Homily

Recently I ran across a piece I had read before by a Roman orator and writer who lived about 100 years after St. Paul and was very popular in his day. His name is Marcus Cornelius Fronto. Here is something he wrote in one of his speeches: “They have formed a rabble of blasphemous conspirators, who, with night-time meetings, periodic fasts and inhuman feasts seal their pact not with some religious ritual, but with desecrating profanation. They are a crowd that furtively lurks in hiding places, shunning the light. They are speechless in public but gabble away in corners. They recognize each other by secret marks and signs. Hardly have they met when they love each other, throughout the world, uniting in the practice of a veritable religion of lusts.” Now what group of people do you think Fronto is talking about? That’s right—the Roman Senate. Politicians were the same back then as they are today. No, of course he is speaking of Christians.

We don’t have lots of written material about what people thought of Christians in the first few centuries in the Roman empire. Obviously, some people greatly admired Christians, and that’s why the Church continued to grow, but as we see there were others, especially among the educated and upper ranks of society who really despised Christianity. It was thought of as a corrupting religion that was a danger to society; a faith that was only fit for slaves and degenerates. As you can see from Fronto’s words he thought Christians were evil people. Why was that? Well, we see in the negative accounts of Christianity all kinds of strange ideas about what Christians believed and practiced. As you heard, these ideas had nothing to do with reality, but they were based on rumors and stories from people who did not like the Church. A number of anti-Christian writers from the ancient world did not seem to care what Christians actually believed. They were satisfied to use the rumors and stories they heard because they couldn’t stand Christians. And what was one of the top reasons cited for why the Church was such a horrible religion? Christians did not want to fit in with the rest of the people.

They didn’t attend the public festivals of the gods. In fact, they renounced all the gods. They didn’t attend the bloody games of the stadiums throughout the empire, unless, of course, during times of persecution, they were the victims paraded into the arena to be slaughtered. They did not make use of prostitution or other outward sexual aspects of Roman society. They felt a bond with one another which was not shared with pagans. Most Christians were indeed slaves and people of the lower classes, so how could a religion held by such people be anything else than a religion of idiots and immoral criminals, or as a former presidential candidate said, people who are “deplorables?”

The biggest problem was that Christians just did not want to fit in with the moral and public life of the empire and its society. If they did not want to go along with the morality and common lifestyle of their neighbors and fellow countrymen, then they were to be rejected, scorned and criticized as unpatriotic lowlifes. Indeed, among the high and mighty of Roman society the emotional reaction against the Church broke out from time to time, and place to place, in violent persecutions where many faithful lost their lives by an act of law. Why couldn’t they just accept what other people accepted, and act like other people acted and get along with what normal people believed?

It's this attitude that St. Paul is addressing to the parish in Ephesus in today’s epistle. Paul tells them not to walk in darkness, not to give in to evil and immoral activity but rather to carry the light—which is goodness, justice, and truth—because that light is not their own creation. That light is Christ. That’s why at baptisms the priest leads the newly baptized holding a candle, three times around the tetrapod as they follow the cross he holds up in his hand. That’s why the newlyweds carry a candle in the same way, same procession. As newly baptized, as newly married they follow St. Paul’s words, “Walk then as children of light… testing what is well pleasing to God; and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness…”

We face a fair deal of opposition to our faith from the high and mighty of our own day, and increasingly we find ourselves at odds with our fellow citizens on matters of life and death, sexual morality, marriage and family life, the role of government in society and the nature of true freedom. It’s not easy to stand for the teachings of Christ when people criticize, castigate, and declare those teachings to be harmful, uncaring, ignorant, and hateful. Today there are Christians who are losing their jobs because of their faith (although their bosses always claim some other reason for firing them), and some are losing friends and members of their families, because of their faith.

We should not get discouraged. At our baptisms the priest handing us the candle said, “Strive to be enlightened by the light of faith and good deeds so that when the Lord comes you may meet Him…” We will not give in to darkness, we will not walk in darkness, but let us humbly but with full courage and strength carry the light of Christ for ourselves to guide us, and we carry it so that others may see it too, even perhaps among our relatives and friends, we carry that light that others may see it leads to goodness, justice and truth not to the darkness that degrades the human person and devalues the human soul. The light of Christ—how well are we letting it shine even as these December days grow shorter and shorter? Is it lighting our path today? Is it shining for others to choose or reject? Let us hold on to that light that no darkness can ever overcome unless we throw it away. Christ is our true light.