It should be asked whether the invention of the Internet was actually a good thing. We could honestly ask that question of most media, as has been a constant complaint for millennia. The Greek philosopher Socrates, living almost 500 years before our Lord, complained that writing would cause people to stop using their memory. Yet the modern media, in particular the Internet and social media, does more than cause us to forget things, but exposes far more of our society to us. While television can be regulated or controlled by various authorities, the Internet is truly equal in that anyone can share anything. And what is shared concerning the state of affairs of our age is quite frightening.
Perhaps you have heard these things, but if you have not, they should give you pause. The consistent promotion of anti-Christian degenerate values such as sodomy, transgenderism, and the exaltation of the state above the family is consistently on display. We don’t even need to look far to see this happen. This past week, the Kentucky Department of Education issued a document on students who suffer from the mental disorder of transgenderism in favor of the student against their families. The department said that it is not always necessary to inform parents and guardians of any name changes or gender identification or sexual orientation. This is not from New York or California. This is in our state. It is here.
What is happening? What we are seeing is the complete dismantling of everything oriented to God: not just church or religion but even family and the identity of the human person as having both a body and a soul. Every aspect of society is being upended and turned towards the degradation of the human person from one created in the image and likeness of God into a unit only fit for whatever the elites or those in power think they should be. They have pushed God out of the public square, they continue to promote the slaughter of the innocent in abortion and contraception, they continue to unravel everything in the quest to tear down all that good Christians and those in pursuit of the true and the good and the beautiful have sought to build up and elevate over the course of human history.
Are we at the end? It is perhaps possible, though none of us knows the hour or the day. One could rightly argue we are seeing an end of an age, a time similar to the calamitous fall of Rome in the fifth century, signaling an immense transition into a period of further uncertainty, struggle, and woe. It is not getting better. They are striving to label you as fascists, as racists, as enemies of the state. They seek to steal your children and groom them into mindless consumers, only able to enjoy the sensual as the highest good. And it seems as if they are winning.
Yet, as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ, we know that all this has happened before. We see it in the Passion of our Lord as He is mocked, jeered, derided, spat upon, and hated by the crowds. We see it in the indifference of Pontius Pilate, knowing this to be wrong yet desirous of pleasing the people so politics pushes on. We see it in the cruelness of the Jewish elders who scoff at the Messiah manifested before them. We see it above all in the agony of the Cross, where it seems even the Lord Himself suffers a feeling of the absence and alienation of God, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned Me?”
We know the rest of the story. We know of the triumph of the risen Savior, victorious through His sufferings and death over all the enemies of God. We know that the tomb is empty, that the promise has been fulfilled, that we are not abandoned or lost forever. We know this, yet do we believe?
The disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith in today’s Gospel. The Apostles are very real men in the sense that they seem extremely weak in comparison to the Lord who towers over everyone whenever we read or hear the Gospels. The passage ahead of this says that the disciples struggled to dispel a demon from a possessed person. So it seems natural for them to ask for more faith in order to perform more works. Jesus rebukes them for asking for more faith, as if it is only magic. We do not need more faith for the performance of works, but we need to live the faith which we have received from God towards the works He calls us to do.
Faith is not a feeling, nor is it a mere intellectual apprehension of reality. Faith is our assent to the truth which comes from God. We believe because it is true but also because God has given us the grace to believe. The small mustard seed of faith has already been planted within us, through our baptism. We must let it grow through His grace and through our works. Hence our Savior tells us to label ourselves as unprofitable servants who did what they were called to do. The response to faith is works: the living out of the truth and reality that there is one God, that Jesus is Lord, that the Church is the only means of salvation, that we are called to more than the glitter of the world and the wiles of the devil but that we are called to eternal life.
We may cry out like the prophet Habakkuk in the first reading, wondering where God is in these dark times, where it seems that everything is turned to evil and all seems but lost. Yet God assures the prophet when He declares, “The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.” Our task is not to give in to the despair and nihilism that washes over all, but to remain steadfast in faith, steadfast in the Lord. We must do the task God has given us and not grow slack or weary. We will be hated, we will be mocked, we will suffer in one form or another, but if we remain the servants of God, we shall live.
Dear brethren, do not lose heart at the chaos of the world. Do not struggle even when it seems that the smoke of Satan seeps into the Church, when clergy willingly abandon the faith to accommodate the age rather than proclaim the Gospel. We are not called to an age of ease but to the labor of salvation. God still speaks to us, and we must not harden our hearts either by joining the world or by despairing over how quiet God seems. As the last king of Narnia said before entering his last battle, “We are all in the paws of the true Aslan.” God is still in control.
St. Paul, writing near the end of his life, writes to his beloved Timothy, “bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.” Let us be strengthened for the battles that lie ahead. Let us live out the faith of the mustard seed which God has planted within us, to stand up for God, for truth, for goodness, and for beauty. Let us oppose all who make themselves the enemies of God with the weapons of prayer and charity. Let us turn also to the help of blessed Mary and all the saints, asking their continued support as we fight the good fight. May we continue to have faith in God, in the entire Trinity, in the one Church of Christ, that we may bear our share of hardships so that we may be worthy of the rest and the joy that awaits in eternal life.
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