A SERMON FOR THE 4TH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
We seem to have a bit of a problem going on in Eastern Europe
right now. Wars and rumors of wars, as
our Lord warned us about. This shouldn’t
surprise us, given the spiralling of Western Civilization as a whole toward
what looks like a point of no return. I
saw on the news last Sunday that the churches in the Ukrainian capital were
packed, as the faithful crowded in to make their no doubt fervent petitions to
God to protect their nation, praying in the words of the disciples in the boat. “Lord, save us: we perish.”
Because, just like the disciples of our Lord in today’s
Gospel, it takes a “great tempest, insomuch that the ship is covered with the
waves” before we bother turning to God. Prayer
should be our daily, even constant occupation, speaking with God, pouring out
to him all our hopes and fears, our questions and doubts, our repentant sorrow,
our prayers of adoration—but to our discredit, after ignoring all these things for
so long, it’s only when we find ourselves in real trouble that we turn back to
the God who should have been in our hearts and minds all along.
And when we finally turn to God for help, what do we
find? He’s asleep. Yes, believe it or not, some people actually
think he’s asleep. With our feeble and
fickle human nature, we actually have the audacity to attribute God’s
non-intervention in our problems to the preposterous idea that God is sleeping,
oblivious to our trials and tribulations, and that we need to wake God up so
that he can save us. Whereas the reality
is, we are the ones who have been asleep.
We are the ones who have been oblivious to God’s multiple invitations to
pray, to attend Mass, to receive him in holy Communion, simply to make him a
part of our lives.
Why are so many people asleep. It seems impossible that anyone could sleep
through the onslaught of perilous threats that face us today. And yet, some people are even now unaware of
the dangers we face. Some are indifferent
to them, thinking that they won’t affect us, so why should we care. Others yet are simply unwilling to be
distracted from their pleasant daily routine and their “happy thoughts”. Then there are those who are so complacent
that even now they put their hope in man rather than God, blithely and absurdly
confident that the men of this world can fix things.
There’s another category of people who prefer to continue
sleeping in these dangerous times. It’s one
that probably we here today are the most likely to fit into. We know basically what’s going on, but feel
helpless to do anything about it. The
resulting temptation is to bury our head in the sand and distract ourselves
with worldly and material diversions, but this reaction is fraught with
danger. It’s based on the age-old axiom,
“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” During the period of the Black
Death in medieval Europe, there was a phenomenon where some people used to ignore
the risks of contagion and indulge themselves in wild parties. Maybe that’s the reasons so many people got
into trouble for partying during the Covid lockdowns. It’s normal human nature, but it isn’t a
constructive way of handling a crisis. If
you find yourself falling into this trap of dispelling thoughts of imminent
peril from your mind, you are simply anesthetizing your mind—basically lulling
yourself deliberately into, yes, sleep.
But don’t expect the world to be any better, don’t think the dangers
will have passed you by when you eventually wake up.
So what should we do in the face of all the terrible
things facing us today? Ignorance,
complacency and despair are certainly not the answers. The first thing we must all do is recognize
the fact that God is not asleep. We
might be sleeping through the danger, but God is not. Just because he is not
intervening with thunderbolts and booming reprimands from heaven doesn’t mean
he isn’t intimately aware of everything that’s going on in this world of
ours. So why does he seem to be
asleep? Why doesn’t he intervene and
rebuke the ill winds of peril? The answer
lies in man’s free will…
It’s this free will that gets us into trouble every
time. Sure, there may be other crises
that we don’t cause: weather disasters, earthquakes, and so on. But when it comes down to the major crises
that affect history, it’s nearly always man’s fault. God isn’t asleep. He’s watching us, no doubt with sadness,
maybe anger, watching what we do with that free will he gave us. We know why he gave us free will—it’s
so that we can freely choose to love him, to obey his commandments, to freely
conform our will to God’s will. But
alas, we all fail in this respect many times a day, and there are some who even
deliberately choose to defy the will of God and pursue their own whims, often
in the worst ways imaginable. What caused this current crisis with
Russia? Pride, stubbornness, envy,
anger, hatred? I don’t know, but I do
know this: that it was the free will of some people somewhere that
has brought us to this precipice.
And after we mess up God’s world, his creation, we have the
nerve to accuse God of being asleep, of somehow failing us by not
intervening. But think about it, how can
he intervene in the workings of our free will?
If he did, he would be destroying the freedom of our will, the very
element of what makes us human beings and God’s children. He can’t give us free will and then take away
the consequences of our misuse of that free will. He would be taking away the very thing he
gave us. So why should we expect him to?
You may be thinking that this reason for the non-intervention
of God should lead us to conclude what we have earlier condemned, namely that
there’s nothing we can do, so don’t do anything at all. Wrong!
The disciples were not wrong to call upon our Lord in their boat and beg
him for help. They were in danger; they didn’t
have time to analyze why they were in danger, that just maybe the
emergency they found themselves in was one of their own making. Maybe they had taken the boat out to sea
without first checking the weather forecast.
Or perhaps they had tempted fate, or more accurately, tempted God by
staying out on the water longer than they should so they could catch a few more
fish. All they knew was that they were
going to drown if God didn’t help them.
They weren’t wrong in calling out for help, they were wrong only because
they assumed God was unable to help them because he was asleep. Certainly they were wrong in their lack of
faith—we know that because our Lord himself reprimanded them: “Why are ye so fearful,
O ye of little faith?” But their fault
lay in their lack of faith, not in the fact that they called upon our
Lord for help.
This is the reason we must not despair and think God can’t or
won’t help us. It’s why we shouldn’t
think that the worst possible outcome is inevitable and that there’s nothing we
can do about it. We should not give in
to our fears. Our Lord rebuked the
disciples for doing just that, and he will rebuke us today for doing the same
thing. But there is something we can do
and that’s to call upon the Lord as we are reminded in the 90th
Psalm: “He shall call upon me, and I will hear him; yea, I am with him in
trouble; I will deliver him, and bring him to honour.” Our prayer to God must be made, not in fear
and trembling at what faces us, but with confidence in his divine Providence
that all things work together for good to them that love God.
Can God intervene without damaging our free will? In fact, we often see that God can perform
miracles that override the laws of nature.
One such miracle occurs in today’s Gospel when “he rebuked the winds and
the sea, and there was a great calm.” If
he is powerful enough to create the universe and then defy the natural laws he
made to govern it, then he certainly has the power to change the consequences
of our actions in order to answer our prayers.
In fact, it’s why he told us to pray.
Last week, we saw how he changed his divine plan and performed his first
miracle, changing water into wine, purely to answer the prayer of his
Mother. So we should trust that he will
answer our humble supplications—just don’t ask them in fear of not being
answered, but confident in God’s promise to deliver us—“He shall call upon me,
and I will hear him.”
This 90th Psalm from which these words are taken
is sung at the Church’s Divine Office of Compline. I’ve included it in this week’s bulletin, and
it would be a good thing to take it home and read it often, especially in these
times of crisis when we feel that the walls of Jericho are tumbling down around
us. Prayer is not just words that we
whisper into the air, prayer is our SOS signal to God, our mayday call, that we
are in desperate need of help, our bridge over troubled waters. God is most assuredly not sleeping. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither
slumber nor sleep.” He’s there, always listening
for our communication, ready at a moment’s notice to answer our call for
assistance, and to rebuke the powers that be, and to restore that “great calm” for
which we all so deeply long.
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