SUBJECT TO THE KING

 A SERMON FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING

On this feast of Christ the King we have one of those rare Gospel readings that are usually reserved for Holy Week.  In this case, it’s a short clip from St. John’s Passion, read at the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday.  We find our Lord in front of Pontius Pilate, who is questioning him.  “Art thou the King of the Jews?” he asks.  And we, who today celebrate the feast of Christ the King, who acknowledge him as the King of kings and Lord of lords, nod our head as we hear this question.  Yes, we say, of course this is the Christ, King of the Jews.  Our Lord could also have nodded his assent and agreed to this title.  And yet he does not.  He is not impressed by titles.  Instead, he describes his mission to the world, which is to bear witness unto the truth.  “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world,”—not to sit on a throne wielding power and authority over the Jewish people like his forefather King David, but as the humble son of a carpenter, walking among his people, teaching them, and bringing them to the truth.

Power and authority in themselves are not bad things.  In fact, they derive from God, who delegates his own power and authority to our earthly kings who rule over us.  But in return for this power, God demands of these rulers that they bear witness unto the truth.  If they don’t, if they wield power based on lies and hypocrisy, then they are nothing more than tyrants.  Bearing witness to the truth is a far more important role for our earthly kings than any physical or political power and might.  Any king or pope or president who bullies his people into submission, who forces them to accept the lies he tells them, is nothing more than a wicked despot.  Jorge Bergoglio and Joseph Biden are perfect examples.  Think of Bergoglio’s forced abolition of the true Mass, think of Biden’s mandatory vaccinations.  They may have usurped the power of Church and State, they may even wield that power with impunity, wallowing in the adulation that their sycophants dribble upon them.  But these are not true rulers we look up to for guidance and protection.  They are more like vile upstarts who like to bully their subordinates simply because they can. 

So when Pilate asks our Lord if he is the King of the Jews, our Lord does not acknowledge this title of king, a name given to good kings and bad kings alike.  While a king he most certainly is, his royalty does not derive from the power of the title.  On the contrary, the title of King belongs to Christ because he bears witness to the Truth, because he is in fact the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  And this is what his answer was supposed to convey to Pilate and all those listening.

Because he is the Truth, he is truly the King of kings.  A king who has subjects.  But when our Lord commands us his subjects, we obey him not just because he is a king.  We obey him because he is the Truth and can never command us to do something wrong.  The two tablets containing the Ten Commandments are our Book of the Law, beautifully encapsulated in those two Great Commandments, to love God (Commandments 1-3), and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Commandments 4-10).  The Ten Commandments are our law of Love, a love which binds us in glorious subjection to our King.  It is this law of love that commands us to love him in return for the love he shows us, and for the truths he has revealed to us his children through the Church he founded.

Because we now know these truths, we understand that we must love God.  Not because it is the law, but because it is what we want.  We want to love God.  How can we not want to love God when we know what he is, who he is, and what he has done for us.  How do we show our love for God?  By serving him.  First we know, then we love, then we serve, servants of the King.  It is our place to serve him.  He is Christ the King and we are his loyal and obedient subjects, striving at all times to please him, and it’s important we know that this is our role in life. 

Now that we know our place with regard to Christ the King, we should find that peace and comfort in knowing we truly are in our rightful place of subjection at his feet.  We should be enjoying the peace of knowing that if we have known, loved and served God in this world, we are well placed to be happy with him forever in the next.  This hope for the salvation of our souls will surely be realized so long as we don’t offend our king by being disloyal, so long as we kneel before his feet and beg his mercy if we ever have the misfortune to displease him. 

One last point, which I hope will dispel any remaining doubt that prevents you from enjoying that peace of mind.  We always seem to keep that element of uncertainty, wondering about that mystery that our Judge will be infinitely mercy but also, at the same time, infinitely just.  After all, we know exactly what we truly deserve by our manifold sins.  This is where the fear of God comes in.  It’s quite normal to fear a king, any king who has the power of life and death over us.  He can, and just might, for any whim, deliver swift and lasting justice at any given moment.  He can also bestow mercy, so we do what we can to remain in the king’s good graces.  It is no different with Christ the King, he who will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead.  We fear the wrath of God, and rightly so, as it keeps us on the straight and narrow, at least most of the time.  The difference is, Christ the King does not have whims.  He doesn’t have mood swings, and we don’t have to be walking on eggshells in his presence.  We know what he wants from us—it never changes—and we know that he has died for our sins and promised us our eternal reward if we repent of our sins.  So today we pray for his mercy, that the infinite justice of this King will be tempered by his infinite loving kindness.  We pray to the Mother of this King, the Queen of heaven, asking her to pray in turn for us, now and at the hour of our death.  And we consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart of Christ the King, pierced by a lance so that saving grace may flow from his side, the Blood of the Saviour, washing our sinful souls of their dark deeds, and opening the gates of heaven for us poor sinners.  May that Blood now descend upon us, a laver of redemption and of life.  “May the earth resound from pole to pole with one cry: Praise to the Divine Heart that wrought our salvation; to it be glory and honour forever.  Amen.” 

REDEEMING THE TIME

 A SERMON FOR THE 20TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Let me start today by asking you a riddle.  What comes and goes in the space of a split second, and yet continues to be there even after it is gone?  The answer is time.  To be precise, the present time.

Time’s a strange thing.  It was created by God in the very first chapter of the Bible.  There could not have been any chapters in the Bible before this, because there was no time in which anything could “happen.”  God created time in his own image and likeness, the likeness of a trinity.  Time is the name we give to three distinct things—past, present and future.  It has existed ever since that moment when God created time, and will continue until the end of the world, when “heaven and earth shall pass away…”  After that moment, nothing else will exist except the supernatural beings—angels and men, and of course God himself.  We shall exist after time no longer exists.  Time will be transformed into eternity.  An eternity outside this world, in either heaven or hell.

So how much time do we have?  Years?  Months?  Minutes?  But I’m not talking about how much time till the end of the world, or even till we die.  That time is in the future.  How much time do we really have?  The answer is surprising but true.  We only have a split second.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that we exist only in the present, that split second that exists between the future and the past.  We do not live in the future.  Not even the immediate future.  We prepare for the future, certainly, but anything can happen between now and then that could affect our plans.  We can plan to make bacon and eggs for breakfast, but if we drop our last egg on the floor while we’re cooking, we’ll have to switch our plans to cornflakes.  In the spiritual life, we can make our resolutions to God in the confessional, we can promise faithfully to sin no more.  But then the future appears in our life as the present, and we have that split second of “present” to make the decision whether to yield to temptation or resist it.  Then the present disappears forever, never to be repeated, never to be changed or modified in any respect whatsoever.  Poof!  It’s gone.  It’s now in the past, and we will forever be thankful to God for resisting the temptation, or forever regret giving in to it.

