17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
If today's Gospel sounds familiar, it should. It's the continuation of last week's. You may remember that last week's reading was kind of long and this week's is about average. But if you put them together you get a VERY long reading. So, the passage is split in two and read on consecutive Sundays.
That's fine, but where does that leave the person who has to preach on the second weekend? Father Gary covered it all very nicely last weekend, so what should I talk about? I guess I could just stop here and go sit down. But you know me better than that. I'm not going to give you any less than you expect.
So I thought about it, and prayed about it, and good news! I do have something to talk about. This week's and last week's Gospel both end with the separation of good and bad with the bad being thrown into the fire. We know what Jesus is talking about, don't we? Good and evil. Heaven and hell. It's pretty clear what's going to happen to us at the end. Jesus is going to judge us. He's going to separate the good from the bad. He's going to say to the good, "Well done, good and faithful servant." The news for the bad will be, well bad. No heaven. No paradise. No choirs of angels. Just fire. Lots of fire. Fire forever. And not a fire extinguisher or a jar of Noxema in sight.
That's our faith. That's what we're supposed to believe. So why are there so many people who don't believe it? Not the heaven part. Hardly anybody doesn't believe in heaven. And most of us think, or at least we hope, that we're going there. But the other place? Not so much.
Somehow our society has come up with this alternate theology. The fact that we're all here in church today means we probably don't subscribe to this new system, but some of us might.
I'll call this new belief system, the Church of Me. The Church of Me breaks people down into three groups. Group number 1 is small and exclusive. It includes me, probably my family and friends, and a few other people like John Paul II and Mother Theresa. We're going to heaven.
The second group is bigger. It includes people like Sadam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, mass murderers, child rapists, other baddies. They're going to hell.
The third group is huge. It's everybody else. According to the Church of Me, we don't know where they're going and we really don't care. That's their problem, not mine.
The Church of Me pretends to worship God, the one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God that you and I worship. But in real life, they worship a lot of gods. They worship the god of money. They worship the god of power. They worship their houses and their cars. They worship flat screen TVs and iPods. They'll stand in line for three hours to get the latest incarnation of the iPhone, but they don't have time to spend 45 minutes in church once a week.
The funny thing about the Meists is that they'd like to have what you and I have, but they don't want to give up what they have to get it. Sometimes they'll tell you that they have plenty of time to give up Meism and come back to the real Church. They'll get around to it......someday. It's strange, really. They have to be the first to own the latest gadget. They have to be first in line to see the new movie, but when it comes to their eternal salvation, they have no sense of urgency at all. It's like the old movie, "Heaven Can Wait."
But sometimes heaven can't wait. We saw that this week when a young firefighter lost his life in the line of duty. We saw it when a young child died when his grandma's car ran off the road and into the Meramec River. We see it over and over again. Young people die. They die before their time. They die thinking they have plenty of time to get ready. But only God knows how much time we really have.
The pressure on all of us, especially on young people, is tremendous. We may read the Bible. We may pray for a few minutes every day. We may go to mass every Sunday, maybe even every day. But all of that adds up to just a few hours a week, tops. The rest of the time we're constantly being reminded of how important it is to have the most stuff. Buy this car! Buy this house! You'll get more girls is you wear this cologne! You'll get more guys if you wear this perfume! We're assaulted in our own living rooms with commercials for things that nice people didn't even talk about just a few years ago. Woo hoo! If I take this little purple pill, my ED will be gone and I can do it whenever I want, even if the neighbors do drop by, for up to 36 hours.
Then, between the commercials, the real fun starts. Remember when Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were the first TV couple to sleep in the same bed? It was scandalous! It was outrageous! Now we have "the Baby Borrowers." Teenagers playing house with other people's children. They even share a bed. This so-called "social experiment" isn't about the kids. It's about what happens to teenagers when they play house. And it ain't good. Shows like "How I Met Your Mother" and "Two and Half Men" make non-stop fornication seem like the natural thing to do. The Catholic Church has one TV network, the Meists have hundreds. Where's it going to end?
This week marked the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical on human life. We all know what it said. No artificial birth control. Some critics say that this was the beginning of this teaching. But, like nearly every Church document down through the centuries, it was just the confirmation of something that the Church has taught from the very beginning. The purpose of marriage is love giving and life giving.
Here's what Humanae Vitae predicted forty years ago. It said that dire consequences would come from the wide-spread acceptance of artificial birth control including marital infidelity, a weakening of morals, and a fear that husbands may lose respect for their wives. The document warned that governments might mandate the use of certain contraceptives and maybe even abortion.
