Saturday of the 18th week in Course 2023
What is our biggest problem in life? If you are a Republican, you might say “the Democrats.” If you are a Democrat, you will say “Republicans.” But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Our biggest problem is one we can’t solve, almost by definition. You can solve political problems by organizing and getting out the vote and making sure the election is fair and free. What you cannot solve, however, is human sin. Not by yourself. Nor can we allay all the effects of sin, not even with science. Why not? Because sin is a divine-level offense by a human-level actor. Sin offends not just society, nor local communities, nor even ourselves. Sin offends God. And, in a sense, all sin is an offense against the big commandment we are reminded of here in Deuteronomy: “The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Our offense is loving ourselves more than God, or our plans more than God’s.
You see, we just need to look at the phrase we see over and over: The good things of the land “you did not build. . .did not fill. . . did not hew. . .did not plant.” Everything the Hebrews had in Palestine, and that we have here in North America, is a gift, a divine gift. Our sin is that we treat these gifts as if we ourselves built, filled, hewed, planted. Even if we’ve done some of those actions, it would not take a long time to look around and find first that some human being has helped us to the state we are in, and that ultimately God is responsible for our health, our safety, our success. All kinds of things could have kept us from our current state, but we arrived and most of it was God’s work.
The psalmist gets it. We no longer have to write out the law on little scrolls and have them swinging between our eyes or on the back of our hands. But we do have to give our good Lord praise and thanks, and tell God that we love Him, and that we know He is our rock, our fortress and deliverer. We have to tell the truth, and step back, allowing God to be God.
Now consider the disciples of Jesus. He had given them power to heal, to drive out demons, and to preach the kingdom of God. But this poor child with seizure disorder leaves them baffled and embarrassed. They cannot drive the demon out. Jesus answers them: “faithless and perverse generation.” It is a lack of faith that is the problem. Faith is the divine gift that connects each Christian, through Christ and the Church, to the Father. Whatever petition we raise to God is raised to God. We have no power of ourselves. Thus we must, as we learn elsewhere, pray constantly and stay thus in contact with the Father. And we must fast from otherwise good things like food and drink in order to bring out bodies, our passions, under control. Then we can ask for mountain-size remedies and expect to get them, but only by the will of Our heavenly Father.