So while preparing for our future is important, our eternal judgment will be based not on vague plans that haven’t happened yet, nor even on our past.  Our eternal judgment will be based on that split second of “now” that’s already gone by the time I’ve finished the sentence.  What am I doing now?  What am I thinking?  What am I saying?  I will be judged on this split second, so make the most of it.

But wait, Father, you might say.  There isn’t just one split second, there are millions of them.  Each one follows the last, and so on, so I have plenty of time.  Or at least, I have more than a split second left to make important decisions.  True, but I’m not talking about making decisions, I’m talking about your current thoughts, words, deeds.  You might take time preparing for a future decision, but at some point, some split second in the present, you will eventually make that decision to act, to speak, to indulge a certain thought.  Make sure it’s the right decision.  

The split second of now might not be a conscious decision.  But it’s always based on a decision you’ve already made or are currently in the process of making.  You’re in church listening to a sermon right now because you already made the decision to get out of bed this morning and go to Mass.  That was a good decision.  But what are you doing now?  Right now?  What’s going through your head?  Are you listening and trying to understand what I’m saying?  Or are you still thinking about whether to have the bacon and eggs or the cornflakes for breakfast?  So think about it—it’s always about now! 

St. Paul puts it very well in today’s Epistle to the Ephesians.  He tells them to “walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time.”  And why?  “Because the days are evil.”  He’s not talking here about the times we live in as being evil, though heaven knows they are.  He’s talking about evil as the absence of good.  Every split second of our lives begins as something evil because there is no good in it.  It will forever have been an evil split second if you waste it and don’t do something good in it. 

This good you do at every split second may not be a conscious act and that’s okay.  You’re not conscious of doing a good thing while you’re asleep, for instance.  And yet you are.  Because you made the decision to go to bed and sleep.  All those sleeping moments are thus turned into something good.  We can even sanctify them if we say our night prayers properly.

The point is, we need to fill every one of our split seconds with something good.  We need to redeem the present; to take that empty moment, that split second that is devoid of anything good, and drive out the evil emptiness of it, replacing it with good.  Just like the act of turning on an electric light drives out the darkness, so does the goodness of our thoughts, words and deeds drive out the evil of the moment.  This is the redemption of that moment of “now” in our life, a redemption that we are responsible for.  So be responsible for every split second that passes you by.  Redeem every single one of them, because you never know which of them will be your last.

CALLED AND CHOSEN

 A SERMON FOR THE 19TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

“Many are called, but few are chosen.”  It’s an expression we’ve heard often enough, but what exactly does it mean?   Many are called, but how many exactly?  The answer is simple enough—every single human being that ever lived or will live is called.  And what are we all called to?  What is this wedding feast to which all men receive an invitation?  It is a wedding feast that extends from this life to the next.  In this life we call this feast the reception of the Holy Eucharist, at which we unite with our God in Holy Communion.  This temporary union will eventually transform into the true wedding feast of life everlasting in which we are united completely, perfectly and forever with our God in heaven.

To this wedding feast we are called, and we are right now attending, ready and prepared to unite our bodies and souls with our Lord at Holy Communion.  To be able to do this we must first have been baptized into the Church Christ founded, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  Unless we are members of this Church we may not receive Holy Communion.  There’s another pre-requisite for receiving Holy Communion and that is to be in the state of grace.  So if we find ourselves in mortal sin we must first confess our sins to a validly ordained Catholic priest and receive absolution for our offences against God.  Once we are Catholics in the state of grace, and have reached the age of reason, there is nothing that should keep us away from Holy Communion.  This is the wedding feast to which the King has invited us and no excuse should keep us away.

If we do refuse the invitation, if we do not regularly receive the Holy Eucharist, that King who invited us, whose feast of Christ the King we will be celebrating in a couple of weeks from now, that same King will be exceeding wroth.  He has every right to be angry—he established the Church for our salvation, and died for our sins that they may be forgiven.  Who are we to refuse these gifts and throw them back in God’s face?  They were given for one reason only, that we may be worthy to receive the Holy Eucharist in this life and be happy with God forever in the next.  If we refuse Communion we are effectively refusing salvation.

This brings us to the second part of our Lord’s statement, that many are called but few are chosen.  Now we know who are called, every single human being.  But which of them are chosen?  We can start by ruling out all those who refuse the invitation, those who for one reason or another reject the call to the wedding feast.  They either refuse the first step, which is to become baptized Catholics, or they commit sins but do not repent of them—they don’t confess them and receive absolution.  They were called but they are not chosen.  They were called—in other words, redeemed by Christ.  But how do they expect to be chosen—saved—if they refuse his Church and his sacraments?  When one of those born-again evangelicals tells you they’re saved, they are doing nothing more but presuming on God’s mercy.  They think they can save their souls even though their belief in Christ and ‘love’ for him does not extend to obeying his commandments. They will not become members of the Church he founded and they will not confess their sins to a priest.  Whether they end up “saved” or not, whether they end up among the chosen, is up to the mercy of God, and it is only through this mercy that there is any hope for them.  He is the final Judge of their souls, and we leave it to him to be both infinitely merciful and infinitely just.

Now what about the rest of us, those who are here today, those who attend Mass, who keep the commandments, who are loyal to the teachings of our Church.  We are called and we came.  But are we chosen?  If we come to Mass in the state of grace and fasting, but refuse to receive Holy Communion, will we  be amongst the chosen.  Our Lord says no.  Being here is not enough.  We must be wearing the proper wedding garment.  This is the wedding garment of humble submission to Christ’s commandment that, though we are still unworthy, we must still eat his Body and drink his Blood.  Yes, O Lord, I am not worthy, that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed.  We’ve done everything we can, we’ve answered the invitation to be baptized into and remain loyal members of the Church, we’ve confessed and been absolved from our sins and are in the state of grace, but we’re still unworthy certainly.  How can we presume then to go up to the communion rail and receive Christ’s holy Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity?  Because we are commanded to do so.  And so, in that final moment before we receive Communion, we humbly submit our unworthiness to God, Domine, non sum dignus, and we ask for his mercy that he will speak the word only and heal our souls.  If we don’t, if we resolutely remain in our pew week after week, we should expect nothing more when the time comes than to be bound hand and foot, to be taken and cast into the outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  If we refuse Christ’s greatest gift, the Blessed Sacrament, we will not be chosen.  We will not save our souls.

So today, we ask ourselves am I called?  Yes.  Most definitely.  Am I chosen?  That’s a different question, which I hope you agree has now been answered.  Called and chosen.  Redeemed and saved.  We are all redeemed.  But we are not all saved.  I may very well have accepted the invitation to the wedding.  I’ve even shown up at the feast.  But am I wearing the wedding garment required for salvation?  Am I ready to receive Holy Communion as a practicing Catholic free from mortal sin?  If not, and I persist in my refusal to receive, or even if I am indifferent to whether I receive or not, either way I stand a very good chance of being singled out to be cast into the outer darkness.  If we don’t want to spend eternity weeping and gnashing our teeth, let’s make sure we do what we have to do, so that we will indeed be chosen for higher things.