Now it's forty years later. Is the world dramatically different than it was in 1968? Have Paul VI's predictions come true? It turns out that he was an optimist! Things are even worse than he thought they'd be. More than half of all marriages are ending in divorce, even among Catholic couples. Here in the United States we lead the world in annulments. You know who's the only group to buck this trend? Couples who practice natural family planning. They have a dramatically lower divorce rate than all other couples.
In order to control the population in China, couples are limited in the number of children they're allowed to have. Birth control and even abortion are mandatory, just as Pope Paul predicted. The United States hasn't gone that far yet, but public schools spend your tax dollars to provide free contraceptives to students. The Meists seem to be winning.
But, not so fast! There are hopeful signs. I'm looking at one right now. Faithful Christians are coming to church. Here at St. Bernadette, our numbers are growing for the first time in a long time. Even though we've closed churches in the city, we're building new ones in the suburbs. My son and his family belong to a brand new church in St. Charles County.
Just this week we found out that the leaders of the rebellious board of directors at St. Stanislaus have been reconciled with the Church and are asking for the Archdiocese' help in restoring their parish to it's former, Roman Catholic, glory. They've learned, like so many before them, that they need the shelter and protection of the Church that Jesus established so many years ago; that the rules and laws of the world's biggest, longest lasting organization are there for a reason.
No, the world's a mess in a lot of ways. But Jesus told us that the gates of hell wouldn't prevail against his Church, and He hasn't been wrong yet. Good things are happening. Hundreds of thousands of young people attended World Youth Day this month. While some couples go off and get married in a park, or on a ferris wheel, or while they jump out of an airplane, many, many more are being married in church, where marriage belongs. Every year the Couple to Couple League sends out thousands of NFP manuals. Babies are being brought to church to be baptized.
We have a lot of things going for us. But what we don't have is forever, at least not in this life. Our days are numbered and only one Person knows how many we have left and He's not telling. Death may come like a thief in the night. Or it may come as a heart attack in the middle of the day. It may come in a car accident or as the result of some demented soul with a gun. We just don't know.
What we do know is that Jesus' words are true. "Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth." If today were the day, which group would you and I be in?
If today's Gospel sounds familiar, it should. It's the continuation of last week's. You may remember that last week's reading was kind of long and this week's is about average. But if you put them together you get a VERY long reading. So, the passage is split in two and read on consecutive Sundays.
That's fine, but where does that leave the person who has to preach on the second weekend? Father Gary covered it all very nicely last weekend, so what should I talk about? I guess I could just stop here and go sit down. But you know me better than that. I'm not going to give you any less than you expect.
So I thought about it, and prayed about it, and good news! I do have something to talk about. This week's and last week's Gospel both end with the separation of good and bad with the bad being thrown into the fire. We know what Jesus is talking about, don't we? Good and evil. Heaven and hell. It's pretty clear what's going to happen to us at the end. Jesus is going to judge us. He's going to separate the good from the bad. He's going to say to the good, "Well done, good and faithful servant." The news for the bad will be, well bad. No heaven. No paradise. No choirs of angels. Just fire. Lots of fire. Fire forever. And not a fire extinguisher or a jar of Noxema in sight.
That's our faith. That's what we're supposed to believe. So why are there so many people who don't believe it? Not the heaven part. Hardly anybody doesn't believe in heaven. And most of us think, or at least we hope, that we're going there. But the other place? Not so much.
Somehow our society has come up with this alternate theology. The fact that we're all here in church today means we probably don't subscribe to this new system, but some of us might.
I'll call this new belief system, the Church of Me. The Church of Me breaks people down into three groups. Group number 1 is small and exclusive. It includes me, probably my family and friends, and a few other people like John Paul II and Mother Theresa. We're going to heaven.
The second group is bigger. It includes people like Sadam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, mass murderers, child rapists, other baddies. They're going to hell.
The third group is huge. It's everybody else. According to the Church of Me, we don't know where they're going and we really don't care. That's their problem, not mine.
The Church of Me pretends to worship God, the one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God that you and I worship. But in real life, they worship a lot of gods. They worship the god of money. They worship the god of power. They worship their houses and their cars. They worship flat screen TVs and iPods. They'll stand in line for three hours to get the latest incarnation of the iPhone, but they don't have time to spend 45 minutes in church once a week.
