The Soul and the Perfect Love of God

July 31, 2016—The Tenth Sunday after Trinity

Luke 12.21

          If there was an award for the book with the best title ever it would go to a book of Christian apologetics by Norman Geisler entitled, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. I love that title because it catches the reader by surprise. We all know that Christians have faith. We think of atheists as being people who have no faith. But that analysis is a little too simplistic. Christian faith in Jesus Christ is based on the evidence for God deduced from natural theology and philosophical reasoning, Biblical revelation, especially the resurrection of Christ, the witness of countless miracles and answered prayers that are central to the history of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, and modern scientific research into the beginning of the universe and the origin of life itself. Christian faith is based on a studied analysis of the evidence. It is reasoned faith.

        Atheists to have their beliefs to, but their belief that God does not exist is a blind faith. It is faith that adheres to what atheists want to be true despite the overwhelming evidence against it; which is why professor Geisler says that he has not enough faith to be an atheist. He means that the case for God’s existence and for Jesus Christ being the incarnation of that God is too strong to deny. And deny it is all atheists can do, they cannot actually refute the evidence. In the end, they just refuse to accept it. Atheism isn’t really a faith at all, it’s a rebellion.

       I know that many atheists will take offense at what I just said. I have read many debates between Christians and atheists and the atheists in those debates are very intelligent people who make very sophisticated arguments. I don’t mean to insult my opponent’s intelligence. But I would point to something obvious that exposes the atheists view as reasonably indefensible and that is the absence in atheism of a doctrine of the soul. Once you deny the existence of God you are forced into denying the existence of souls, because immaterial transcendent souls cannot exist apart from the deity who makes them. This denial of the soul exposes atheism as the blind faith that it is.

        It’s one thing to deny the existence of God whom we cannot see, who is invisible to us, whose existence we deduce from the effects of his grace upon us and the order of the world around us. But it is another thing entirely to deny the soul, which by looking inward we can all readily perceive. Every human being knows himself or herself to be more than the sum of his or her parts. We look within and see within us an infinite horizon of dreams, values and ideals, of conscience and of mind, of goodness and desire, of meaning and truth. There is no one who looks into himself and thinks I’m just a collocation of atoms and nothing more. People occasionally do that and when they do we recognize that they are clinically depressed and we help them out of it. But everyone in a healthy state of mind knows that he or she is not just a congeries of randomly assorted chemicals but he or she is a person, a unique being unlike any other with inalienable rights and duties and relationships that only a person could have. A person is not a thing; a person is an embodied soul; a living being someone who not only has a brain but has a mind of her own. A mind that is to the brain as electricity is to a light bulb. Every light bulb in the world could break and disappear but electricity will forever be. Likewise, bodies are born and die but souls are immortal.

       Christian faith is rational it is a reasonable inference based on the evidence that God exists and that Jesus Christ really is Lord. But atheism is irrational. It is absurd for a creature who knows himself to be a living soul to deny the existence of God, without whom souls could not exist. That is why the author said it takes more faith than a rational person has to be an atheist. To be an atheist you essentially have to deny what you are: a living soul; and believe that you are nothing more than the sum of your chemical parts; that there is no transcendent dimension to the human experience; no higher purpose to life than physical survival, no higher universal values to pursue beyond one’s own immediate temporal needs, no higher meaning that defines us other than material existence. Who really believes that life has no higher meaning? What could be more insane than that?  It takes reasoned faith to be a Christian but it takes absolute blind faith to be an atheist. If the American Psychological Association were not entirely dominated by atheists, the DSM IV would list atheism as a psycho-pathology, a form of abnormal psychology called the 'Pontius Pilate Syndrome': a deranged state of acute narcissism in which a person cannot see the truth even when looking straight at it.

       Some of you are wondering, I’m sure, what is this sermon about? This sermon is about the most important debate in the modern age: is Western Civilization, the nations that used to comprise Christendom, going to fully embrace the soulless psychology of atheism or will we be true to Christ?  The rich man in the parable that Jesus told today is an atheist. He didn’t care about God, nor did he care about his immortal soul. He lived only for himself in the here and now. His motto was “eat, drink and be merry”, as if that is all that matters. The man in the parable is blind to the higher transcendent reality of life in God’s universe. He does not understand that he has an immortal soul and that God has given us the soul for a purpose: to love and serve him who is our Maker and to love and serve others who like us are made in his sacred image. Jesus essentially makes fun of the atheist in the parable who thinks he’s so smart but he’s really a fool. He thinks that he has a good plan for his life, but he is actually clueless to the higher purpose of life. If there is one parable in the Bible that addresses the situation in America and Europe today this is it. When Moslems are beheading priests during mass and grown men defecate on the door of the church, you know that time is running out, the end is near.

