Isaiah 50:5-9
Psalm 116:1-9
James 2:14-18
Mark 8:27-35

Land of the Living

Faith and works: the sum of Christian life, enshrined in the two Great Commandments. First, we must believe in Father God, believe in His Son and in the Holy Spirit and love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. This is faith. Second, we must love our neighbors as ourselves caring for and looking after their needs. This is works. On these Two Commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. As Jesus said, all the Sacred Scriptures are condensed into these two commands: faith and works.

In a most important mystery, Jesus reveals that God is our Father — our personal, intimate parent, our own Mother and Father. And we are His adopted children with God's Son being our older Brother and Exemplar. Not surprisingly, then, we continually find the New Testament being articulated in terms of family. When St. James writes, "Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead." This should not be hard to grasp in family terms. For Jesus says,

Before we go deeper into this important subject, however, I must not ignore that our Epistle reading continues to be a great dividing point between Catholics and Protestants. A central feature of Luther's theology is sola fides — "by faith alone are we saved." Saying that the Epistle of James was "unworthy of the Apostolic spirit!" Luther thought of The Apostle, St. Paul, who argued in several places that we are saved by faith. But St. Paul does not reject works. Calling Abraham the Father of Faith, St. Paul would surely not argue that works are not required, as if Abraham might recline on a couch the Ur of the Chaldees merely contemplating his love of God. No. Abraham must arise and go and do!

St. Paul's focus was on the Hebrew Law, addressing the highly specific problem of imposing circumcision, Jewish dietary laws, and other ritual burdens upon the Gentiles, which would have undermined his ministry to the Mediterranean peoples to the West.

Writing on the living spirit versus dead letter of the Law, St. Paul opposed the perfunctory and heavy-hearted fulfillment of a contract. To grasp this, let us reflect on the question in terms of family. Consider loveless marriage as an example. Can we really use the word marriage for what amounts to unbreakable chains of bitterness and resentful duty? Without the spirit of marriage — devotion, solicitude, patience, caring, tenderness, empathy, loyalty — can we really say that two people are married, two being made one, or is it merely the dead letter of the Law that binds them into a lifeless contract? There are only two solutions here: revive the heart and soul of this marriage or own that it is irrevocably dead. Without faith, the works of marriage are tyranny, and a mockery of living marriage and a vivid example of works without faith.

I have never studied Protestant theology and know very little about the Protestant mind. But I have formed the impression that what troubles Protestants most on the "faith vs. works" question is the false and mistaken Protestant assumption that we Catholics believe that we can merit sanctification simply by fulfilling certain rules and tasks. I hope that all Christians realize salvation comes about, through the grace of God, when one conforms her or his life to the mind and life and faith of Jesus Christ. It is a gift of grace accepted and then honored by arising and doing, which in turn become an occasion for the gifts of further divine graces. In the Orthodox East one says that we are saved in becoming Jesus Christ through a process of ever-deepening conversion, a process known as theosis. Roman Catholic doctrine does not disagree. As with the Two Great Commandments, both are necessary in the journey to Heaven: faith and works, an all-encompassing love of God and the care of His people .... following the example of our Lord and Brother, Jesus.

Certainly, the Church has been deeply wounded by works without faith — clergy and religious and laypeople who go through the motions but who do not believe, much less love God with all their strength or conform their lives to the mind and heart and life of Jesus of Nazareth. I recall taking a car trip with a wealthy Roman Catholic layman who was widely praised as a humanitarian and had been honored throughout the universal Church. Being alone with him, I soon realized he wanted to pick my brain as a professor of theology. His text was Matthew 25. We all know the passage in which Jesus declares that by feeding and clothing and befriending the poor, we in effect have done these things to Him. "'Come, O blessed of my Father," He declares, "and "'inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'" (Mt 25:34). As this man had surely done all these things for the poorest of the poor, he wanted to know if a contract had been fulfilled and completed.

I replied, "Well, you know how contracts work: certain general statements are made in the beginning and then refined as you go along. Take, for example, a Last Will and Testament. At the top, it may read, "All my natural issue will inherit equal parts of my estate." But as you get into the individual clauses, you discover that in its detailed execution the shares are not really equal, for equality is hard to define.

"So let me get this straight," he replied. "Feeding and clothing the poor is not enough."

"Surely it is commendable to clothe and feed the poor," I said, "Indeed, Jesus tells us that this is required. But elsewhere in the Scriptures we find that the content of our hearts and the purity of our lives are also required. Think of the Two Great Commandments: first, present a blameless personal life before God in an offering of faithful and true love; second, care for your neighbor." I do not know why people search for loopholes in the matter of their salvation. Do we not all know what is required "to go to Heaven"? Have we forgotten what it means "to be good"? It is a perversity in the human spirit that looks for a different way. And when that perversity is found among clergy and among vowed religious, the lives one finds practicing this perversion are heart-breaking.

