Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19:8-11
1 Corinthians 1:22-25
John 2:13-25

"For He Knew What Was in Man"

I give thanks that the humble spans of our lives have crossed what I regard as the greatest boundary in human history. I give thanks that we saw what was on the other side of this boundary. We grew up at the end of the Age of God, which had been the norm for thousands of years, many thousands, while our adult lives have been spent, for nearly a half-century, during the Age of Man — another way to say it is, "the secular age." As I make this claim, I can almost feel educated people jump from their seats. Having spent eleven years studying Medieval and Renaissance languages, literatures, and cultures, I feel bound by custom and consensus to locate the Age of Man as beginning during the Renaissance. But I do not mean the rise of the Middle Class nor the first stirrings of the Scientific Revolution nor even the Protestant revolution, when people rejected the sacraments and took the role of priests for themselves. I mean that I lived during the age when most people believed in God and then lived to see the age when they did not.

One rarely met with anyone during the 1950s and early 1960s who did not honor and revere God. (I am not speaking only of Christians.) Foul language was virtually unheard of in public places (and swiftly censured whenever it might be heard). Pornography was never seen in stores or television or movie theaters and, of course, not on the Web. And the family — one man who was married to one woman, for life, who raised their children together — was the norm, nearly universal. (We took it for granted, of course.) During the 50s extended families living together in the same house, and certainly in the same town, was common. And together they all worshipped their God.

What I share here is not simply a golden memory, but rather a steady, formidable world that certainly existed. Yes, there were exceptions, but in the natural world, there are always exceptions, outliers. As any scientist of the natural order knows, that is why one studies statistics and learns about the bell curve. I am talking about what is mostly true. Did you know that what is mostly true is what is true? This is a cold axiom of science. When one studies the natural world, that is in the nature of the subject. Nor is my claim that this world has vanished an unscientific and faulty impression. No, we can follow this by the numbers. 15% of the French attend religious services, followed by 10% in the U.K., and 7% in Australia. By comparison, the U.S. demonstrates a greater interest in God, yet far fewer than half of all Americans observe any kind of religious practice, and only one state crosses the 50% boundary when it comes to worshipping God. And that is Utah, thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. My native New England is down in the 20% range. Vermont is 17%.

When I discuss these things, which certainly befit the season of Lent, I use another phrase for the Age of God, a more practical one. People my own age nod sadly when I remind them that we have lived to see something most remarkable in human history: the End of Decency. For we remember a world in which no one locked their doors. We remember a world filled with gentlemen and ladies. We remember the niceties people would exchange in public, tipping one's hat, opening doors for other people, and inquiring into their well being.

This world died slowly. I recall as a young Merchant Marine, serving the Mississippi Basin, that I would take early morning strolls in small southern towns when my boat was at dock. The captain would say, "Why don't you walk on solid ground for a while," which was a treat. And I would stoll up and down the streets of these little towns, like Natchez or Lake Providence, Mississippi, in the early morning light. I could see that people had left the keys in the ignition of a convertible with the top down parked out on the street. I would look up on the front porch and see people sleeping, without fear, on the front porch, with no screens, no lock. And then I could see that the front door was left wide open all night with the screen door standing ajar. Yes, that world of trust and goodness died slowly.

Not long after that I understook a walking tour of Ireland, the country of my ancestors. I walked all over. Met people. Asked into their welfare. We would buy each other pints of Guinness in the pub, and the next day I would have breakfast with them. I wanted to learn all about Ireland. And I heard the same lament everywhere I went: "The doors of Ireland are closing! The doors of Ireland are locked!" For many centuries scarcely anyone owned a lock in Ireland, but now no one dared go to sleep without locking their door. A new kind of age, never seen in Irish history, was taking hold.