      So many people today doubt that God exists that if you are a devout believer you may feel like an outsider. Don’t be intimidated by this increasingly anti-Christian society we now live in. Atheism is absurd and dangerous and there is no scientific reason or good philosophical reason to embrace it. Those who embrace atheism do so for emotional reasons of their own. God exists, God is the creator of all else that exists; nothing would exist were it not for God and nothing can exist apart from God. And I can make that case by one simple reason; a reason that proceeds from the heart of Jesus’ teaching. A human being is body and soul. It’s the immortal soul that defines the human being as a creature of God.

       How do we save civilization and turn this tragic situation around? The hope for our salvation is in one word: love. Our need for love and our ability to give and receive love should be enough to tell us that God is not imaginary. Love is not imaginary. Love is universal. Everyone wants it and everyone knows what it is. Everyone knows that we need more of it. How do we know this? We know it because every human being has a soul. A soul is not chemical or biological but is spiritual in nature. A soul is transcendent spirit. We receive our physical bodies from our parents who like us are made from the dust of the earth but the soul is a gift of God, it is immortal. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image. God is love (1John4.8) and God has made us like himself, he has equipped us with a transcendent soul able to give and receive love. This is the thing that is most important about us and makes us uniquely human. We love.

       Love includes awareness that we need others. As the poet said, no man is an island. But as we love others and are loved in family and in community we become aware of something else. Our love is incomplete and less than perfect. When it comes to love, the best of us are like children learning to walk. We walk but then we fall. We get up. We fall again. We are encouraged by love but then we are disappointed; disappointed in ourselves for not loving others in the way they need us to love them and disappointed in others who do not love us fully either. And so we soon learn something else about ourselves: we are made for love but we don’t know entirely how to do it. Love requires a lot of learning. Migrating animals know by instinct how to migrate, where to go and how to get there. But love is not an instinct. Love is a skill. Like any skill, love aims at perfection. God is perfect love. God alone loves perfectly. God alone does everything in love. This means that if we are going to fulfill our deepest need for love, we must become one with God. God alone is the answer to what plagues this world because God alone can teach us to love perfectly.

       Faith is the humble awareness that we are inadequate to the task of love and that we will never be perfect in love unless God by his grace enables us. When we confess that we are sinners in God’s sight, we mean that we know ourselves to be imperfect and inadequate to the task of love and that we have no hope of loving perfectly unless God enables us to do it. In other words we will never be perfectly happy until we are one with God, because perfect happiness is the result of perfect love and there is only one source of perfect love: God, the Holy Spirit.

      This is what Saint Augustine meant by his confession: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” He meant that he had searched for meaning and happiness in many places in sexual conquests, in power, in fame, in wealth. None of that satisfied him because he realized what he had so long denied: that the human heart is made for unconditional love; therefore, only  God, the perfect love, can fulfill a human soul.

       This is why everyone in this world needs Jesus Christ. Jesus is not just one more religious leader among many. Jesus is the incarnation of God’s perfect love. Jesus is the perfect love of God among us; teaching us to love by example and completing our imperfect love by divine grace. “All that the father has is mine” he said. This means that God’s perfect love flows to the souls of the world through Him. That is what John meant when he said of Jesus, “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.” He meant that Jesus will pour into our hearts the love that will make us both holy in the sight of God and fully able to love others unconditionally as he loves us. Jesus came into the world to change the world forever by giving us direct access to the one thing we most need, the love of God. Whenever we receive communion, God is literally pouring his love into our souls, healing all that is broken and imperfect with us.

       The goal of a every Christian who really is a Christian is to become like Jesus Christ in showing unconditional love for all people, always. And Christ established the church for this purpose: to train an army of saints who follow Him in the way of love. Every church that really is a church should be a school for learning unconditional love; learning not only from sermons and Sunday school lessons but from each other. A church is true to its purpose only in so far as its members show each other and the larger community around them unconditional love. “By this all men will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “ by the love you have for one another.” In the kingdom of God, love is the standard by which we are known and judged.