WHICH IS EASIER?

 A SERMON FOR THE 18TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Did you notice in today’s Gospel that when they brought the man sick of the palsy to our Lord, Jesus had no intention of healing him.  It says that our Lord “saw their faith” already.  So he didn’t need to perform a miracle.  Miracles were our Lord’s way of reinforcing the credibility and authority of his teaching by showing people he could do things they couldn’t.  People needed to have faith in him and in what he taught them, but for most of them, their faith was not strong enough to make them change their lives.  No, what they needed was something that that would astonish them, something that would make them stop in their tracks and go “Ooh” and “Aah”.  So very often, Our Lord would deign to grant their wishes and would perform a miracle.  He made the blind to see, the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak; he made lame men walk and cleansed lepers.  “Ooh!  Aah!”  But in this particular case he “saw their faith”, he saw that these people who brought him the man sick of the palsy already had a sufficiently strong faith and didn’t need any miraculous displays of his supernatural powers.

So even though they had brought him this sick man, presumably so that our Lord could heal him, Jesus was prepared to refuse that healing.  Perhaps it was better for this sick man to earn a higher place in heaven through his suffering, perhaps our Lord wanted to test the man’s faith by allowing his sickness to continue.  Whatever the reason for not curing him, our Lord nevertheless wanted to do something for this poor man.  So he did.  He forgave his sins.

Think about this a moment from God’s perspective.  When God looks down on us, living our lives in this world, lives which have no other purpose than to test us and see if we love God enough to merit heaven, what do you think is most important in this divine inspection of his creatures?  Is God primarily interested in whether our bodies are healthy?  Or whether our souls are healthy?  Which is more important to God—that we avoid temporary suffering in this vale of tears, or eternal suffering in hell?  While God is certainly compassionate for our temporal suffering, obviously he has more care for our souls than our bodies.  Thus, when they bring to him a man suffering from the palsy, our Lord seeks to reward them, and him, by curing the man’s soul rather than his body.  He says to the man “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.”  And hopefully, since this was far more consequential to the sick man than merely curing his body, both he and those who had carried him there were indeed “of good cheer,” believing that he was far better off with this spiritual healing he had received.

But then of course, as is always the case, there are those nearby who do not have such good faith in our Lord.  “Certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.”  These men of little faith refused to believe that Christ was the Son of God and that he had power to forgive sins.  Of course, it was not Christ who blasphemed.  The blasphemy came from those who accused the Son of God of blasphemy.  Our Lord knew exactly what they were thinking and replied to their evil thoughts: “Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?  For whether is easier, to say Thy sins are forgiven thee; or to say, Arise and walk?” 

Let’s ask ourselves at this point in the story, whom do we more closely resemble?  The people who were perfectly content with the spiritual healing of the man with the palsy, the forgiveness of his sins?   Or the scribes who needed proof that Christ had such power, who needed a miracle before they would even consider believing in him?  Are we of good cheer when we come out of the confessional with our sins forgiven?  Or do we come out complaining because we have a headache, or because the chapel is too warm, or the sermon too long?  Do we secretly wish for miracles, that our physical ailments and discomforts may vanish away in a puff of smoke, or that I might finally have written a sermon that’s less than ten minutes?  That’s one miracle that isn’t happening today.  But think about it, are we men of faith?  Or men of little faith?  Can we be content with the supernatural miracles hidden in the sacraments, the miracle of forgiveness in Confession, the miracle of the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist?  Or are we constantly seeking wonders?   Hollywood has succeeded to a large extent in making amazing events and astonishing superpowers normal.  From Clarence the Angel to the Bionic Man, we can “ooh” and “aah” all day long.  And if we stop to think for a moment, isn’t this what the devil wanted all along?  That we become numb to the truly miraculous, and treat with contempt those hidden miracles that we cannot see, those that truly count?

Let’s pause and reflect on the truly amazing powers of God.  Whether we see them, as the people in Fatima back in 1917 saw the Miracle of the Sun, or whether we see them only through the eyes of faith, such as the real presence of God on our altar this morning, God’s powers are awesome enough that we should indeed stand in awe before them.  We don’t need to hear the equivalent of those words, “Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.”  We don’t need to be cured of our diseases, we don’t need for all our sufferings and tribulations to just go away.  What we do need is the faith to be of good cheer, that the sacraments of our Holy Church will provide us with the graces we need to save our souls.  That really is something that should make us rejoice.  For that is really all we need.

WHO'S YOUR BUDDY?

 A SERMON FOR THE 17TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

There are some people in our lives that we really like.  Sometimes, we know instantly on meeting a person that there’s a connection, some spark of common interest or the recognition of a mutual bond of temperament.  There’s an attraction that means we simply like that person, and whether we’re just two ships passing in the night, or whether it’s the beginning of a deep and lasting friendship, my point is that we have no trouble whatsoever in following our Lord’s second great commandment, which is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And then there’s the other extreme, those other people, that, for one reason or another, we just can’t stand.  We’ve all come across them, and continue to do so on an almost daily basis.  People we just cannot get along with.  There’s no need for me to go into detailed examples.  You all know what I mean, and in your head, you’re already coming up with a few prime candidates for this unenviable position among “the most disliked people in my life.”

Of course, there are hundreds of people in between these two extremes.  And when we think of the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, we tend to bring this vast and indistinct group to mind.  They’re the ones we don’t really care about one way or another, so it’s relatively easy to think of going a little bit out of our way to be nice to them.  No problems there, right?  We see a little old lady trying to cross the road, and we’re so proud of ourselves for taking the time to make sure she gets to the other side without getting squashed on the way.  My good deed for the day!  I’m such a good neighbor!

But our blessed Lord expects such deeds from the average Christian, and probably even from the average atheist too.  He knows that most of mankind are decent people at heart, people who know how to be “nice” to people we hardly know, polite and pleasant at all times, like the staff at Chick-Fil-A…  “My pleasure!”  But is this what his great commandment is all about?  Just being nice to folks?  Or is he asking us to rise to greater heights of charity than this?  And when we contemplate this possibility, how many of us start to feel the slight tinge of discomfort, as it dawns on us that the phrase “Love thine enemy” is not something we invented to try and make us “nicer.”  No, it’s a commandment, a phrase coined by our Lord himself in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven.”

Our Lord doesn’t want us to limit our love to those we naturally like.  On the contrary, he points out that “if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”  What makes us true Christians and unlike the publicans, unlike the atheists and pagans, is that we love our enemies.  If we do not love our enemies, we’re no better than those hypocritical pharisees who love only the people who love us, the folks we “get along with.”  What merit is there in that?