Realizing how great was the passing of this historical age, I began seeking out people in their eighties and nineties when I myself was still in my twenties to ask them about the world they saw with their own eyes. One man, "Pop," was nearly a hundred. I would sit with him in the evening under his Mamosa tree smoking Luckies while he held his Pall Malls between slender, stately fingers with his old dog Duchess lay at his feet, sitting there in his retractable beach chair. We'd sit and watch the fireflies in silence. One day, waiting for the right mood, I asked, "Of all the things that you see as you look at the world eighty years ago, what stands out as the greatest difference compared to today?" He slowly turned to look in my face, in a mixture of disbelief and sadness. "Why, don't you know?!" he asked in sincere wonder. "Don't you know?! Why, it's crime. There wasn't any crime." And I began to realize what he meant because hat mutual regard that even I saw in the 1950s was an inviolable law during the first half of the twentieth century and no doubt for centuries before that.

I do not mean that people did not commit any crimes anywhere. I go back to a principle that I shared with you a moment ago: what is mostly true is what is true. There are always outliers. There are always items for newspapers, but what is mostly true is .... people did not steal from each other. People did not burgle houses. Murder was rare. Yes, there was the Wild West before churches and schools and a regulated constabulary took hold. But in Maryland, where Pop lived, and in the settled states of the East, crime was rare. And I thought, when people steal from each other, that is surely a contemptible thing, for it reveals a depraved indifference to the welfare of another human being. And then it hit me that nearly all the Commandments having to do with humans living with humans are about stealing: stealing the respect due the aged; stealing another man's wife or his life. And I also don't mean only Maryland. I was born in Newark, New Jersey. No one is going to argue that Newark, New Jersey was a Utopia of the bygone golden age. Yet, Littleton Avenue, where my mother grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was also a place where no one locked their doors.

Pop has been dead nearly a half-century now. He did not live to see a world where school teachers, women(!), sought out sex with twelve and fourteen-year-old boys. He did not live to see the United States government funding transsexual operations where confused young people, who need patient understanding, receive instead reckless experiments that destroy their lives forever. Nor did he live to see the near-total collapse of marriage and the family. I am sure you all know that the family — a man and woman who are married raising their own children — is now the minority case in the U.S. And where is the mass murderer, in this plague of public shootings, who was raised in such a family?

Of course, the great question arising from the mists of my meanderings this morning is, Why? Why should should there be this obvious and unmistakable link between religious life and decency? Certainly, we have heard for centuries that reason and science and progress would lead us to a world of universal love and mutual caring. Religion, it was said by these prophets, was the problem, holding us back from this Utopian age.

Strangely, and of all things, this was precisely the premise of the liberal bishops of the Roman Catholic Church during the 1980s when the Catechism was being prepared. The Ten Commandments, they claimed, were standing in the way of a New Age of Love. When a draft Catechism had been completed, it was sent out to every bishop in the Roman Communion for comment. A flood of modi, (requests for modification) inundated the commission who had been charged to do this work. The bishops, mostly from the U.S., had seen that Part Three of Catechism was being organized around the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments?! They could scarcely believe it! "Hadn't the Church progressed far beyond the Ten Commandments?" they demanded to know. Hadn't the Church gone to a higher place? a transcendent place far above rules and laws? And many Roman Catholics during this same same historical period were discovering at Confession that more and more priests were pooh-poohing the idea of sin. "Just focus on loving God and loving your neighbor!" they were told. Yes, universal love would take them to a higher place than a Church teaching about life-giving virtue and life-destroying vice. You heard it among the Protestant ministers, too. And in the background, the Beatles played, "Love, love, love. All you need is Love."

The poor members of the commission! What were they to do with all these modi?! These were bishops, after all, "authentic teachers" of the Roman Catholic Church. No one is senior to a bishop, whose title in the Roman Church is "the Most Reverend." So they went to the Roman Communion's senior-most officer in matters of faith and morals, a Cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger. In reply to their request for guidance, the gentle Cardinal Ratzinger slowly and silently came into the room carrying a large book. He set it down at the head of the table where the commission members sat and in that soft and gentle voice, whom everyone heard when he was elected pope, began to read:

A powerful story. But the sentence that resonates most powerfully to me this morning is the first thing Jesus says to the ruler. And it is the answer to our great question, "Why": "No one is good .... but God alone." And this reminds me of a sentence we heard only last Sunday: "This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.