The funny thing about the Meists is that they'd like to have what you and I have, but they don't want to give up what they have to get it. Sometimes they'll tell you that they have plenty of time to give up Meism and come back to the real Church. They'll get around to it......someday. It's strange, really. They have to be the first to own the latest gadget. They have to be first in line to see the new movie, but when it comes to their eternal salvation, they have no sense of urgency at all. It's like the old movie, "Heaven Can Wait."
But sometimes heaven can't wait. We saw that this week when a young firefighter lost his life in the line of duty. We saw it when a young child died when his grandma's car ran off the road and into the Meramec River. We see it over and over again. Young people die. They die before their time. They die thinking they have plenty of time to get ready. But only God knows how much time we really have.
The pressure on all of us, especially on young people, is tremendous. We may read the Bible. We may pray for a few minutes every day. We may go to mass every Sunday, maybe even every day. But all of that adds up to just a few hours a week, tops. The rest of the time we're constantly being reminded of how important it is to have the most stuff. Buy this car! Buy this house! You'll get more girls is you wear this cologne! You'll get more guys if you wear this perfume! We're assaulted in our own living rooms with commercials for things that nice people didn't even talk about just a few years ago. Woo hoo! If I take this little purple pill, my ED will be gone and I can do it whenever I want, even if the neighbors do drop by, for up to 36 hours.
Then, between the commercials, the real fun starts. Remember when Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were the first TV couple to sleep in the same bed? It was scandalous! It was outrageous! Now we have "the Baby Borrowers." Teenagers playing house with other people's children. They even share a bed. This so-called "social experiment" isn't about the kids. It's about what happens to teenagers when they play house. And it ain't good. Shows like "How I Met Your Mother" and "Two and Half Men" make non-stop fornication seem like the natural thing to do. The Catholic Church has one TV network, the Meists have hundreds. Where's it going to end?
This week marked the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical on human life. We all know what it said. No artificial birth control. Some critics say that this was the beginning of this teaching. But, like nearly every Church document down through the centuries, it was just the confirmation of something that the Church has taught from the very beginning. The purpose of marriage is love giving and life giving.
Here's what Humanae Vitae predicted forty years ago. It said that dire consequences would come from the wide-spread acceptance of artificial birth control including marital infidelity, a weakening of morals, and a fear that husbands may lose respect for their wives. The document warned that governments might mandate the use of certain contraceptives and maybe even abortion.
Now it's forty years later. Is the world dramatically different than it was in 1968? Have Paul VI's predictions come true? It turns out that he was an optimist! Things are even worse than he thought they'd be. More than half of all marriages are ending in divorce, even among Catholic couples. Here in the United States we lead the world in annulments. You know who's the only group to buck this trend? Couples who practice natural family planning. They have a dramatically lower divorce rate than all other couples.
In order to control the population in China, couples are limited in the number of children they're allowed to have. Birth control and even abortion are mandatory, just as Pope Paul predicted. The United States hasn't gone that far yet, but public schools spend your tax dollars to provide free contraceptives to students. The Meists seem to be winning.
But, not so fast! There are hopeful signs. I'm looking at one right now. Faithful Christians are coming to church. Here at St. Bernadette, our numbers are growing for the first time in a long time. Even though we've closed churches in the city, we're building new ones in the suburbs. My son and his family belong to a brand new church in St. Charles County.
Just this week we found out that the leaders of the rebellious board of directors at St. Stanislaus have been reconciled with the Church and are asking for the Archdiocese' help in restoring their parish to it's former, Roman Catholic, glory. They've learned, like so many before them, that they need the shelter and protection of the Church that Jesus established so many years ago; that the rules and laws of the world's biggest, longest lasting organization are there for a reason.
No, the world's a mess in a lot of ways. But Jesus told us that the gates of hell wouldn't prevail against his Church, and He hasn't been wrong yet. Good things are happening. Hundreds of thousands of young people attended World Youth Day this month. While some couples go off and get married in a park, or on a ferris wheel, or while they jump out of an airplane, many, many more are being married in church, where marriage belongs. Every year the Couple to Couple League sends out thousands of NFP manuals. Babies are being brought to church to be baptized.
We have a lot of things going for us. But what we don't have is forever, at least not in this life. Our days are numbered and only one Person knows how many we have left and He's not telling. Death may come like a thief in the night. Or it may come as a heart attack in the middle of the day. It may come in a car accident or as the result of some demented soul with a gun. We just don't know.
What we do know is that Jesus' words are true. "Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth." If today were the day, which group would you and I be in?
posted by Mike at 3:40 PM
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