St. Therese of the Child Jesus was, as you know, a Carmelite nun.  Nuns, believe it or not, have the same feelings and emotions that we all have.  They are actually human beings behind those long veils and layers of starched linen.  And they have the same natural attractions and friendships as the rest of us.  They prefer some of their fellow nuns to others.  What made St. Therese different was that she deliberately befriended the nuns she had the least attraction to, the ones she even had a natural aversion to.  These unpleasant sisters lived under the delusion that they were St. Therese’s closest friends, so delightfully well did she treat them.  It’s an interesting lesson from this little saint in which we can all find inspiration.  We need to make that act of virtue called ‘charity’ and show more affection and love to those we like the least.  And when we do, we will find out very quickly that this is heroic virtue that requires a tremendous effort.  Nevertheless, we must give it our best effort, and not allow a young and frail Carmelite nun put us to shame.

So who is your best friend?  Your closest confidant, the one you love the most?  The person you have in mind is actually not your best friend.  He or she may be a great consolation in your life, one who brings you countless hours of happiness and joy.  But if I may, I would like to suggest to you that your best friend is actually the person in your life to whom you most owe the salvation of your soul.  Taking away the most obvious candidate for that role, which is our divine Saviour himself of course, I’d ask you to examine the circle of acquaintances in your own personal life.  Which of them contributed the most to making you a candidate for heaven?  Is it the loving, doting parents who spoiled you rotten when you were a child?  Or is it rather the parents who were strict, who taught you that you can’t always do what you want and took you out to the woodshed when you argued about it?  Do we owe more to a wonderful spouse who has given us nothing but loyalty, support, and affection; or to an abusive spouse who taught us, without meaning to, the virtues of patience, tolerance, humility, and reliance on God alone?  In life, we actually learn more from the bad example of others than from their good example.

By the way, don’t ever think of using that fact as an excuse for giving bad example yourself.  Don’t think you’ll do a better job of getting your wife to heaven by beating her and getting drunk every night.  We all owe God obedience to his commandments, and we can’t love God or our neighbor by deliberately hurting them.  Nevertheless, on the other side of that coin, we can benefit from those poor unfortunate souls who do not love God and who do not love their neighbor, the ones who give us nothing but a bad example.  We can learn from them how not to behave.

So let’s re-evaluate today who our best friends are.  We owe so much to the people we dislike the most.  We owe them a debt of gratitude for helping us on our path of salvation.  They’re forever with us on that path.  They point us in the wrong directions, they try to trip us up, they tempt us to do wrong.  They are the other side of the coin of friendship, the side we can learn from by their mistakes, their wickedness, and their disregard for our own salvation.  Ironically, it is the evil they bring to our lives that makes us better Christians.    Dislike them all you want, avoid them when necessary, but never hate them, never wish them harm, never return evil for evil.  Love them with true Christian love, because if we choose to learn the right lessons from them, they are our best friends!

BREAKING THE LAW

 A SERMON FOR THE 16TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

It comes up in the confessional time and again, so I thought I’d try and set the record straight once and for all so that we know when we’re committing a sin and when we’re not.

Let’s call to mind first of all what a sin is.  Something is sinful, not because it breaks a rule or a law, but because it offends God.  Keep that in mind and everything else falls into place.  This is the spirit of the law, and if your motivation is always to love God you will never commit a sin.  Christ knew this perfectly well, of course, and in today’s Gospel he reprimands the hypocritical Pharisees and lawyers of the Jewish faith for preaching that one must never break a law for any reason.  He points out that in certain cases you can, and sometimes even must break the law.

We, of all people, traditional Catholics who uphold the true faith, should know this.  After all, if we adhered to the letter of the law—the canon law of the Church—we couldn’t even attend this Mass here today!  Are we not “betraying” the Vicar of Christ himself by going to a Mass he has abolished?  Obviously we’ve all come to the very serious and well thought-out conclusion that we are doing the right thing, otherwise we’d all be at the Novus Ordo in our local parish church this morning.  So we all, in principle, and in practice too, agree that some laws just have to be broken.  In this, we follow the teaching of Christ himself when he tells the pharisees that they would be perfectly justified in pulling their ox or ass out of a ditch on the sabbath day.  We are equally justified in pulling ourselves out of the filthy ditch of the conciliar Church and coming here to Mass on the sabbath day.

So can we break any law we want if there’s a good reason for doing so?  I’ll give you the principle first, the theory behind what we can do and what we can’t do, which laws we can break and which we can’t.  It’s a simple distinction, so don’t think we’re going to get bogged down in a lot of highfalutin theology.  It’s a distinction between two types of law: disciplinary law and divine law.  Let’s start with divine law, most of which is simply the natural law.  The Ten Commandments are divine law, and cannot be broken for any reason.  We can never murder someone, for example, no matter how much we think they deserve to be knocked off.  We all probably have a little list in our head of people we’d secretly love to put an end to.  But it’s just a little fantasy when we get right down to it—if we had Nancy Pelosi chained up in a chair, we wouldn’t really be prepared to pull the trigger, would we?  If you would, go to confession!  Because no matter how much better off the world would be without her, we’d be breaking the Fifth Commandment of the Divine Law if we make it happen.  We can never do something which is intrinsically wrong no matter how much good may come of it.  The good end never justifies the evil means.

Now that we’ve established that we can’t break the Divine Law, let’s look at the other type of law, Disciplinary Law.  This is a law that is based on circumstances, and circumstances, as we well know, can change.  We are obliged, for example, by the disciplinary law of the Church to attend Mass on Sunday.  It is an obligation that binds us under the pain of mortal sin, so it’s not a law that can be treated lightly.  We must go to Mass at all cost every week, no matter where we are, what other things might be happening at Mass time, no matter how tired we are, or lacking in energy, enthusiasm, or whatever.  If we miss Mass even just once, we commit a very serious sin, one that, unless we repent and confess it, will prevent us from ever entering heaven.  And yet… it’s a disciplinary law.  There are circumstances that can allow us to deliberately miss Mass.

We’ve mentioned most of these circumstances before, so I don’t need to dwell on them.  Here’s a brief list:  we’re sick, there’s a snow storm and it would be dangerous to travel, we live too far away from a traditional Mass, we have a sick relative we need to look after, we have a job that requires us to work on Sundays (first responder, law enforcement, military, baker, hotel keeper and so on), or, for that matter, if your ox or ass has fallen in a ditch.  It’s nothing more than common sense, and if you have a good reason for not going to Mass, it’s not a sin and you don’t need to confess it.