Years ago, when I followed my priestly call to the Third World, I met the living saints, men and women who were perfect in both faith and works. These were gracious people who gave off light and were absolutely faithful in their prayers, unfailingly charitable in the conduct of their lives, and who had given decades of their lives to the hopeless task of caring for the poorest of the poor. But they took each life, one at a time, realizing that each mattered most greatly to God. After some time, and realizing that these religious sisters and brothers were authentic, the real thing, exactly what they seemed to be, I was moved to question the doctrine of original sin as being universal. After all, this doctrine was not developed until the fifth century .... St. Augustine. In any case, what is true in the natural order is what is mostly true. There are always outliers in any data set in the life sciences.

I also met vowed religious and priests and bishops who were not perfect, who went through the motions of religious life but live Christian life. Some believed that because they lived in the one of the most dangerous and squalid cities on earth and because they served the poor each and every day, that they had fulfilled their contract with God. I began calling this heresy the "Matthew 25 bargain," thinking of my car trip with the famous humanitarian. These men and women looked upon religious life as a kind of factory job. Before they punched in on the clock each day and after they punched out, they believed they were "off-duty." Needless to say, the manner of life these representatives of the Church lived were known to many people — certainly known to those with whom they rendezvoused during "off-hours," certainly known to those with whom they worked in the general workplace. And of course these people told others about it. Of course they did! And then those people told still others. Without question, this had a profound moral affect on all who knew about these things. "So that's how the Church works today," people told themselves. "You do your part, but your personal life is your own."

Is it a stretch to apply the "Matthew 25 bargain" to the Church we have known for the past two generations? For two generations our young people have been told "service is real faith!" Meantime, the priests who have preached this message have also conveyed it in the conduct of their personal lives: "faithfulness is not important, only works!" Read the copiously footnoted Goodbye, Good Men (Michael S. Rose) written in the late 1960s. Read Cardinal Medeiros' letter to the Vatican written in 1979 (Humberto Cardinal Archbishop of Boston). Read the highly respected The Changing Face of the Priesthood written by a seminary rector (Rev. Donald B. Cozzens) in 1999. All of these describe the same thing: not a crisis of individual priests who have sinned, but rather a culture, a way of life, a near-universal attitude that believes "punching in on the clock each day" fulfills the contract with God. Small wonder, the Two Great Commandments of the "new vision" of the Church are "Don't judge me!" and "Live and let live!"

During a Lenten retreat I led at a Roman Catholic parish some years ago, a woman in her late sixties said aloud before others — about a hundred affluent, well-educated adults — that she dated various men and that she practiced what she termed "a healthy sex life." "Everyone knows what dating is," she said. When I urged her to to protect the holy and not cast pearls before swine and that marriage was the unique sacred vessel protecting this holy expression of love, she could scarcely believe her ears. She declared loudly, "My God is the New Testament God! You're stuck in the past with the Old Testament God, the judgmental God!" she said. As I looked around the church seeing nearly every head nodding in agreement, I realized that this was much more than one lost soul. "Madam," I replied, "the very premise of your statement is held by the Roman Catholic Church to be a grave heresy, Marcionism. And the rest .... the rest you've been taught repeatedly through elementary school and high school."

I walked away that evening weighed down from a crushing grief. What in the world do we say to our children? They would be right to ask, "Isn't the Church there to protect us? Isn't the Church the last bulwark against depravity and darkness?" Not even their grandmothers can be depended upon. And their parents? Hook-up culture overtook the majority of their parents long ago. Just look at the American family! And where are the priests?! Where are the parish priests who pledged to guide them and fight for them and, yes, defend a wholesome way of life! (Most unpopular, I assure you.)

As a parish priest, I was constantly asked by parents, "How do you raise children in a world like this?" I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do know know certain truths. First, throw out the television. You cannot not prevail over the television. It is hopeless to compete against the constant in-flow of toxic values and premises and the depiction of I-can-scarcely-call-it-life that one finds on the television. Replace it with family activities and start young. But take heart, I told them, for naturally planted in the hearts of our children, and deeply inscribed in their souls, is an instinct for moral good and revulsion of moral evil. Look at the phenomenal popularity of the Harry Potter books! Think of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and, above all, the multi-generational reverence paid to The Lord of the Rings, written by the devout and profound Catholic layman, J.R.R. Tolkien.

What do you say to your children? First, ground them in moral soil. Read to them. Watch the excellent films that have been made from the books by C.S. Lewis, a foremost Anglo-Catholic apologist of the twentieth century. And when they become older, then steep them in one of the greatest Catholic minds of any century, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis' close friend and fellow professor at Oxford. When they have graduated from this academy, they will be ready to hear the pivotal question of their lifetimes: "To which vocations does God call us during a time of great darkness?" After all, it was not so long ago that a vast, Swastika-covered evil descended upon Europe, and their great-grandparents answered heroic calls to vocation.

