Choosing Life Instead of Death

 Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The colloquial definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting different results.  How often we can be insane, at least according to that definition!  It’s like the old gag where a man goes to the doctor and says, “It hurts when I raise my arm,” so the doctor replies, “Then don’t raise your arm!”  Sometimes the simplest things in theory, are the most complex in practice.

    St. Paul reminds us today that the wages of sin is death.  When we sin, we are inviting death into our life.  We might say that we are cutting out life from our existence.  Sin is slavery: shackling ourselves into bondage.  No one forces us to sin; we have the freedom to choose good from evil.  But how often do we choose evil?!
    And then, having chosen death, having chosen to sin, we wonder why we reap death.  Again, our Lord reminds us that if we sow death, we will reap death.  If we sow slavery, we will reap slavery.  We know the tree by the fruits it produces.  But we still go back to the tree that brings us death and weakens our relationship with God, or even separates us from God.  
    Of course, we think that we can get away with it, or that the consequences won’t effect us.  We think we can outsmart sin and death, or be so tricky that we can enjoy the sin but not suffer the consequences.  
    But no one explicitly thinks this way when he or she sins.  We don’t use our brains, we use our passions, and so we often don’t consciously think: this action is not good; it is not leading me to God.  If I do this, I’m inviting death and slavery into my life.  Or we may think that it’s not a big sin, so we don’t need to really worry about it.  So we flirt with little sins, not realizing that they can, if left alone, lead to bigger sins.
    But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Our Lord came precisely to transfer us from the kingdom of death and slavery to the kingdom of life and freedom.  He ransomed us with His own Precious Blood, and paid the price of our freedom by dying on the cross.  God wants freedom for our life.  He wants us to live.  And He offers us every opportunity for freedom and life.  But we keep sliding back into slavery and death.
    The antidote to this sliding is the fear of the Lord.  Our Gradual today, from Psalm 33, begins, “Come, children, and hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.”  The fear of the Lord is not about being scared or afraid.  Fear of the Lord is about recognizing the pain sin causes God, not because He is weak, but because He mourns when we draw farther away from Him.  Think of this fear like the fear you would have of disappointing your spouse or a parent.  Sometimes the worst thing we can hear is, “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.”  When we love someone, we want to show that love to them, and we don’t want them to not feel that love.  The scriptures often use the image of adultery, marital infidelity, to describe sin.  The action is bad enough, and we know it’s wrong, but the pain that comes from realizing we let our beloved or our Father down is sometimes worse than any corporal punishment that could be inflicted upon us.
    So, to avoid sin, especially grave sin, we need to keep that desire not to hurt our beloved, God, at the front of our mind.  When our mind is fixed on God and showing Him our love by what we do (and what we don’t do), then we’re less likely to give in to those sins that demonstrate that we don’t fully love God, that something else is more important than Him.  Would that we always kept the post-sin sadness in our minds before we fell into sin, so that we wouldn’t have the pain that comes from disappointing our beloved, our God.
    Our life in Christ is not so much about doing the right things and not doing the wrong things (though we should do the right and avoid the wrong).  We can live at that surface level of our faith, where we just do this and don’t do that because the Scriptures or the Church tell us so.  But God invites us to let our roots grow deeper so that we can bear better fruit.  He invites us to consider His commands as the way that we can return the love that He first showed us when our Lord died on the cross.  How often we go to our Divine Physician and say, “It hurts when I sin!”  He tells us, “Then don’t sin!”  Keep at the front of your mind your love for God, that love that makes sin seem less appealing, and by keeping that love before you, avoid the death that sin always brings, the death and sin that were conquered by Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit reign for ever and ever.  Amen.