#catholic #sermon

• Dramatic shift with Septuagesima Sunday: we stop saying Alleluia until Easter; we put on purple, the sign of penance. In the office, we go back to the beginning of the Bible, the opening chapter of the book of Genesis. This season represents a new start for us.
• We learn about the creation of the world along with the creation of mankind. We learn about the sin of our first parents.
• The Church wants us to start off this season with a reminder that we are wounded with Original Sin. Our souls are sick and in danger of dying.
• Original Sin with its wounds is like a genetic disease that is passed on through the ages, from generation to generation. Our first parents, Adam and Eve contracted the disease and modified the spiritual DNA of the human race. From that point forward, the disease is transmitted every time a child is conceived.
• This is a doctrine of the Catholic Faith. Trent: “If any one asserts, that the sin of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity; and that the holiness and justice, received of God, which he lost, he lost for himself alone, and not for us also, let him be anathema.”
• Trent also defines that Baptism takes away original sin, but that its effects remain in us. “This holy synod confesses and is sensible, that in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive to sin; which, whereas it is left for our exercise, cannot injure those who do not consent, but resist manfully by the grace of Jesus Christ,”

The effects of Original Sin

• Here is the situation: we received a defective spiritual DNA from our parents, such that Original Sin was communicated to our souls when we were conceived. The sin itself was taken away when we were baptized, but the effects of the sin remain in us.
• We are sick in our soul with these effects. And when someone is sick, you take them to the emergency room or urgent care, depending on how severe their condition is. The doctor would say to us: you have the wound of ignorance in your mind, you have the wound of malice in your will, and you have the wounds of concupiscence and weakness in your emotions.
• Holy Mother Church is like our nurse and doctor. She makes us aware of our condition and she prescribes remedies. She encourages us to fight against our spiritual sickness and gives us the seasons of Septuagesima and Lent to train us in that fight.
• When you have a disease, you try to fight it. You do not do anything that you know will foster the disease. You do not go to a place where the disease is rampant. If I go to a rock concert or a bad website or a bar, the disease within me will grow stronger. I will become more sick, weaker.
• But we do not just fight the disease by avoiding places where the air is infected with sin. We take the disease everywhere we go, because we carry it within ourselves.
• We know that when a disease is inside a person, it seeks to propagate itself. Think of cancer for instance. It is always trying to grow more and take over our body, until it has destroyed us. The sin within us tries to do the same. Just as cancer patients have to fight the cancer within them if they want to survive, so too we have to fight the cancer of sin if we want to reach eternal life.

Mortifying ourselves

• The epistle of today’s Mass is all about carrying on this crucial fight for our eternal lives. St. Paul compares it both to a race and to a fight.
• And he tells us what he does to fight the fight: “I chastise my body and bring it into subjection”.