        That’s what prayer is for. Ask God to fill you today and everyday with the Holy Spirit, and prepare your soul to receive the fullness of his love. And keep your commitment to receive the body and blood of Christ each Sunday and more often than that if you can, for his body and blood is the very love of God poured into our souls. It is thru union with Him who is eternally one with God that we too will become perfect in love.

Ask to Receive the Holy Spirit: the Fullness of God’s love

July 24, 2016—The Ninth Sunday after Trinity

Luke 11.13

       In the gospel we read this morning, we hear Jesus make an amazing promise to his disciples. He tells them, “If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Lk.11.13). He says this in the larger context of a teaching on prayer. His doctrine of prayer is very reassuring.  “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (LK.11.9) he tells them. In other words he assures them that God hears our prayers and that God is anxious to answer our prayers and meet our needs.

       But how far will God go to meet our needs? Anyone who has ever asked God for anything concrete, like a new sports car, learns quickly that the heavenly Father is not like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. God does not appear in response to prayer to fulfill our dreams, bow to our vanities and serve our selfish wishes. God has a purpose for prayer and it’s not to make us all successful, brilliant, attractive, millionaires; too bad. God is Goodness with a capital “G”. God wants us to become all that He is, like him in every way. God has given us prayer as a means to achieving that end.

      True prayer always begins with a question on our part:  not just what do I need here and now to get through the present crisis, but what do I need to become more like God? If we fail to see our prayers answered, it may be because we are not praying. Prayer is not just asking God for favors for ourselves and others. That is allowed and encouraged, but that is not the primary purpose of prayer. Prayer is asking God to give us those virtues that will make us more like His Son. God wants us to become like Jesus. Prayer is the means by which we grow into his likeness. Whatever God does for us in response to our prayers, He does to that end.

        Prayer is to the human spirit what physical training is to an athlete. If you engage in prayer deliberately and consistently for the right purpose, you will see results. Prayer is like keeping to a healthy diet. It requires discipline and you have to keep at it. But unlike dieting in which you are largely on your own, God helps us in prayer. God wants us to succeed.  God wants to forgive us our sins and to give us patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, a charitable and generous spirit, courage in the face of suffering, a hunger for righteousness, a humble heart, unshakable faith. That’s what, “ask and you will receive,” means. God is Spirit. His chief concern in prayer is for our spiritual and moral growth. If we accept prayer for what it is and enter into it on God’s terms, there is virtually no limit to what God will do for us. He will even give each one of us, personally, the Holy Spirit, if we ask. In fact, that is the point of Jesus’ teaching: we are to ask for the Holy Spirit.

        That sounds simple enough, but many Christians are hesitant to ask for the Holy Spirit because they have no idea what the Holy Spirit is or what he does. We baptize and offer up our collects “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”He seems familiar enough to us. And yet, many Christians are puzzled by the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t help to be told that He’s the third person of the Holy Trinity. I have had many faithful Christians tell me something to the effect that, “God I get, and Jesus I get, but I don’t get the Holy Spirit? What is it?” The Holy Spirit is the perfect love of God. The work of the Spirit is to abide in the church, sanctifying each one of us in love (John14.15-17). When Jesus says that God wants to give us the Holy Spirit he means that God wants to give us the fullness of his love. And by giving us the Holy Spirit, God wants to transform us from selfish, fearful little people pre-occupied with our own immediate needs into great lovers of God and of sinful humanity. He wants to make us into saints, into living souls who walk in love as Christ loved us, who gave himself up for us, so that strengthened in his Spirit we might do the same for others (Eph.5.1-2). To this end God wants nothing so much as to pour the Holy Spirit into your heart and mine (Rom.5.5) so that we might grow into the image of Christ and become like him, men and women of faith and holiness who do everything in love (1Cor.16.14).

        Why does God wish to do this for us? The answer is as obvious. Why did God send his Son to suffer and die on a cross for us?  God wishes to hear our prayers and answer them, even going so far as to give us his own Holy Spirit, because God loves us. God does not just like us, sort of, or have crush on us. God loves us with the passion of a groom ready to take his bride on the wedding night. God wants to lavish everything he has on us. He wants to pour out all of his love on us and fill us with the fullness of his love. The Holy Spirit is the fullness of God’s love. It is his whole heart, mind and soul. It is, therefore, his most precious gift. The Holy Spirit is God himself, in all his sweetness, all his tenderness, all his power, all his glamour, all his goodness, all his generosity, giving himself to us unconditionally.

