Homily

In St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians today, we heard him list his rights as an apostle. He has the right to marry and to be fed, clothed and housed so that he can be free to preach the Gospel. Yet even though he is deserving of all these things, he has not made use of them. Instead he supports himself. He says, "If we have sown spiritual seed for you, is it a great thing that we reap a material harvest from you?" He clearly wants them to understand that the spiritual gifts he brings and the spiritual work he does among them is of far greater value than any food, drink or clothing, far greater than any of the material goods they would spend if they were supporting him.

How do these two realities come together in Christian life, the spiritual and the material? I remember talking to a young man one time and he was describing why he had fallen away from the Church, and one of his reasons he gave is that he can't believe that a God is constantly interfering in the life of the universe, doing miracles or talking to people and telling them what to do. Now I don't want to get into those specific questions but rather the larger picture. Where do the spiritual and material worlds meet? We see them meeting in a dramatic way in the Transfiguration of our Lord when miraculously Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the mountain and Jesus’ face shines as brightly as the sun and His clothes were as white as light. And so I have to wonder what was going on in the minds of Peter, James, and John, after witnessing this miraculous event where they also heard the voice of God telling them that Jesus was His beloved Son and they should listen to him. Yes, they had seen Jesus perform extraordinary miracles of healing and exorcism but this was all about Jesus Himself, not about His miraculous powers. How do you go back to just sitting with Him at the dinner table and passing the bread to Him after that? What were they thinking? What would we be thinking after seeing this transformation on the mountain?

Now I can understand the young man's attraction to the ideas of the Deist philosophy that God created the universe and then He steps back and does not intervene or get involved in any way. It's an attractive idea in one way because it puts the universe and my own life into my own hands. I don't have to worry about living in a world where miracles can happen, or where grace is prompting me to go, or where I need to be speaking to God or listening to Him with the ear of my heart. This material world is all that truly matters as long as I am alive, and my job is simply to figure it out in a rational and reasonable way. It's all up to me, and who can I trust more than me? Thank God it doesn't have to be God!!

In that frame of mind, in that way of thinking, the Theophany event would be considered, at best, some kind of hallucination, or, at worst, simply a lie by the apostles. If God does not interfere in His creation, then He certainly would not be sending a son to become a man and suffer, die and rise from the dead for the salvation of the world. In the Deist understanding, Jesus was no miracle-worker, and certainly not divine. He was simply a good man who taught moral and ethical truths, and nothing more than that. It's my job to try and figure out how to live a moral and ethical life through the use of reason and intelligence and making sense of my life in this material world.

This is where I think most people in our country are heading—a certain type of deism, rather than atheism. A place where God has left all the decisions in my own hands and where I don't have to worry about such things as prayer, sacraments, worship or the guidance of the Body of Christ, the Church, or any sort of divine revelation as Christianity teaches. It's all up to me to decide and make my own way in life. I believe in God, it's just that after I say I believe in Him everything else is up to me. I can reject Christianity, or at least ignore the claims of Christianity, and still be spiritual. I might even call myself a Christian, but I will decide what it means to be a Christian (and the truth is, it might not mean very much on a day-to-day basis.)

How do we come to this place? We have focused ourselves so powerfully on the material goods that modern science and technology have provided us with that we have little time or energy or desire to look to the spiritual life. We have, in many ways chosen the material world over the kingdom of God. We work hard to get a lot of stuff, then we have to take care of and preserve the stuff we have gotten, because what's the point of getting stuff if we're not using it? Like the Israelites in the desert who got tired of waiting for Moses to come back from the mountain, we too prefer something we can get our hands on, something we create or buy, rather than a bunch of commandments. We may not set up a golden calf, but we can easily find other types of idols to become objects of our devotion. We are built for worship, it's in our very nature as human beings, but the question is who or what shall we worship?

We are swimming in a sea of stuff. We're swimming in an ocean of material goods and technology, and it becomes more and more difficult to hear the voice of the Father Who tells us to listen to His Beloved Son. We may have chosen Facebook over prayer, YouTube over Scripture, a better car over attention to virtue, natural foods in place of supernatural grace, entertainment in place of worship, and self-judgment and personal opinion instead of the life-giving teachings of Christ, and surfing the net rather than serving our neighbor. These things appear to be a lot more gratifying in a very superficial way.

The stuff of this world, which we have more of than any other people at any time in human history is always there in front of us like the tantalizing fruit in the Garden of Eden. "Take me, use me, buy me, own me, desire me until you have me." The danger is that we can allow ourselves to be seduced by it without a thought, and maybe even neglecting our life in Christ because we're not choosing to balance our lives as Christians. The problem is not that material goods and technology are bad. The problem is when, instead of using them for good, they end up using us instead. When you have adult males spending five or six hours or more playing video games day after day and thinking there is nothing abnormal about that, I think it's a sign that there is a problem. And then we have no time, no room, no energy, no attraction for Christ. Yesterday, just yesterday, how much time were you engaged with the Lord in some way?

Where do the spiritual and material worlds meet? Only in Christ, our Lord, do we find that perfect balance. Only in Him can we find that excellent balance for our own lives. Let's be sure we let Him in today.