THE CHILDREN OF PROMISE

 A SERMON FOR THE 4TH SUNDAY IN LENT

Rejoice!  Today is Laetare Sunday—Rejoicing Sunday—and for one brief day in the middle of Lent we are instructed by the Church to discard our spirit of mourning and repentance and to put on instead our brightest garments of joy.  Our vestments glow with the rose-colored hue of happiness, we place flowers upon our altar, and we turn our thoughts for a short while, from fasting and sorrow for our sins, to visions of the eternal happiness that await them that persevere through Lent and through this vale of tears that is our life.

As we look around that sorrowful vale of tears, which today seems to be filled with more trials and misfortunes than we can handle, we may wonder what there is to be joyful about, and how we can summon up any happiness at all in the face of the dreadful state of the world around us.  The answer is to be found in the actions of our blessed Lord and Saviour in today’s Gospel.  By a single miracle he took  five thousand people who were about to starve in the wilderness, and he fed them.  We live today in such a wilderness.  A wilderness devoid, for the most part, of the means of satisfying our spiritual hunger; hunger for peace, stability, the restoration of the Church’s traditional faith and worship, the restoration of the natural order.  Where is our Lord to be found?  He is here with us now and we are in his presence, the presence of that same blessed Lord who promised—promised!—that wherever two or more shall be gathered together in his name, there shall he be in the midst of them.  And like the multitude in the wilderness he will feed us, he will fulfill our spiritual hunger.

And how exactly will he feed us?  With the same five barley loaves and the same two fishes that he fed the five thousand.  Five barley loaves, two fishes.  Five and two.  Add them up and you have seven.  Seven, because these five barley loaves and two fishes represent the seven Sacraments.  Call to mind the teachings in the catechism: it is no coincidence that there are two kinds of Sacraments, again five and two—two Sacraments of the Dead, Baptism and Penance, and five Sacraments of the Living.

The Sacraments of the Dead, the two fishes in today’s Gospel, take souls that were spiritually, in the state of sin, and introduce them or restore them to the life of grace.  Through Baptism we are cleansed from original sin, and through the Sacrament of Penance, the sins that we actually commit are washed away.  Instead of souls that are spiritually dead, we now have souls that are in the state of sanctifying grace, souls who may now be permitted to enter the gates of heaven into everlasting life.

As for our five barley loaves, these are the five Sacraments of the Living, Holy Communion, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction.  They are given to those who are already in the state of grace, and increase that sanctifying the grace in the soul, bringing us to a higher level and closer to God.  They provide us also with the graces specific to the sacrament we are receiving, whether it be the grace to practice our state of life faithfully through the Sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders, or to strengthen our resolve as warriors of Christ through Confirmation, and so on.

It is in these seven Sacraments that we find the chief source of the graces we receive from Christ, and it was for this purpose that he himself instituted them all.  They are gifts from God, and we should be grateful for them.  Alas, so many are not.  Even Catholics abuse God’s gifts and reject the opportunities they have of availing themselves of the graces they need for salvation.  They even show contempt for the sacraments by avoiding Confession and Holy Communion, throwing back in our Lord’s face the means of salvation which he so mercifully gives them.

Today, we have the opportunity to witness the way it should be done.  Two young children are receiving Sacraments for the first time.  After Mass today, little Averly Crescenzo is to be baptized into the Church of Christ, and will enter for the first time into the life of sanctifying grace.  Baptism, Sacrament of the Dead, one of the two fishes.  Meanwhile, another young lady, Julie Griffith, her soul cleansed for the first time through the Sacrament of Penance, the second of those two fishes that constitute the Sacraments of the Dead, will now share in the barley loaves that represent Holy Communion.  She will receive for the first time the Holy Eucharist, and will be filled with the infinite graces that are given in that Sacrament.  She will receive the sacramental grace of being nourished and strengthened by the spiritual food of the Eucharist, she will for the first time discover that union with God that is our eternal destiny.

Please pray today for these two children that they may grow in grace.  They’re like two little fishes themselves, and as St. Andrew wondered aloud in the Gospel, “What are they among so many?”  If we pray that they grow in grace, we should recognize that there is no limit to the heights of sanctity to which they may attain, no limit to the good they may bring to the world.  And if we pray for them, we should pray also for ourselves, because it is the same for us.  The infinite graces of the Sacraments we receive are enough to make any of us saints.  How sad that so few of us are.  If only we would all partake of the Sacraments more worthily, more frequently, more effectively, there would be enough fragments left over from those graces to fill twelve baskets, to save twelve thousand souls and more.  The Sacraments are the key to restoring the world into the true Kingdom of Christ, and it’s up to all of us to gather up those fragments that remain, as our Lord told his disciples, “that nothing be lost.”

So today is a day for rejoicing.  By the example shown to us today by two of the most innocent among us, we surely can rejoice on this Laetare Sunday, not only for them, but for ourselves who enjoy the same opportunity to be fed by those seven gifts of our Lord, and to attain, in spite of our manifold sins, to the life everlasting.