But, you might object, going to Mass on Sunday is breaking the Divine Law, the Third Commandment, isn’t it?  Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath.  No it is not.  It breaks the disciplinary law of the Church to keep holy the Sabbath by attending Mass, but not the actual commandment of God to keep holy the sabbath.  Moses and the Israelites were not committing a mortal sin by not going to Mass in the wilderness.  The Church created this law of going to Mass so that we could more easily know how to keep holy the sabbath.  But it’s not the only way, and if we really can’t attend Mass it’s important to keep in mind that we still need to obey the Divine Law and keep that Sabbath holy!  So no unnecessary servile work, no unnecessary shopping, and above all, extra prayers to make up for not being able to go to Mass.  If you fail to observe these rules of the sabbath, then you would be breaking the Divine Law—and that, you’d need to confess.

Just keep to common sense.  It’s the same in the natural world.  Traffic lights and speed limits are there to keep us safe.  They are disciplinary laws of the state or local authority.  They must be obeyed or you’ll get a ticket.  But the Law has flexibility and if you have a truly good reason for breaking the speed limit the police will be on your side.  Go racing through a school zone full of children at 75 mph and they’ll throw the book at you, and rightfully so.  But if you go through a red light at three in the morning when there’s no traffic around, as you rush to get to the hospital with your wife who’s in labor in the back seat—you might get pulled over but you’re more likely to get a police escort to the maternity hospital than a ticket.  God’s mercy acts in the same way as our natural compassion, and he’s not going to condemn us for breaking a disciplinary law for the right reason.  Rather, he will send his holy angels to escort us into Paradise because we were motivated by common sense and a true, not hypocritical love, a love of God that follows the spirit and not the letter of the law.

We’re all breaking the Church’s law just by being here this morning.  And yet it's that love of God that brings us here, that constant desire to seek out the Way, the Truth, and the Life that our beloved Church has temporarily abandoned.  Let’s look forward to the day when we can close this chapel and find God again in our local parish church—when we can return to our rightful place in a Church that once again imposes true laws that God wants us to follow.

GOOD GRIEF!

 A SERMON FOR THE 15TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Death has a habit of rearing its ugly head often when we least expect it.  We read of new deaths every day on the news—celebrities, famous actors, former politicians, monarchs—death comes to all.  It comes to each of us in turn, and as we get older, we become increasingly aware that our own turn is coming.  Meanwhile, we watch in solemn silence as others go before us. 

The world these days (and by “world” I include the Conciliar Church) has a way of sanitizing the grief that comes with death and bereavement.  Indeed they have perfected it.  Funerals have become occasions “to celebrate the life of the deceased,” and “celebrate” they do.  Gone are the solemn wakes of old, replaced by videos of the dead person’s “funniest moments”.  Balloons have replaced incense at the gravesite, and prayers for the dead are regarded as pointless as we all go straight to heaven when we die, bypassing somehow that unpleasant event in which we are judged.  Progressive atheists who do not believe in the afterlife may be pleasantly entertained by all these amusing antics.  Even the confused Catholics of Vatican II may find false comfort in the idea that there is no hell or purgatory. But no matter what reassurance anyone of us may find in canonizing every single human being as soon as they’re dead, we may be assured that the poor suffering souls themselves must be dismayed to be thus neglected in their anguish.

Imagine how we will feel after sentence is passed by our blessed and merciful Judge.  Assuming it’s a “thumbs up” and we avoid eternal damnation, we still owe temporal restitution for our multiple sins and will be faced with the prospect of the fires of Purgatory for who knows how many days or centuries.  And as we look down upon our bereaved friends and relatives, those whom we loved and who claimed to love us, now giggling happily at the sight of a few dozen helium balloons floating up to the clouds, and telling each other with smug conviction that we’re already in heaven and don’t need their prayers, what shall be our “feelings” then?  Disappointment?  No!  Anguish!  Betrayal!  Realizing that no Masses will be offered for the repose of our soul, no supplications made to shorten or reduce the pains of our temporal punishment…  How many thousands, millions, of souls must have already experienced this most terrible of disappointments, the devastation of knowing they are alone and abandoned even by those dearest to them?

The vestments for a funeral are white only for children who die before they are old enough to know the meaning of immorality.  They alone are assured of their immediate reward, and our sorrow at their passing is mitigated by knowing they are truly already with the angels in heaven.  For everyone else, there is the judgment, and the clothing of the bereaved and the vestments of the clergy are black, the color of mourning and of humble supplication for that judgement to be merciful.  Candles are unbleached, the music is somber, speech is hushed and respectful.  We follow the traditions of mourning and are comforted by them.  We are comforted chiefly because these funeral rituals are of comfort not only to ourselves but more importantly to our dear departed also.  The love we had for them while they yet lived amongst us does not miraculously vanish the second they die; it remains in our heart and we are glad that we still have the opportunity to show that love by helping them with our prayers.

Our “feelings” in our bereavement are not pleasant feelings, and often we cannot prevent our tears or other expressions of grief.  We have lost someone we love and we mourn their passing.  But as St. Paul reminds us, we should “not be ignorant concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.“  In the midst of our mourning we must not give way to the kind of sorrow where we lose hope in the resurrection of the dead.  When our Lord meets the mother of Nain in today’s Gospel, he tells her, “Weep not.”  He tells her this, not because she was doing something wrong—our Lord himself wept at the death of Lazarus.  Our weeping is merely the natural expression of our grief.  But even as we weep, we do not lose sight of the purpose of death, and that it is a necessary part of God’s plan as we are transported from this Vale of Tears into the everlasting destiny that awaits us in heaven.  The transfer from this life to the life eternal may not be instantaneous.  This isn’t Star Trek—we are not just beamed up to heaven.  But we do have that virtue of hope that sustains us in what could otherwise so easily become despair.  “Weep not.”  Weep outwardly if you want, but retain that joy in your soul that the purpose of death is to take us to a better place.  As if to prove this resurrection of the soul after death, our Lord reaches out to the dead man’s body and says, “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.  And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.”  This resurrection, first of the soul, and later of the body, and the life everlasting that follows, is our own future also, it’s our destiny, if only we love God and follow his commandments.

St. Paul describes this perfectly: “Behold,” he says, “I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.  For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality… then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” 

Let us then not live in terror at the prospect of bereavement and death, but focus instead on the process that follows, hopeful for God’s mercy, confident that we will see the loving arms of Christ reaching out to us as he utters that most beautiful word, Arise!  For then we that are dead will indeed sit up and we will speak, as we begin our last journey to join the angels in heaven, there to speak and sing out forever the glorious praises of God, “Holy, holy, holy, hosanna in the highest!”

