The Worst Lenten Homily I’ve Ever Heard

This past Ash Wednesday I was travelling, so I had to go to Mass and receive ashes at a church I did not know.  It was a very large parish in a big city.  The Mass was full—well over a thousand people.  It seemed normal until the homily. 

Every year on Ash Wednesday, the Gospel reading is the same, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21.  In this section of Matthew, found in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ instructs us about almsgiving, prayer, and then fasting.  These are the spiritual practices we are supposed to engage in during Lent.  Appropriately, the priest preached his homily on these three practices.  Yet, what he said was very misguided; it was one of the worst homilies I had ever heard and definitely the worst Lenten homily I could imagine. 

The priest began with prayer.  He began by opposing the quantity of prayer with the quality of prayer.  He insisted that prayer is not about quantity, about how much time is spent in prayer.  Instead, prayer is about quality.  He described prayer as quality time spent with God.  Thus, Lent is not a time to increase the quantity of our prayer, but the quality of it. 

While quality certainly matters in prayer and is, in itself, more important than the quantity of our prayer, the ordinary way to improve the quality of some act of ours is to increase the quantity of it.  Practice makes perfect.  The only way to get better at something is to do it more.  Increasing the quantity of our prayer is the normal way to improve the quality of our prayer.  Further, very few people are spending too much time in prayer.  Instead, almost all of us are spending far too little time. 

When we consider that prayer is a relational act, that it is indeed spending time with God, then this becomes clearer.  The way we improve and strengthen or deepen a relationship with another is to spend more time with them.  When we love another, we want to spend more time with them.  And conversely, spending more time with someone is the normal way of falling deeper in love with that person! How many love stories do we have about two people who are not initially attracted to each other, where it is not love at first sight but a love that develops over more and more time spent together?  Similarly, spending more time in prayer will gradually increase our love for God and for prayer, and it will improve the quality of our prayer, too. 

Additionally, Lent is the season when we are supposed to pay more attention to our spiritual lives. It is the season when we are supposed to pray more. 

Second, the priest discussed fasting.  He explained that not everyone can fast from food for various health reasons.  Then he said that we can fast from other things, and that this is the better fasting.  He was very vaguely gesturing at the idea that we can “fast” from technology and gossip.  But then he said that the chief way to fast is to fast from sin, and that this is what fasting is all about.  Thus, we should stop sinning during Lent. 

While it is certainly true that the main end or purpose of fasting is to stop sinning and draw us closer to Christ, this priest totally misunderstood that it is precisely by fasting from food that we achieve these results.  The primary meaning of the word “fasting” has always meant to eat less food, and less tasty food.  Using technology less is a secondary meaning, but certainly we could all watch less Netflix and use social media less (and spend that time in prayer), and Lent is a great time to do that.  But the Church still requires us to fast from food and abstain from meat during Lent.  We are supposed to fast from food, to eat less food and endure some minor hunger pains, in order to gain self-control and thus avoid sin. 

Probably, we all want to stop sinning.  The issue for most of us is that we do not have sufficient self-control to stop sinning, we are slaves of sin and not truly free to choose the good.  Thus, we must grow in self-control and virtue.  One way to do this is to practice fasting.  In fasting, we impose a pseudo-temptation on ourselves by hunger and abstaining from delicious foods.  The mere choice to fast does not make enduring the fast easy.  Instead, we must ongoingly adhere to our decision to fast and this trains our will to resist the temptation to break our fast with that delicious steak.  Actual fasting from food during Lent is how we become capable of avoiding sin. 

Finally, the priest discussed almsgiving.  He noted that some people are very poor and unable to give alms.  Thus, we can give alms in other ways.  These include things like giving others our time and attention, and especially by giving them our smiles.  But, he noted with intensity, our smiles must be real and come from the heart.  Again, the quality of the smiles we give to others matters more than the quantities of smiles we give.

One wonders how many Americans in a wealthy Florida city are truly impoverished to the point of being unable to give alms, especially when Christ praises the widow who gave her last two pennies (Luke 21:1-4; Mark 12:41-44).  Again, just like he did with fasting, the priest had downplayed the necessity of the actual practice that Christ commanded us to do, and that the Church has always practiced during Lent, and he has focused on secondary applications and meanings of the words.  Yes, we certainly should give others our time, attention, and genuinely smile at others.  Yet, doing these things in no way removes the requirement that we give real alms (i.e., money or the goods it buys) to others who need them if at all possible.  Concerning this, St. James writes, “If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (Jas. 2:15-16). 

As with prayer, very few modern people are at risk of fasting too much or giving too many alms.  Instead, almost all of us desperately need to do more of these things, myself at the front of the line.  Lent is especially the time to do these things, to pray more, to fast more, and to give more alms.  Beginning Lent with a homily that heavily downplays the necessity of truly doing these practices is a horrible idea and betrays a deep watering down of the Gospel of Christ.  Christ spent many hours in prayer, Christ fasted from food for forty days, and even the Apostles note the importance of themselves giving alms (Acts 3:6).  This Lent let us embrace the very real and physical practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; let us actually pray more, actually fast from food and learn to endure hunger, and actually give more money away to those in need. 

These practices are not distractions from our relationship with Christ and true spiritual worship of God, to think so would betray a grave misunderstanding of the Gospel of Christ and the Tradition of the Church.  I can only hope that the congregation wasn’t paying much attention to the homily. 

Photo by Dawn McDonald on Unsplash