Homily

Recently I was thinking about balance and judgment as I was putting some butter on my toast. Not so many years ago butter, as we all know, was thought to be one of the types of fatty foods that will give you a heart attack before you are 60 years old. Does science still hold to that? A quick Google search shows me that science no longer holds to that opinion. Now how about this statement from the “Authority Nutrition” website: “The war against saturated fats was based on bad science. It was never really proven that it caused any harm. In fact, recent studies suggest there is no association at all between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease.” But wait a minute, I say to myself, because I live alone, if the old science was bad, how do we know that this new science is good? It seems to me that people who rely on what “science tells us” tend to believe that the latest thing “science” tells us is always correct even if it goes completely against what “science” told us was true last year. But we will believe it because we all know that newer science is better than older science because it’s newer. And it lets us eat butter.

Now I am not knocking science of course, but that word can mean different things to different people in different areas of study. The science of the nature of chemicals is something that will give us some extraordinary and true facts about those chemicals and what they are made of and how they act in the real world. The science of how chemicals and their compounds react upon our health does not produce the same level of truth and reliability. So what do you do if butter is one of your favorite chemicals? And that led me to another thought. If you could chart out the rest of your life, if you could foresee the future and learn that you will die at the age of 82 years and 5 months, but if you stop today eating butter, and never touch butter again you will live for 2 more months. Would you stop using butter to live 2 more months? Now what if you will live 2 more months but you will be also suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease? Would you eat the butter or not?

If is about balance and judgment. And, although people like to pretend sometimes that science shows us what balance and judgment are, nothing could be further from the truth. Science may provide us with useful facts concerning this physical world, but how we use those facts, if we want our lives to be good, will require balance and judgment. Science can give us facts, but how we use those facts to a good end will take balance and judgment. Science can tell us how to create a poison, and science can tell us how to create an antidote to poison, but science cannot tell us whether or not it is good to poison anybody. (Any never poison the clergy. Trust me, it just makes things worse.) The values we use to judge actions and thoughts are not the result of science. So, for those who believe there is nothing greater than this physical world, where do their values and their judgments come from? And for those who believe that there is a God, but we don’t really need to pay much attention to that belief, as long as we’re living in this material world, what kind of balance is that?

In today’s letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul tells the parishioners there to balance their freedom to eat anything, against the scandal it might cause to some of their fellow Christians. And he judges that the value of not giving scandal is more important here than the values of personal freedom. Balance. And then we hear Jesus talking about judgment as well, and not only talking about it but declaring that He Himself will be the judge. And He will judge by what we have done that we should not have done, and by what we did not do that we should have done.

There is a great foolishness, a stupidity that is deeply imbedded in our current culture and that is, “Don’t judge other people.” Now it is true that it is part of our faith that we may not judge the state of another person’s soul. But if someone kidnaps your child, or steals every penny that you have, I do believe you will judge their actions to be bad, immoral and evil. You can’t judge their souls but you would be crazy not to judge their actions. And I bet you would want them to stand before a judge—for judgment. And rightly so!

I think it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, if we do not have something that gets our attention, and gets us to re-examine our course, we tend to go on the same old way day after day. The Lenten season, by altering our lifestyle and our focus, and our practices, is an opportunity to make a change for the better. “Repentance” comes from the word that means a change of mind from doing what is wrong. It is an opportunity to create better judgments about our lives in accordance with Christ’s love for us. It is an opportunity to gain a greater sense of balance in our lives, especially in these days where values flip-flop like footwear on a Hawaiian beach. When we pull back a little from routine, through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, we find the room we need to make better judgments about our lives in this world, and to find a better balance of how we can better live our lives in Christ even while we still live in this world. With butter. (But not for long, maybe just a week.)