SERVING TWO MASTERS

 A SERMON FOR THE 14TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

You can’t have your cake and eat it.  It’s impossible.  Either your cake is going to sit on the table forever or you’re going to get tired of looking at it and cut off a slice or two till it’s all gone.  And once you’ve finished eating it you don’t have your cake anymore.  Simple enough.  And yet, how hard do we try to do exactly that, have our cake and eat it.  Or to put it a different way, we try to serve two masters.  This is equally as impossible as having your cake and eating it.  We can’t get away with serving God and serving mammon at the same time.  Mammon?  What’s mammon?  Simply put, mammon is the things of this world, all the things we want as opposed to what God wants.  We can’t have our cake by doing God’s will and eat our cake by following our own will too, because sooner or later our will and God’s will clash.  They will find themselves in conflict.  It’s inevitable, because God’s will has as its goal the glory of God himself and the salvation of souls, while our own will seeks nothing than our own miserable little pleasures and vanities.  God’s will is that we save our souls, while our will, unfortunately leads us to do whatever we want, even though it means the loss of our salvation.

It is of immeasurable help if only we can come to this simple recognition that we are faced with this choice between these two masters, God and self.  We have such high aspirations to follow God’s commandments and be good little Christians, but then as soon as we want something else, we give up on our high and holy ambitions and yield to our whims.  We want God, but we want our own self-satisfaction even more.  And if we do this too often, we end up doing it too easily.  We no longer fight temptation but try to justify our bad actions.  We begin to place all our love in the things that provide merely natural and temporary happiness or pleasure, and we end up despising the things of God.  Sadly, we see it happen so frequently, especially among our young people.  As they grow through their teenage years, and their hormones and feelings of independence lead them away from a life of sacrifice and service into one of self-indulgence, so very often they end up expressing openly their decision that there is no time or place for God in their lives.

The sad passing of Queen Elizabeth this week has given us a very timely example of such a life of service and devotion to her God and her people.  As a young person she committed herself to the heavy duties of her role as princess and then Queen, and whatever may be your opinions of monarchy, I don’t think there is anyone who would disagree that here was a lady who truly gave her all to the responsibilities she believed God had placed upon her shoulders.  And like the good Samaritans we have spoken about in the Gospels of the past two Sundays, here again is a non-Catholic who puts so many of us to shame, we who have the true faith.  Let’s go no further at this time than to take the ancient lesson of our Lord that there is much to be learned from the good example of others, no matter what their faith, or whether they wear the rags of lepers or the grand finery of a queen.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord lays out the solution to this dilemma that faces us on a daily basis, to follow God or to follow mammon.  Stop giving so much thought, so much energy, he says, to the material things of life.  “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body; what ye shall put on.”  Rely instead on divine Providence.  “Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.”  The fowls of the air, the lilies of the field—they do perfectly well, thank you, without actively seeking out all the nice things they need.  “They sow not, neither do they reap,” yet God provides for them without their seeking.  We should follow this example of the fowls of the air and lilies of the field, relying simply and humbly on God to give us the things we need, and certainly, never abandoning God to seek after these things without him.  To all men, God bestows good things, the things they need.  He does so, seemingly without discrimination between those of the true Faith and those who live in the ignorance of their false beliefs.  To the lepers he gave healing.  To rulers of nations he has delegated his authority to govern.  One leper gave thanks unto God and that leper was a Samaritan.  Queen Elizabeth showed a greater and more sincere faith in God than many so-called Catholic popes, priests, presidents and politicians who have abused the authority God gave them to defy the laws of God.  I would be personally grateful for your prayers that, like the Samaritan leper, The Queen’s faith might have made her whole.  Meanwhile, we must give our highest allegiance and worship to one master only and that master is our Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords, the God by whom kings and queens do reign. 

In keeping with our Lord’s teaching, St. Paul lists in today’s Epistle all manner of evil behavior that constantly tempts us away from our true master: adultery, uncleanness, fornication, wrath, drunkenness and so on.  He compares them with the things of God, what he calls the fruit of the Spirit: joy, peace, gentleness… it’s a different kind of list altogether.  Spend some time and read through both these lists.  Ask yourself, which among them pertains to me?  Which among these vices and virtues, which of these types of behavior best describes the master I serve?  To which of these masters am I subject?  If, or rather when, we recognize in the first list some degree of fault on our part, let’s take this occasion to do better. Examine your conscience, repent, go to confession, and resolve to change.  Let our faith make us whole.

ANOTHER GOOD SAMARITAN

ANOTHER GOOD SAMARITAN

Last week’s Gospel, you might remember, involved the parable of the Good Samaritan.  For the Jews listening to our Lord, the very idea of a “good Samaritan” was somewhat of a contradiction.  Samaritans were the people who lived in the neighboring country of Samaria.  They maintained a breakaway religion from the Jews, a religion with its own traditions and holy places.  According to the Jews they were apostates and were supposed to be shunned.  How could there be such a thing as a “good” Samaritan?  And yet, our Lord uses a Samaritan in his parable to show how an apostate was a better neighbor to the poor man left to die in the street than the Jewish priest and Levite who passed him by. 

In this week’s Gospel, another “good Samaritan” makes an appearance.  In this case, he’s a leper, one of the ten lepers our Lord healed and the only one of them to say thank you.  Our Lord answered his act of thanksgiving, saying, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?  There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” So again, the Jews are put to shame by the better behavior of a schismatic foreigner.  Our Lord then makes the extraordinary declaration that “thy faith hath made thee whole.”  After all, he was a Samaritan, he didn’t have the true Jewish faith.  So how could his false faith in the Samaritan religion make him whole?

The answer to this paradox lies in the true meaning of faith.  Ultimately, it’s faith in the true nature of God and the truths that he has revealed that is important, not a belief in any corrupted beliefs that a particular institution may have acquired.  This fact is of particular relevance to us who sit here today.  Time and again since Vatican II our Church leaders have given constant scandal to the faithful, openly displaying in their words and behavior that they have less faith than non-Catholics.  It’s one of the reasons so many Catholics have deserted the Conciliar Church either giving up religion altogether or in search of something “better”.  God will judge them fairly, given the failure of the shepherds to protect their flock.  It has happened before during the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century, when many revolted against what they perceived as corruption in the Church.  They were wrong then, and these new apostates who flock to the enticing and oh so charitable mega Churches in their neighborhood are equally wrong now.  We can never replace corruption with a different kind of falsehood.

When the institution fails to provide the Truth of God, we have the obligation to seek that truth elsewhere.  But be very careful to make this distinction between the “institution” of the Catholic Church and the real Catholic Church, the Bride of Christ, the Mystical Body.  When we speak of the Catholic Church today, we should always have this distinction in mind—it’s our saving grace that we, who believe in the faith taught by the Catholic Church since its establishment by our Lord Jesus Christ, are members of that Church today, and that those who deny and compromise those teachings today are no longer members of the Church.  We have an enormous illusion in the world today, one where the Catholic Church appears magically to still exist in Rome, where a man in a white cassock is still almost universally recognized as the Vicar of Christ on earth, and which still makes its universal decrees to its members throughout the world.  The problem is that it truly is an illusion.   When those decrees forbid the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to take just one of hundreds of possible examples, we know immediately that this is not the actual Church of Christ.

