IF IT AIN'T BROKE...

 A SERMON FOR THE 13TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”  So the saying goes, and it makes a lot of sense.  If something is working just fine, exactly the way it’s supposed to, why mess things up by taking it apart and coming up with some fantasy to make it better?  Take your car for example.  Sure, there may be room for improvement—a little oil in the motor, a bit more air in the tires.  But as you’re driving merrily along to your vacation in Florida, there’s no need to stop on the way as it’s purring along down I-75 with all the kids in the back seat, and take it to a garage to get a new transmission installed.  I’m not telling you anything astonishing here, it’s just common sense, and to do such a thing wouldn’t even occur to us.

It does occur, however, to the folks that like to call themselves “progressives.”  For them, there’s no such thing as a status quo that’s already working just fine and doesn’t need changing.  Progressives constantly feel the need to make things “better,” whether their ideas would actually do so or not.  What matters to them is only that “progress” is being made.  The end result is irrelevant to them, so long as they can sit back and look with satisfaction at the fact that things have changed. 

We find it in politics, where the Progressives go under the misleading name of Democrats.  Misleading because democracy is the last thing on their mind.  They want to impose their own warped view of government on the rest of us whether we want it or not, and are prepared to destroy anything or anyone in their path, whether it be the Constitution that establishes the foundation of our country, or the President who tries to improve our lives through that Constitution and its tenets.  His obvious success in doing so gives them no pause and just makes them hate him all the more.  They continue to strive for a new, improved type of country, a new constitution that will reflect their vision of global equality.  Examples of previous attempts to bring about their fantasy of full-blooded socialism, by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, fall on deaf ears.  Their only thought is to blindly continue implementing social change no matter what the consequences. 

In the Church, this kind of progress for the sake of progress has been raised to the category of a heresy.  It’s known as “Modernism”, which is nothing more than the religious application of the Progressive agenda.  Modernists are not content with the faith of our fathers, or with the Mass that Christ instituted.  They feel the constant need to “improve” everything that was given to us by Christ and his Apostles.  One of the modernist “popes” even “improved” the Rosary given to us by the Blessed Mother.  The current heretic in Rome, Bergoglio, has just “improved” the Our Father.  The Church was doing just fine, churches were filled, converts were flocking to the true faith, vocations were increasing to the point where seminaries, monasteries, convents were overflowing with devout Catholics giving their lives to God.  Parish schools were the envy of the nation, and parents made tremendous sacrifices just to get their children enrolled.

Why couldn’t they just leave things alone?  Because they’re “progressives” and for them, they can’t abide to let things be.  So they want to “fix” things, even if they “ain’t broke.”

This is not the way of God.  Our blessed Lord did not wander all over Judea and Galilee trying to improve what didn’t need fixing.  He did not perform miracles to make people more intelligent, men stronger, women more beautiful.  But when he did find someone who was “broken,” he healed them.  The ten lepers in today’s Gospel were very much broken.  They had that terrible disease of leprosy, which ravaged their flesh, destroying skin and muscle tissue, turning their bodies into a putrid, festering mass of sores, some of them may have had missing fingers and toes, perhaps even a gaping hole where their nose used to be.  Leprosy is not a nice disease, and these poor men were definitely in need of a miracle.  So when they heard that the miracle-worker from Galilee was passing by, they cried out to him to help them in their distress.  They were sick, and he healed them.  They were broken, and he fixed them.

There are times in our life when we too feel the need to call upon God to fix what is truly broken.  Broken, it seems sometimes, beyond repair.  Times when our own sorrowful mysteries encroach upon the joyful, when our basic needs can no longer be met, and what was once working starts to irrevocably break down.  Take the current Covid-19 crisis, for example.  So many people are in dire financial circumstances.  Out of work, unable to provide for their families, bills piling up—it gradually gets to the point where people can no longer cope or come up with ways to deal with their situation.  Or perhaps, it’s a medical problem.  As we get older, our visits to the doctor seem to become more frequent, until it’s no longer a question of preventative care—taking vitamins, getting the right nutrition and exercise—or of maintaining life with the right pills and drugs.  Suddenly, we find ourselves beyond the care of human doctors and in need of a “fix” from a higher source.  It’s even worse if it’s someone close to us who is in financial straits or medical peril and there’s nothing we can do about it.  We call upon God, and from the bottom of our hearts we cry out for mercy.

“O Lord hear my prayer, and let my cry come unto thee!”  God does hear our prayer, and never fails to answer them.  Perhaps not in the way we anticipate, but assuredly in a way that best fulfills his own divine plan for us and our neighbor.  We should always be thankful for the answer he gives us, and offer up whatever pain and sorrow may come along with that answer.  This is never easy to do, as we prefer to get our own way.  But our Father in heaven knows best.  And we always owe him our most profound gratitude for the answer he gives us. 

You’ll notice that only one out of the ten lepers shows his gratitude by actually thanking our Lord.  And I’m sure you also noticed that he was a Samaritan.  Just one week after we read the story of the Good Samaritan, the Church once again places a Samaritan before us as the one who behaves better than the followers of the true religion of the time.  It reinforces the lesson we learned last Sunday—that very often, non-Catholics behave far better than those of us who profess the true faith.  That should be for us not a reason for envy or despair, but should rather inspire us to live up to our own higher calling.  We who have been given the grace of being baptized, of being raised Catholic, have far greater responsibilities than the rest.  We must recognize our privileges as graces freely granted us by God.  And like all privileges, they comes with the burden of responsibility to do more and to do better.

The obligations now incumbent upon us are these:  to love God and our neighbor.  Each of us must find the best way to do this.  But one means at least is common to us all, and that is the one commanded by the Blessed Mother—to pray the Rosary in reparation for own sins and the sins of mankind, and to avert the heavy sword of justice that is poised over this world and ready to strike.  For indeed, the world is broken, and one way or another, God is going to fix it.  Let our prayer be that of the ten lepers, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”