Fides ex Auditu

Without a doubt, the parable we have just heard is the most famous parable Jesus ever preached – that of the Prodigal Son. It has captured hearts and inspired imaginations down the centuries, and it speaks ever so powerfully to us today. Part of what makes this parable widely compelling comes from how easy it is to see ourselves in any of its characters: the son who squanders his inheritance, the father who forgives, or the brother who resents both. As we see ourselves in the characters, we can also read particular sins into the very center of the narrative. Whatever the younger son may have done to waste what his father gave him can easily stand for our own sins or the sins of our loved ones.  The sins from our own experience that we read into this parable, however, tend not to be the superficial or inconsequential ones but, on the contrary, those that are deep and damaging. We don’t compare the sin of the prodigal son to the little white lie we told when we were twelve; nor do we...

Does God want us to be happy? We may instinctively say, “Yes, I know God wants me to be happy,” but our day-to-day experience of being unhappy (in whatever form that takes for each of us) may lead us to think otherwise. We might try to explain away our unhappiness in the present moment in one of two ways. Perhaps we believe that God wants us to be happy, but he won’t let us be happy because of our sins. Or, perhaps we think that God wants us to be happy, but only in the next life and not in this one. When I’m feeling blue, I tend to put both together and think that God won’t let me be happy because of my sins, but happiness will be my reward in the life of the world to come – please God, I make it there.  Each of these attempts to explain the reality of our unhappiness despite God’s desire for us to be happy are, what we call half-truths. Taken as absolutes they’re false, but there’s a hint of truth in them. That hint of truth, however, is mixed with insidious lies – lies that the ...

I’m sure we have all wondered what heaven will be like. From the time that we first heard the Gospel and came to know the promise of eternal life, we have all carried with us some conception, however faint, of what heaven, our eternal reward, will be. Up and down the centuries, theologians and poets, musicians and painters, and all the rest have sought to describe the contours of heaven, inviting us to ask who will be there, what will it look like, what will we do, and similar questions.  Some years ago, I came across a novel that offered me less of a description of heaven than it gave me a new way of thinking about it. That book was Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Gilead is the memoir of an old preacher named John Ames in which he reflects on his long life and ministry. John Ames is close to death and thus sets out to write a lengthy letter to his seven-year-old son to read after he passes, and his son is old enough to comprehend all the things...

We are well aware that the season of Lent is about turning away from sin. This past Wednesday, we were told to “Repent and believe in the Gospel”, and we have hopefully all made a resolution to root out some kind of sin from our life over the next forty days. But for us to stop sinning, we have to understand why we sin in the first place. Otherwise, we’ll simply keep spinning our proverbial wheels in the mud. Why do we sin? That is a question that we each must ask for ourselves in the quiet of our heart, as we each have our own reasons for being drawn to one sin or another. We believe, however, that the light of Christ reveals to us our humanity, and that applies both to us in particular as individuals and in general as a species. Thus, we ought to seek to discover how that light, which reaches us today through the Scriptures we have heard, reveals us to ourselves and helps us understand in particular and in general why we sin.  I propose to you the following thesis: We sin because...