What did the Samaritan leper of the Gospel do when he heard that Jesus was in town?  Did he stick with his false religion and seek healing from one of their “holy men?”  No.  He joined with the other Jews who recognized the true faith and the true bearer of that faith who alone had the power to heal.  We do the same today, and we should take courage from the example of this Samaritan who abandoned not the true faith, but the corrupted faith of the Samaritan religion.  We should take courage also from the other nine lepers.  They too recognized that their own Jewish high priests could not truly heal them, that they too had become too corrupted by power and greed to provide them with the healing and cleansing they sought.  They too recognized the true bearer of faith when he came to their town.  All ten of them, the nine Jews and the one Samaritan, lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”  And he healed them all.

Whether we returned to the true faith of our fathers from the Novus Ordo Church or from another non-Catholic sect, we were given the grace to recognize God in his true light.  And we did as the lepers did, and went out to meet him.  Here we are.  But are we now going to complacently accept where we are and do nothing more about it?  Or are we going to return to our Lord, here today in the Blessed Sacrament, just as truly present as he was in that village in the Gospel, and thank him from the bottom of our hearts that he has cleansed us from the filth of lies and false worship that exists, it seems, everywhere else?

This faith that we have had indeed made us whole.  We must give thanks for that, certainly, and then we must do more.  And Jesus said unto the leper, “Arise, go thy way!”  We must arise, not sit back comfortably in the dull routine of our daily lifestyle, and we must go our way.  What way is this?  Is it the way of preaching the truth to our neighbor, is it the way of teaching children, raising families properly in the right morals and faith?  Is it through moral activism, such as pro-life groups or the very opposite, through contemplative prayer, the Rosary, and adoration of God?  Maybe a mixture of some or all of the above or something else entirely, but somehow, in some way, we must obey our Lord who gave us the grace of being cleansed and healed from falsehood.  We must make our thanks to God for this great grace, and then we must arise from the communion rail and go our way, our own individual way to which God calls us.  We must follow our vocation wherever it leads.

GOD WITHOUT RELIGION

 A SERMON FOR THE 12TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

It’s a common thing these days to come across people who claim to be spiritual but who have an abhorrence of “religion.”  “Yes, I believe in God,” they’ll tell you, “but I do not believe in organized religion.  I’m spiritual, I find Christ’s teachings very nice, sometimes helpful, but that doesn’t mean I have to go to church! I don’t feel like I need to be a member of one religion or another.”  If pressed, they’ll give you many different reasons: organized religion is corrupt, too political; there are too many rules, too many hypocritical holy-rollers who impose high standards on everyone but themselves.  And then there are so many different religions to choose from, each with its own beliefs, ways of worshipping, moral standards and interpretations of Scripture.  Ultimately though, the people who reject organized religion have a profound misunderstanding of what God not only wants from us, but actually demands from us.  They are blind to the logical conclusion that any spirituality, any belief in God they claim to possess, automatically imposes upon them the duty to worship and submit to this God.

Vague feelings of the existence of a higher being are not enough.  Mushy emotional experiences brought on by stories of miracles, beautiful organ music, incense and stained-glass windows might make them “feel good” for a few minutes.  But unless they follow up these brief and transitory sentiments with commitment and action, their “spirituality” is worthless.  Like a dream forgotten as soon as we wake up, the graces that God gave them with these happy thoughts quickly vanish.  They return to their “real life”, a sad and empty life filled with nothing more than material possessions and ambitions.

Such people see Religion as something unimportant, a take-it-or-leave-it feature of their own personal spirituality.  But Religion is a virtue, the highest of the moral virtues in fact, that inclines our will to give to God the supernatural honor and adoration due to him as Creator and Supreme Ruler.  We neglect this virtue at our peril.  “I can be a spiritual person and go to heaven without all those rules and rituals.  I’ll go to church, maybe, when I’m good and ready, when the Spirit moves me, and not till then.”  In other words, they are entirely oblivious that our first duty towards God must be submission to his will.  They fail to acknowledge that they must place God’s will above their own, submitting their own desires and behavior to the will of God, doing what he wants them to do at all times.  And most of all, by giving to God the honor and adoration due to him. 

So what is God’s will for us?  Exactly what is due to him?  God’s chief desire for us is that we save our souls.  For this purpose he established a Church on earth which would provide us with the opportunity to know the truths God has revealed, and to honor and worship God in the way he demands, the honor and adoration due to him.  Once this choice is before us, we can accept gratefully this wonderful gift from God, or defiantly reject it.  So as soon as we know who God is and which Church he established for us, our submission to God must necessarily include our membership in this Church. The Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, so many people confuse the word “religion” with something else entirely.  Instead of thinking of it as a virtue indispensable for our moral conversion and our salvation, they see religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, as an organization of flawed human beings whose belief in God has been the cause of division, persecution, wars and bloodshed.  Some of them, having never been taught the truths of the Catholic Church, hesitate to commit themselves to her, or to any other non-Catholic denomination for that matter, confused by the very different beliefs and practices of each one and unsure who is right.  All of this confused thinking is based on ignorance, usually not their fault, but brought about in these modern times by the lack of straight teaching by the Church of Vatican II.  Instead of stressing the importance of belonging to the true Church that Christ founded and outside of which there is no salvation, the new conciliar Church now preaches the modernist heresy of ecumenism, in which we are told that we can save our souls by just being good people, no matter what false teachings we believe, and no matter to which non-Catholic denomination we care to belong.   The practical result of this heretical ecumenism is that people no longer believe we need to be Catholic to save our souls, and that there is no objective truth to guide us.  We just need to be “good” people, whatever that means, and we’ll all go to heaven together.

For us Catholics, we must get a grip on the doctrine, the infallible teaching, that salvation comes uniquely from the Church Christ founded.  He didn’t establish the Rock of Faith to be one religion among many, all with different interpretations of what the truth is.  He established the Church to be the means by which we may know objective truth and pass it on from one generation to another, truths that he himself had revealed.  He sent his Holy Spirit to guide this Church in all matters of faith and morals, and just as the Holy Spirit is God and therefore infallible, so too is the Church he guides.  There is no room for the contradictory interpretations and whims of the individual.  And if the Church’s insistence that we hold the infallible truth and other churches do not, we should expect division to come from those who deny this.  If we have a thousand Protestant denominations, it is simply because there is only one truth and a thousand errors.  Two plus two equals four.  One truth.  Any other number is the wrong answer, and the Catholic Church must stand up and defend the only true answer.  In fact, for every truth, there is potentially an infinite number of errors and potential non-Catholic churches, each inventing new beliefs and practices that are not based on those revealed by God, and thus ultimately worthless. 

