A SERMON FOR WHITSUNDAY
We’re here this morning for one single purpose. That purpose is to save our souls. We may have come here this morning perhaps out of habit. That’s okay, because it’s a good habit, in other words a virtue. It’s also okay if we came there today out of fear, because we don’t want to put our souls in danger by disobeying God’s commandment. It’s okay because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The point is, we’re here. Ideally, we’re here because we love God, because we want to do his will more than anything else, because we want to unite with him in Holy Communion, because he is our chief priority and focus in life. Ideally. But if our motives are less perfect than that, we can at least reassure ourselves that we are here. We have obeyed the Third Commandment of God and the First Precept of the Church, and we are at Sunday Mass. We’re in the right place at the right time, and if the world ends in the next few minutes, there is nowhere else we’d rather be than here in the presence of our Creator and Redeemer.
On the first Pentecost Sunday, the Apostles felt the same way. They could have made some half-hearted attempts to “move on with their lives” after our Lord had ascended into heaven. They would probably have gone fishing, or returned to their families and settled down. But they had received a mission from God, that they should go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And they had no idea how to do that. All they knew is that the last thing Christ had commanded was that they should remain in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Spirit of Truth. And so they obeyed. Just as you who came to Mass this morning have obeyed, they did what they were told, following our Lord’s instructions to the letter, so that when the time came for the Holy Ghost to descend upon them, he found them exactly where they were supposed to be, waiting and praying.
My concern isn’t so much the reason why you’re here today. The point is that you’re here. My concern is for those who have not obeyed the voice of their God this morning, that they should keep holy the sabbath day, those who have not obeyed the voice of Holy Mother Church that they should attend Mass on Sunday. We should all be very, very concerned for the many who have not bothered to be here today, either here or at some other true and traditional Mass. Their souls are in peril if they have deliberately chosen not to obey God and his Church.
The same goes for any other act of defiance against the commandments. To disobey is to commit a sin, to offend God. If the disobedience is serious, then the sin is mortal. If the sin is mortal and God chooses to take us before we truly repent and (if possible) confess our sins, then our souls will be damned.
And that brings me back to the three things necessary for us to save our souls. We began speaking about them a few weeks ago, and we continue today with the second requirement. The first, as I hope you remember, is that we must belong to the right Church. You all do because here you are, so I’m not going to spend time with that today, other than to remind ourselves that today is the birthday of that Church. The Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles signifies the beginning of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and it was from this moment when the tongues of fire appeared on their heads that the Apostles knew what they had to do and how to do it. Without the Holy Ghost there would have been no Church, and Christ would have founded it in vain. With the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter, we can find that necessary comfort that everything the Church teaches is taught with the authority of God himself, and that it is the guarantee of this Spirit of Truth that enables us to relax and accept whatever is told us by a Church that is infallible. Today’s feast of Pentecost, in other words, confirms what I have been telling you about the necessity of belonging to this Church, which alone, is the source of all the truths about God that we need to save our souls. We are confirmed in our faith by the Holy Ghost, and specifically we are confirmed through the Sacrament of Confirmation.
So much for the first requirement for salvation—here we are, members of the True Church. So make sure you never leave the true Church, as those who followed the Protestant revolution have done, as those who now follow the Modernist revolution are still doing. Keep the faith. The faith of our fathers. The faith of the Apostles. The Catholic faith.
However, faith isn’t enough. We need more than just faith to save our souls, we need faith AND morals. And that’s why we need to obey God’s commandments. It’s easy to know what those commandments are, the Church teaches them to us infallibly, as we’ve already explained. But free will “allows” us to disobey them. Just remember that the option to choose evil is not a real option in the eyes of God. There are no real options here, no weighing up in our head whether we should go to Mass on Sunday or do something else, whether we should use contraception or not, whether same-sex relationships are okay in this new modern age, (and the same thing goes for every other commandment). We MUST obey all the commandments of God and the Church. If we don’t, we can have enough faith so as to move mountains, but if we have not charity—that is if we don’t love God enough to obey his commandments—then we are as a tinkling cymbal, and it profiteth us nothing. Don’t forget, the Devil has the Faith! He believes full well in God! And if we behave as the Devil, we’ll end up spending eternity with the Devil.
So the second requirement for salvation is that once we belong to the true Church, we must submit to all the divine and ecclesiastical laws that the Church teaches. It’s a simple enough statement to make, it’s Religion 101. But not so easy to keep to. And again, that’s where the Holy Ghost comes in. When we’re baptized into the Church the Holy Ghost dwells within our souls, we become the Temples of the Holy Ghost. When we sin mortally, we drive him out and tell him we prefer our own pleasures to doing God’s will. But as soon as we repent, as soon as our sins are absolved, he returns to make us his temple once again. And he strengthens us with his presence, he confirms us, not with tongues of fire this time, but with his hidden divine presence within our souls.
Let’s take note of this apparent coincidence that the Holy Ghost is directly and intimately connected with both requirements for our salvation! If we must belong to the true Church, it is because that Church is guided by the Spirit of Truth, leading us infallibly along our path towards God and our salvation. And secondly, that Spirit of Truth allows us to know what is right and what is wrong so that we can keep our souls free from sin and temples of that same Holy Spirit. We must unite ourselves first with the Holy Spirit within Christ’s Mystical Body, and then allow Christ’s Holy Spirit to unite with our own body and soul through our obedience to the infallible laws taught by that Holy Spirit. Does that sound complicated? It isn’t. On the contrary, salvation is so very simple to understand. It’s a perfect circle of simplicity. I could express it in ten thousand different ways, but somehow, putting it into words turns something so extremely simple into something that sounds complicated. So let’s keep it simple and stop with this resolution—belong to the Church of God, obey the commandments of God. Do this and you’re two-thirds of the way to salvation. Just remember though that while “two out of three ain’t bad”, it’s still not enough! There’s still one more thing missing from our final success in achieving salvation. So in a couple of weeks, I’ll introduce you to the third and last requirement, and then, hopefully, you’ll know all you need to know to save your souls.
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