PRISONERS OF THE LORD

A SERMON FOR THE 17th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

At the very beginning of today’s Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes himself as the prisoner of the Lord.  That’s an interesting choice of words, “prisoner...”  It’s a word that normally conjures up images of captivity behind bars, being held against our will and punished.  What does it mean then, to be the prisoner of the Lord?

For a start, we must revisit the idea of captivity being necessarily against our will.  We are all prisoners, for example, of the laws of nature.  Take gravity for instance.  When I put my cup of coffee down on the table I can be assured that it won’t go floating off up the ceiling.  It’s the law of gravity, and I’m a prisoner of it.  Is that against our will?  Would I prefer to have to float around trying to find where my coffee went?  And then trying to pour hot coffee down my throat would be an even more unpleasant adventure.  So you see, even though we are prisoners of gravity, it’s not the kind of captivity we want to be released from.

God created nature, with its laws.  And God can suspend these laws if he sees fit.  We have an example of that this coming Tuesday with the feast of St. Joseph Cupertino.  This Franciscan friar was granted the very unusual gift by God of floating up into the air whenever he prayed.  I’m not sure why God dispensed him from the law of gravity, but there’s no question that he did, thanks to the large number of reliable witnesses.  Maybe it was simply to show us that God can suspend the laws of nature when he wants.  

We are captives also of other laws.  Laws which not even God can change.  “What’s that, you say, Father?  There’s something that God can’t do?  I thought God is almighty, omnipotent?  He can do anything he wants, surely?”  The answer is simple.  Yes, he can do anything he wants.  But he is incapable of wanting something that would be contradictory.  God could never wantto create a square circle for example.  He could never make two plus two equal anything other than four.  To do so would go against his own nature, which is Truth.

So if not even God can change the fact that two plus two equals four, no amount of imagination or fancy calculation on our own part can ever change this basic fact.  We are prisoners, if you like, of this simple truth.  But let me ask again:  is that against our will.  Would we want the answer to a simple mathematical question to be capable of being different each time we asked it?  How could we live in such a world?  How could we measure length and breadth?  How could we ever build a bridge over a river, or even a simple house to live in, without the consistency of the laws of mathematics?

No, truth is truth.  There’s no way to change truth.  Nor should there be.  The universe is made in the image and likeness of God, and God is truth.  And we can’t change God.  Many have tried, mind you.  From the Arians who wanted to change the idea of the Trinity, to the Protestants and more recently the Modernists, who want to change our Lord’s new covenant with man.  They refuse the idea of only one true Church founded on Peter, they reject the true meaning of every sacrament, and they have abolished the daily and perpetual sacrifice of Calvary that takes place in the traditional Holy Apostolic Mass.  The imagination of man can invent a new God, a new one-world church, a new Mass.  But they exist only as fantasies, while the real God, the “true” God, watches their fantastic dreams, and continues, the same yesterday, today and forever.

The truth that is God extends to all those things he has revealed to us. We don’t have to find those truths for ourselves—God’s only-begotten Son has established a Church to tell us what those truths are.  If the Church teaches us something dogmatically, we don’t have to figure out for ourselves if it’s true or not.  Individual theologians might discuss certain things and try to get to the truth of something, but until the Church pronounces on the matter, their conclusions may correct or they may be wrong.  And what these theologians absolutely cannot do—they cannot declare something true that isn’t. Neither can the Church. But the difference is that once the Church declares something true, we may be sure that it is true, and we must give that teaching the assent of our faith.  When evil men like Pope Francis declare there is no hell, he speaks as an individual, not as the Church.  Not only are we not bound to believe his heresies, we have two thousand years of Church teaching plus the words of our Lord himself to tell us that we must believe in hell, and all the other things that Francis denies.  It is as St. Paul says in today’s Epistle—One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.  And we are prisoners of that one Lord.  We are prisoners of that one faith.

Prisoners?  Yes, because we are held captive by the very fact that God is God, that our faith is of God who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Held captive against our will? No, hopefully not!  Hopefully, we are willing prisoners of the Lord, accepting all the truths he has revealed to us through his Church.  And we would never dream of denying any of those dogmas any more than we would deny that two plus two equals four.

Nor should we be tempted to stray from the truth for the reason that so many other opinions exist. There is only one truth, but an infinite number of falsehoods.  The fact that there are so many, or that a majority of people reject the truth, does not make a lie out of the truth.  We can say that two plus two equals any number we care to make up, 5, 18, 3472, whatever!  But there is only one truth.  And we can declare, dogmatically in a certain sense and with full confidence, that the only true answer is four.  Similarly, if the Church teaches dogmatically that the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, then so it is.  So it must be.  This is the one truth.  There can be no other, and all the false teachings of a hundred thousand protestant sects will never change that one truth.

The destruction wrought by Vatican II has contributed more than anything else to this new world where falsehoods spread like viruses to the uneducated masses.  No longer is there a Pope in Rome who speaks with the infallible voice of authority.  Francis has “freed” himself from being a prisoner of the Lord, and now speaks as just one other voice of false opinion, spreading his poison among us, and leading souls away from God.   Many Catholics who were once proud to be prisoners of the Lord, willing captives of the one faith taught by the Catholic Church, now attempt to follow their pope and escape from their bondage.  They want to believe whatever truths this modern age invents for us, not the truths that God has revealed to us.  They are like foolish men who would exchange the imagined bondage of the open fields and the majestic mountains for a the narrow walls of a prison cell.  When women demand to be liberated by being ordained as priests, they do not realize they are losing their freedom by rejecting the laws of God.  When they claim the right to do as they want with their own bodies by murdering their unborn children, they become slaves to their own unnatural desires and aspirations.  Men too refuse to accept the truths of God, and imagine they can redefine the sacrament of marriage, behaving as though the revelations of God and the sacred commands of holy Scripture and the Church don’t exist.  So many today refuse those beautiful chains that tie us to our Lord and Saviour, they rebel and then find themselves prisoners of their own silly or wicked inventions, prisoners of Vatican II, and of Francis with his bewildering and never-ending series of lies and crazy fantasies.  It is up to the few of us who have been given the grace to recognize these lies for what they are, to remain prisoners of the Lord, keeping the one faith, and with it, our sanity.  For any new invented laws that contradict reality can never work.  The logical end of such wholesale denial is the abolition of all established order in the world.  And that will drive us mad.  

So keep the faith, prize it as the great gift from God that it surely is.  And most importantly, we should not just “say” we’re keeping the faith, but get to know our faith, and accept all the consequences of our faith, the first of which can only be what our Lord tells us in today’s Gospel, namely, to loveGod with all our heart and soul and mind. Our captivity to mathematical truths frees us to measure and design a house.  Our captivity to the truths of nature keeps our feet on the ground and our expectations realistic.  Our obedience to these natural truths help us in one way or another.  But only our voluntary captivity in the faith can free us to truly love God and save our souls.