All good gifts

    Today the Church celebrates a wonderful feast day - not Saint Valentine of Hallmark fame - but rather the brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles to the Slavic Peoples.  Just so you know, this has been a longstanding feast on February 14th, and was not the result of having a Polish Pope.  But in honor of Valentine's Day, I am doing the post in red.

     In the letter of James this morning we heard that "all good giving and every perfect gift is from above" and that the Father of lights "willed to give us birth by the word of truth".  Recently we heard a part of the struggles of Job, and wondered why God would do this to Job.  We often hear people lament that God is testing them, tempting them, to see if they are strong.  I've heard people say "Why has God done this to me?"  "Why am I being punished?" "Doesn't God love me?"

     Temptations will always come our way, the author of James reminds us, because there is an evil outside of us, a darkness that pervades our hearts, a vacancy within the human condition that allows those forces who deny God to work their charms.  I seem to remember a line of Banquo's from Macbeth that goes something like this ... "But 'tis strange, and oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence." [Thanks, Father Bryant, for making us memorize Shakespeare.]  James tells us that God is not tempted to tempt or to do evil.  It is not within his nature to do harm.  "Rather, each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his desire.  Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches  maturity it gives birth to death."

     Temptations are very real, but the do not come from God.  They flow from the darkness that exists apart from God, and attack our human condition, when separated from the Divine, luring us away from all that is life giving.  There are forces that seek to bring us down.  The world often tells us to pay attention to those forces, for they make perfect sense.  But we should not be deceived, for we have been gifted with light and life, and "all good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights."  It is he that gives us the strength to resist temptation and to live life fully in Christ.