        If that causes us to feel a little embarrassed, it is because we know all too well, how undeserving we are of such total love. He wants to make a total commitment to us; but how many are ready to give him the same kind of love in return? Have you ever had someone be more in love with you than you were with him or her? It’s awkward. That’s how it is with us and God. He loves us more than we deserve, and we know it. What but do you do? He won’t take “no” for an answer.

       Take all that Sunday school fluff about prayer being a little talk with Jesus and stow it. Prayer is not holding hands in the park, prayer is the honeymoon night, it’s letting him who loves you have you and giving your all to him in return. Are you ready for that? Many would say, I’m not so sure. And that’s an honest answer because love is a commitment and total love is total commitment. That’s what God is after. He wants us to make a total commitment to Him as He has to us. The Holy Spirit is God’s total commitment pledged to us, the passion of his perfect love poured into our hearts at baptism, renewed in every act of Holy Communion, and renewed again in every humble prayer.

       I’ll be the first to admit: that much love frightens me. But Jesus has assured us that this is the way forward in life. Don’t be afraid of God’s love. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4.18).  As I said to you last week, Jesus is the incarnation of God’s perfect love. He has shown us the way in his own life of constant prayer. Let God have his way with you and God will enlarge your heart until it is large enough to receive the fullness of his love. Love is not easy. Keeping love’s commitment demands struggle, sacrifice and suffering. Jesus who loved us perfectly loved us all the way to the cross; even as we crucified him, he loved us. That’s why God is anxious to give us the Holy Spirit, so that he can strengthen us to love one another even as he loves us.

       So, here is your homework assignment for this week. Pray for the Holy Spirit. Move your lips and open your mouth and tell God that you love him, and ask to be filled with the fullness of his love. Do it once and then do it again and again and again. Let God pour his love into your heart and don’t stop until your heart is full, which means don’t stop being open to his love. Let God fill you with the Holy Spirit!

Martha and Mary: Only One Thing is Necessary

July 17, 2016—The Eighth Sunday after Trinity

Luke 10.38-42                                              

       The news this week has been consumed with the attack by militant Moslems on innocent tourists in Nice, France, and with Donald Trump’s V.P. pick. Our son and his girlfriend were in Nice the day of the slaughter; you can imagine the anxiety we felt on hearing this shocking news. Fortunately for us, they had left Nice to go Paris that afternoon. If not, I might be giving a eulogy for them this morning, not a sermon. The war, and that’s what it is, hit close to our home this week. And for patriotic Americans who are good citizens, who vote, there is nothing like election year politics to absorb the mind in a fury of nothingness. Presidential politics can become for some a kind of obsession that consumes all our waking hours, leaving us one IQ point lower for each hour we spend analyzing the latest polls. I’m not sure who poses the greater danger to the mental health our nation, ISIS and Al Qaeda or MSNBC and Fox News. Either way, it has been a strange week. Between the soldiers of the caliphate trying to murder us and the presidential candidates vying for our votes, many find it hard to think; let alone think of anything else.

       You are excused, therefore, if you forgot the anniversary of the most important event of the 20th century. I’m referring to the wondrous events that occurred in Fatima, Portugal, July 13, 1917. It was on this day 99 years ago, that the Virgin Mary appeared to three young shepherds: Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta. And she revealed to them three secrets that would explain the history of our violent century along with a promise of peace and the means to achieve it. If you do not know the story of Fatima, I urge you to study up on it. If you do know it, then you know that the Catholic Church receives this vision of the Virgin Mary as authentic, and her message from God is a vital word for the whole world. I’m not going to elaborate on the secrets of Fatima today. I will on the week of October 13 say much more about it; that week is the anniversary of the great “miracle of the sun”, a miracle witnessed by 70, 000 people. When Mary appeared to the shepherds on July 13, Lucy, age 10, asked her to do something to prove to the people that they were not lying or making up a story about seeing her. Mary told them to tell the people that if they would return to this field on October 13 that she would, at noon on that day, prove to them all that the message that she had delivered to the world through the little shepherds was true. On noon of October 13, 1917, Mary did what she said she would do. It is simply the most astonishing event of modern times.

       But the purpose of the event was not to astonish many with evidence of God’s omnipotence by making the sun dance in the sky for ten minutes. The purpose was to affirm the message of July 13. That message was a simple one: hell is real and many people are there, and many more are going there unless people repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ.

