rector's Rambling for February 25, 2018

The Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent reminds us that we need God’s help in the battle against sin.  Our fallen condition, original sin, flies in the face of the modern philosophy of self-sufficiency and self-determination.

The Collect begins with the statement “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”  This is a scary thought except we do have one who is able to help, guide, and protect us – Jesus Christ our Lord.  Although we want to think we can do it all ourselves, in fact our propensity to sin damages us in our decision making.

Sin by other people also effects us because sin is rarely “hurting no one else”.  A sinful decision to drink and drive, engage in deviant behavior, lie, or to covet, changes you and how you interact with neighbors.  Sin also tries to draw us into others sinful behavior to justify itself – “everybody is doing it”.

But the Collect acknowledges that our real and only help is from Our Lord.  We pray that He will “Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and outwardly in our souls”.  We cannot separate the two.  And the Collect also acknowledges that sin from others affects us as well as things within ourselves, “evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul”.

This battle against sin is literally life and death.  Last week we saw the horror of a 19-year-old giving in to the evil by committing the horrific sin of murder on his former school mates.  We struggle to make sense of it, but there is no earthly sense, and we argue on social media about the best way to prevent it from happening again.

Lost under the din of the shouting and knee-jerk reaction is the urgent need to pray for those affected by this sinful behavior: families, friends, and our whole citizenry.  We need to pray for their comfort as they mourn.  And we need to pray for the conversion of our country from it’s increasing secularism.  None of these calculated mass shooters are active participants in faith through a church.  This is not a coincidence.  May God have mercy on us all.