Bound in Love

The readings today bring to mind cleanliness and renewal. We are all born with the stain of original sin. It is the sacrament of baptism that cleans us and prepares us for a life in Christ. And when we are older, the sacrament of reconciliation cleans us from the dirt we picked up living a life according to the world rather than a life in Christ. So our grandmother wasn’t wrong when she told us that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” We just had our parish day of penance, when Father brought in many priests to hear confessions. If you missed that, there is still time to get cleaned up before the Easter celebration. So please try to make a point of going to confession before Easter, especially if it’s been a while since you last went.

But cleanliness alone isn’t enough to approach godliness. We need renewal. Renewal is ongoing conversion. Ongoing conversion is a regular recalibration of our priorities and our sensitivities. Jesus tells us today that the ruler of this world will be driven out. The one who rules this world hates the Christian life. This means that our ongoing conversion is a daily process of grappling with this reality and figuring out how to respond to it.

In what ways can we be sure that the world today is dead set against the church of Christ? I’ll just pick three examples: abortion, globalism, and slavery.

First, let’s consider the scourge of abortion. Abortion is the intentional killing of innocent life, life that is unable in any way to defend itself from the killer. The world celebrates abortion as something that empowers people rather than as what it is — something that kills people. Second, let’s consider the economic system known as globalism. Globalism is the relentless pursuit of more money, even to the point of treating human beings as nothing more than cogs in a big machine. Globalism is a kind of shadow slavery, for it denies the dignity of the human person and his right to a just wage.

And, finally, slavery. Actual slavery is still with us around the globe. Sometimes we call it human trafficking, but that is just a euphemism. Slave traders are treating human beings as disposable objects to be used. Sometimes they are used for human pleasure, sometimes they are used to mine cobalt for batteries, sometimes they are used to make basketball sneakers. But in every case, their human dignity is completely stripped from them.

Now how could any of this have happened? We look back nostalgically to the 1950s, or even the 1850s, for a time when it seemed like the world was not diametrically opposed to the life of Christ. But nostalgia won’t solve our problems. There has not been a tight bond between the teachings of the church and the broader culture in a long time. One can argue that it began to change a thousand years ago.

That world was called Christendom, and its cultural heritage persisted for hundreds of years. But it’s over now. There is no support for the Christian mindset in the programs of the powerful today. The powerful don’t really see us, and when they do, they hate us. We can never reach an accommodation with them; they are waging total war against the life of Christ.

We have to take off the rose-colored glasses. We have to see the world for what it is. We have to admit who rules the world. And we have to see his lieutenants and their activities in every part of our lives. But if we see all of this with the eyes of Christ, we will see through all of them to the cross of glory that takes us through Good Friday and all the way to Easter morning. The ruler of this world will lose everything because the world will one day come to an end. The life of Christ will never end. At the end of time, Christ will rule from his Heavenly throne. As St. Therese said, “Remember that the world is your ship, not your harbor.” Renewal is how we sail that ship to our harbor.

Renewal, therefore, will not come from a return to Christendom but to the mentality of the Church in the apostolic age. The apostolic age — the age of the Church at the time of the Apostles and Church Fathers — was a time when the Church was persecuted by a powerful pagan government and culture. 

We changed the culture by individual witness. Some witnessed even to the point of death, and we call them martyrs. It was individual Christian men who stayed married to one woman that eventually changed the cultural understanding of marriage. It was individual Christians who found the discarded babies and raised them that eventually changed the cultural acceptance of infanticide and abortion.

As in those apostolic times, today we have to evangelize with our whole lives. We have to use what the world can see. We have to trust in what are called the transcendentals. Truth, goodness, and beauty. These stand the test of time. These stand the winds of human fashion. These are the ways that a godforsaken culture can find its way back to God.

I stand here at the pulpit trying to preach the truth of God to the people of God. Some of what I’m saying is profoundly uncomfortable. Truth sometimes is uncomfortable. That doesn’t make it less true. I need to make sure that I preach the same truth when I find myself not at a pulpit but in a Publix. And I won’t preach a sermon but I will preach a message by how I live and interact with the people in that store.

Secondly, all of us can preach goodness in how we live our lives. The world today is a hard and bitter place for many people. Just by being kind and gentle we can in a profound way preach the goodness of God to people who have lost the sound of his voice.

Thirdly, beauty speaks to us even if it is not our particular taste. While there is no arguing over taste, beauty is actually objective. The beauty of the Mass prayed here in this parish is undeniable even if Latin is not your second favorite language. People who don’t like classical music recognize the beauty of Mozart’s symphonies. Our efforts to promote and provide beauty, especially in our worship spaces, can be a powerful magnet for those suffering in a brutalist and gray world.

It will be us as individual Christians who will preach with our lives to a world that desperately needs preaching but has lost its sense of hearing. So we will have to show them by our personal witness.

Witnessing, or martyrdom, is costly. We have to follow what Jesus told us today in the gospel. We have to deny ourselves. We have to not love our lives. We have to live for the next life. We have to honor our heavenly father with our lives. And we have to live for the day of judgment.

Not one thing on that list is easy. Our culture says we should never deny ourselves anything that makes us feel good. Our culture says we should love our life or we are not really living. Our culture doesn’t believe in the next life. Our culture doesn’t listen to our heavenly father at all. And our culture has a day of judgment on social media every single day, but it is a judgment given by people who are not worthy to judge.

The only way that we can witness in this costly manner to this broken world is if we keep our hearts clean and our spirits renewed.