       There is probably no part of the gospel, by gospel I mean the teachings of Jesus, more scoffed at, mocked, ridiculed, debunked, ignored and denied than is the doctrine of hell. The modern age just won’t hear of it. The modern age is in love with itself. Like Narcissus, who couldn’t keep from staring at himself in a mirror, he so loved his own image, we assure ourselves that because God is by divine nature unconditional love, God would never punish anyone eternally. Well, at Fatima, the mother of God appeared to inform a world at war, a world about to meet the evils of the Russian revolution, that despite the wishful thinking of modern theologians, hell is very real and that if the world continues to embrace atheism and to reject the gift of the Holy Eucharist, the real presence of Christ, the Savior, among us, that war upon war will continue as punishment for sin, that entire nations will be wiped out and that the violence of the kind we witnessed in Nice this week will continue. It will continue until we renounce atheism and become Christian nations again. When we stop ignoring Jesus Christ and acknowledge him as our king, peace will break out and things will get better. The grace of God that flows to the world thru the heart of his mother Mary will assure it.

      But, you say, “We can’t do that we’re a democracy, we have freedom of religion and free elections and everyone can believe whatever she wants to believe, our strength is in our diversity. Blah, blah, blah.” Tell that to him who can make the sun dance.

       People wonder, why is all of this happening to France? Is France innocent? Terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11. Terrorism began when the French Revolution set up the guillotine in Paris and used it to systematically kill bishops, nuns and priests and impose atheism on a once Christian culture. Napoleon then spread that revolution all across Europe. God is angry at the nations of what once was Christendom for what we have done. God has given us his Son to be our king, and we have rejected him. What else should we expect?

       The lesson of today’s gospel is beautifully simple and direct. “Only one thing is necessary,” Jesus said (Lk.10.42). The one thing we need and cannot do without is Jesus. Jesus alone has the power to save our souls from the fires of hell. Unless we escape the fires of hell, what have all our efforts in this world been for? The sum total of our best efforts is worthless, unless they are redeemed by his love. There is nothing that lasts beyond the grave that has not been sanctified by his grace. Christ alone can do this for sinful humanity. His death on the cross sealed the deal. He is our sanctification. That’s why we who love him call him, “Our Savior”. In calling him “Our Savior”, we are not suggesting that there is another who saves. We’re simply acknowledging him for who he is: he is the one from whom sinful humanity receives true life, life that lives even beyond the grave.

     That’s what he meant when he said to Martha, “Only one thing is necessary”. In the short term, we all have our responsibilities and we have to keep our word, we have chores that need to be done, obligations to others that need to be met. People count on us. We have to be there for them. But unless we embrace the Son of God and follow him in the way of love, as Saint Paul put it, we become nothing more than a “noisy gong or sounding brass.”(1Cor.13.1). Christ offered up his entire life, suffering and all to God and so must we if we wish to follow him into eternity. He made himself the perfect offering for our sins. When we unite ourselves and all we do to him in his self- offering to God, we have the assurance that God accepts us because whatever is in him, who is God’s son, is fully sanctified.

       What I’m saying is that in the long run, the only thing in life that really matters is whether or not we are united to Him. No matter how much you do in this world, you do not want it said at your graveside, “He was a stranger to Christ.”

       The Moslems are going to continue to fight us as they have done since their demonic inception in the sixth century. Whoever dubbed them the “religion of peace” never opened a history book. And unfortunately in this age of 24/7 news coverage, there is no escaping presidential politics. But this sad story does have a happy ending. 99 years ago this week, Mary, the mother of our Lord the mother of our church, the mother all the baptized promised this: “My Immaculate heart will triumph.” She meant that the miracle of the Incarnation that God wrought in her sinless womb, the birth of God’s only Son, is the lynchpin that ties mortality to eternity and it will not be undone by evil men. In other words, God sent his mother to remind and to reassure us that history is his, and that Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead and who sits at God’s right hand cannot be defeated. In him God has given us the victory (1Cor.15.57).

        In an age of terror, remember the words of Saint John, “Perfect love casts out fear.” Jesus Christ is the perfect love of God incarnate among us who is forever among us in his Word and Blessed Sacrament. Trust in him and stay in him. “Only one thing is necessary” for us to win this war and that is for a majority of us to believe in him and to follow him in the way of perfect love. Get your loved ones, your friends and neighbors back into Church on Sunday mornings. On our knees, before his altar of love is the way to victory. This is where we will win.