Using Middle Earth as the allegory, tell your children the truth: they too have been born into a dark age. They will see reflected in their own worlds the indifference of Hobbits who ignore the vast evil and seek comforts and entertainment instead. (They turn on the TV!) They will identify with the small, group of heroic young men and young women who are needed to form a holy fellowship, the Fellowship of the Ring — who refuse evil and who will stake their lives to it. Yes, of course they will be tempted. But they will help each other to see the greater good: the need to present themselves, and prepare themselves, and to be worthy when the King should return.

We must be absolutely honest with ourselves and with our children. The Evil One has turned our world upside down, robbing our children of moral and dependable parents and grandparents and blighting the Church. Yet our children will resonate with certain truths they will find in certain books:

• In an evil time, the bad will outnumber the good, but numbers don't matter.
  
  Read the Gospel this morning, and ask the Lord Jesus Christ, Who was pitted against the entire religious establishment. Ask His Apostles who faced an unbelieving world and then made the +Sign+, the Sign of the Cross the most recognizable symbol of all time.
  
  
• Our children will know that false ones are as common as dirt, like Orcs, but the true are diamonds — pure, brilliant, and rare.
• They will know that the vast power of Goodness is only with the faithful, though they be few.
• Those who are called & the chosen must embark on a spiritual journey on which everything will depend.
• Together they will lead us and help the world to prepare for the Return of the King.

The Roman Church has been hobbled by a fear of losing priests (I know. I was in the middle of it), however evil these men might be. Always to go forward under the banner of forgiveness! Forgiveness, forgiveness! Talk about works without faith! (As Hamlet said, "Words, words, words.") By all accounts among those who were near to him, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger began speaking more and more frankly about what he called "this filth" in the priesthood. "We must root it out!" he said. "Then you shall have no Church," came back the reply. With polls indicating that 60% of the U.S. RC priesthood were active in a homosexual lifestyle, that would be no exaggeration. "Fine!" Cardinal Ratzinger retorted. "Then the Church must go back to her roots!"

When he was elected Pope Benedict XVI, he set about his business: seeing that 86.6% of all sexual abuse victims were boys past the age of puberty, he barred homosexuals from seminary and directed that known seminarians who practiced homosexuality be removed. He introduced what he hoped would be an enormous influx of married priests into the RC priesthood by establishing an Anglican Ordinariate (which, tragically, would be opposed bitterly by the U.S. Bishops driving many Anglo-Catholic priests away). He sought rapprochement with the Society of Saint Pius X, a large block of devout, conservative, and dependable priests, again bitterly opposed by the U.S. Bishops and mocked in the press. He marginalized powerful prelates such as Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal McCarrick and began a regime of wholesome reforms, swimming against a fierce tide of liberal secular media. He moved swiftly and boldly until this heroic, though aged man, was overwhelmed by the evil and treachery around him, seeing no way ahead.

His pro-gay-priest opponents, undermining him at every turn, wanted a very different kind of pope. And they got one. Appropriating the name of St. Francis, this Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio immediately suppressed two conservative Franciscan religious orders, shuttering their seminaries and placing their superiors under house arrest for practicing traditional Catholic life. That was the only charge. He made Cardinal Kasper, whom Pope Benedict had sidelined, his new theologian-in-chief. Talk about rehabilitating a career! He restored Cardinal McCarrick, a longtime homosexual predator, back to his position of power and influence. And the infamous Red Binder, the results of a secret investigation ordered by Pope Benedict — a 300-hundred page dossier detailing powerful cardinals dressing in drag and attending homosexual orgies — that dossier the present pope seems to have sunk to the bottom of the blood-red sea.

Be not afraid though the good be few ... even if the priesthood be pruned back to 40% of its present number. Jesus taught us again and again, the good are always the few:

Spiritual journey is not undertaken by herds of cattle and is not "herd mentality." The opinion of the majority will not matter in the end. And God's commandments and moral statutes do not change with the times. They are eternally true and our only lifeline to sanity and goodness. We manifestly live in a world that does not care. In the end, a mystery will be fulfilled: in the Final Judgment, each of us will receive the object of his or her desires, however wholesome or unwholesome they might be. Role models have vanished. The Church is sick-unto-death. The good indeed are few. But never underestimate the immeasurable and overwhelming power of Goodness that will come to those few.

Witness EWTN, forbidden by the Church, a handful of mere mortals who lacked money and power, gathered in a tiny studio. Yet, through them the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was overwhelmed, helpless, and humbled by this show of God's Goodness.

Keep your children's eyes, therefore, on the prize. Moral good continues to inspire. Moral evil continues to repel. And holy books, even on CD and DVD, are all around us. And they, in turn, will open the holiest Book, the Sacred Scriptures. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have seen to that.

Find good priests where you can and grapple them to your hearts with hoops of steel. Pray for them, seeking the intercessions of Blessed Mary and lift up a never-ending offering of prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For wherever two or three are gathered together in His Name, He will be there in the midst of them. As our Psalm reading concludes this morning,

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