Throughout history, the Church has had to defend herself and the souls of her faithful many times from such wicked attacks on the truth, and so yes, there has inevitably been much bloodshed.  Many martyrs have died defending their Catholic faith, and to be fair, we must admit that the actions of a few over-zealous Catholics have led to the inexcusable treatment of our enemies.  However, one thing that we cannot do is blame the Church herself for the bad behavior of her members.  While we may acknowledge that cruelty and immorality have been a plague on human history that has scandalized many, our answer to such evils can never be to blame the divine institution of the Church that Christ founded.  Instead, we must ever concentrate on our own personal response to such evils, a response that must be founded on the teachings and example of Christ himself.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord describes exactly what he wants in such circumstances.  Our Blessed Lord soundly condemns the behavior of the priest and the Levite who ignored the plight of the injured man who had been attacked by thieves and left half dead in the roadway.  Despite the fact that these two men were members of God’s chosen people, they neglected their responsibilities of charity and ignored the poor man dying on the street.  In fact, it was up to a foreigner, a non-Jew, a Samaritan, to behave according to God’s will and take compassion on the injured man.  Our Lord’s purpose in telling this parable is revealed in his concluding words, when he tells the lawyer questioning him, “Go, and do thou likewise.”  How many times do we notice the apparent charity of non-Catholics and Novus Ordo Catholics and compare it to our own “Traddie” approach to loving our neighbor.  If we are put to shame by the good behavior of those outside the faith, Christ has the answer for us: “Go, and do thou likewise!”  The law of loving God first and then our neighbor as ourselves is the paramount commandment of our religion.  If we would only practice what we preach, we might find that we would attract more converts to our faith, drawn to it by the charity and good example of its members.

So when we hear the poor, ignorant and godless individuals spouting their nonsense about the Church and the evils of organized religion, let it give us pause to wonder how our own behavior could be contributing to their aversion to our faith and Church.  It is not enough to explain to them the reasons why evil exists among the individual members of the Church, we must show by our conversation and example that any such evil exists in spite of and not because of the Church’s teachings, which, if they are strictly believed and observed, can alone lead them to true charity and holiness by means of the true Religion given us by the Good Shepherd, in the sacred pasture of the Roman Catholic Faith.

BEING A GOOD STEWARD

A SERMON FOR THE 8TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

“There was a certain rich man, which had a steward.”  This is how today’s Gospel begins, and right away there’s a question that needs to be answered.  We all know what a rich man is, but how would we define a “steward?”  Basically a steward can be defined as “someone who is entrusted with the careful and responsible management of something.”  So now let’s think for a moment how we are stewards, and about “who” has entrusted “what” to our care.  The essential response to this question is that everything we have belongs first to God who has entrusted us with the care and management of these various and diverse things.  What things exactly?  Everything!  The world around us and everything in it. 

Depending on who we are, this would include many other people too.  For example, a king is entrusted with the welfare of his subjects.  The Catholic faithful are entrusted to the care of their priests, bishops and pope, whose solemn duty it is to provide them with the truths of their faith, valid sacraments, and solid moral values.  If we’re parents, then God has entrusted to us the welfare and moral education of our children. 

We’ve been entrusted with other things too.  The time we have, for example is not really ours.  It is on loan to us from God, and we had better make sure we don’t waste it or spend it on things that take us away from God instead of drawing us closer to him.  Our bodies too are not our own.  We may have been given a body that works perfectly, or perhaps less so, but in either case it is up to us to take care of it, making healthy choices in our lifestyle.  We may have been blessed with intelligence or with good looks, but none of this is for our own benefit exclusively.  We should use any physical or mental advantages we may have for the glory of God, not to gratify our own ambitions and desires.  Thus we should use our mind to learn more about God so we may know him, use our emotions to love him, use our energy to serve him.  And let’s make sure above all that we look after the welfare of our soul, by avoiding the occasion of sin and other sources of temptation, cultivating our virtues, constantly battling against our unbridled passions, our vices, and our general inclination to do whatever we want and not what God wants.

We are stewards of so very much and we must not be careless or negligent in taking care of what we have been entrusted.  Like the steward in today’s Gospel we too shall be judged on how well we actually do manage what the good Lord has loaned us.

The word “stewardship” is very much in vogue today amongst those who imagine themselves to be the enlightened elite of our society.  They constantly lecture us about how evil it is to drive a gas-powered car to work so we can provide a living for our family.  Meanwhile, they consume tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel as they fly all over the world for no other purpose than to chastise us more effectively.   This kind of hypocrisy is typical of how the liberals twist an idea and turn into something perverse, often in complete contrast to the good management of the things God has entrusted to us.  When God entrusts the life of a child to his mother only to have the mother murder this child even before it’s born, this is just one example of the overturning of true stewardship.  It’s a complete betrayal of the trust God has placed in them.  They place the welfare of their own bodies—“my body, my choice”—over the care of the innocent children who are totally dependent upon them to bring them into the world.  A tiny innocent baby is entrusted to them by God.  They kill it.

We can already see a pattern emerging, I think, that shows that bad stewardship stems from one original source, and that is the bad management of our free will.  We have choices.  All through life, we experience the need to make one choice after another.  When we make a bad choice we generally experience bad consequences.  These in turn provoke us to further bad choices, thus continuing the mismanagement of what God has entrusted us with.  When a woman claims that it’s her body and her choice, it’s a choice that is generally made before she finds herself with a child she doesn’t want or doesn’t feel equipped to raise.  God gave us the sacrament of marriage for a reason!  Or if pollution threatens the planet today, is it not because of bad choices that were made in the past to bypass some simple precautions that might have caused them to lose a few dollars in profit?

All these artificial choices we think we must make in the present stem ultimately from the one original sin.  God gave Adam a garden to tend, and a companion, Eve, to help him.  Unfortunately Adam failed in his stewardship of both, allowing Eve to wander off and be tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit of the one tree God had forbidden them.  All our temptations to be poor stewards today stem from this original failure by the first steward Adam.  Nevertheless, we can’t use this as our excuse for the negligence we show today.  We are all entrusted with the same free will that Adam had, and only we have control over it to either be good stewards or bad stewards. 

The easiest way to prevent our own misuse of that free will is to never yield to that first temptation to do wrong.  The consequences of that first mistake are simply more and bigger mistakes as we take the path that leads to destruction.  Avoid each temptation as though it were your first and only temptation, because you never know where it will lead you.  It’s why we first ask God to “lead us not into temptation,” and only afterwards that he “deliver us from evil.”  One thing leads to another, and we mustn’t let ourselves be drawn away from the narrow, difficult and uphill path, no matter how alluring the world and its attractions may be.  Every single one of those alternative paths will take us down a different road—away from our destination, away from salvation.  Be the good steward you’re meant to be and just keep going, taking care of what God has given us and mortifying the deeds of the body, as St. Paul says, so that we shall not die, but live.