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It isn’t good enough.\u00a0 It isn’t good enough to just say you believe- assenting to some vague sense of belief in the trinity, and that Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, and promised those who believed all of that they, then they would inherit eternal life.\u00a0 Because this may be paying lip service to the consequences of what our faith teaches. \u00a0\u00a0And appearances don’t cut it either- looking like a Christian by just appearing to live as a Christian, coming to Mass each week; and associating with a Christian community like this one. \u00a0These are good things- but they aren’t sufficient, \u00a0because they don’t in and of themselves make us Christians.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
You see, as Moses says in the first reading on behalf of God the Father, we have to “Take these words of mine into your hearts and souls”.\u00a0 Into your hearts and souls!\u00a0 That means that we need to not just say we believe, or appear to believe, but me must understand what our faith teaches so that it becomes part of our innermost being.\u00a0 If we do that, then we will live our Faith, and that is the key, living our Faith- believing and understanding what we believe to such a depth that our hearts and minds respond to it by the way we lead our daily lives.\u00a0 That is what it means to be a Christian.\u00a0 And so, today’s scriptures, taken as a whole, require a whole lot more of us than just saying we believe or going through the appearances of a believer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now St. Paul says very clearly this morning that:\u00a0 “A person is justified by Faith apart from the law”. \u00a0So, Faith is what saves us, not observance of the law, but it has to be real faith.\u00a0 Faith is believing in what God has revealed to us, even if we can’t understand it all or reason it all out.\u00a0 Today’s society has embraced an intellectual attitude that says to believe in something, it has to be proven; there has to be scientific evidence of it.\u00a0 But again, Faith is accepting things we cannot prove- things like the incarnation and the trinity and even the existence of God, just don’t conform to our culture’s standard that requires scientific proof.\u00a0 And yet, through the whole body of scripture, and the tradition of the Church, we have been given our basic Nicene Creed on what we believe about God.\u00a0 This Creed is professed every Sunday right after the Homily.\u00a0 It is what all of us as Christians- even our Protestant brothers, \u00a0jointly profess as the basics of our religious belief.\u00a0 To be a Christian, we need to believe all of it, taking it on Faith.\u00a0 Why? Because over thousands of years of our Judeo Christian tradition, \u00a0\u00a0the Nicene Creed emerges as the essence of God’s revelation of His nature to us, and so we need to accept it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And we have been given the ten commandments on what God expects of us in terms of moral behavior.\u00a0 These have been augmented by Jesus’ teachings, particularly the Beatitudes.\u00a0 We need to accept these because they are direct revelations from our God.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now our culture teaches us, especially when we are college educated, to challenge everything.\u00a0 We are taught to be discerning, skeptical, and critical of what information is presented to us.\u00a0 We are taught to test everything, reason it out, and weigh all of the implications in arriving at truth.\u00a0 And our society preaches that things are relative; that it all depends on the circumstances and your perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And so, when we are confronted with something like our Catechism- which summarizes the teachings of the Church including the implications of what our faith teaches on the Creed and the 10 commandments and the beatitudes at the next level of detail- people tend to bristle at this level of detail and challenge it.\u00a0 Rather, our culture encourages a cafeteria type of “faith”, one in which we pick and choose what we reason to be acceptable from the Catechism, as if any of us individuals have the intellectual capacity to compete with the aggregate teaching authority of our Church. \u00a0\u00a0And this is done under the guise of going by our own consciences.\u00a0 I’ll have more to say about the conscience part in a minute.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so, there are folks who claim to be people of “Faith” who believe, for example, that Abortion is OK because they see other dimensions, other perspectives of the truth- like the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. \u00a0\u00a0But this is not a matter of personal opinion, it is a moral truth.\u00a0 And yes, there are moral absolutes, things are not relative.\u00a0 Abortion is not OK even in cases of rape and incest because of the circumstances; it is always inherently wrong because it takes an innocent life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That’s what the emphasis in today’s Gospel is trying to tell us.\u00a0 Moral relativism is like building your house on sand- because as an individual your house cannot handle relativism.\u00a0 You and I need bedrock to build our foundations on- absolute rights and wrongs- or else we will fall apart when we are confronted with all of the challenges.\u00a0 None of us has the wisdom and discernment of God.\u00a0 And so He has revealed his truth to us through scriptures and our aggregate tradition.so that we will know- will know what the truth is, and the Catechism is the truth, the bedrock foundation we all need.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Let me talk about conscience for a minute.\u00a0 We all must act according to our consciences, right.\u00a0 And in fact, the Catechism says that.\u00a0 But, the Catechism also says that our consciences need to be informed, fully informed.\u00a0 The formation of our consciences is not a secular responsibility.\u00a0 It is a responsibility that is associated with our belief system.\u00a0 You know, last December, our parish and the Diocese as a whole, launched a program called “Why Catholic”.\u00a0 “Why Catholic” is a walk over several years, through the Catechism.\u00a0 It is a way for you and I to become better informed as to what the Church teaches and why.\u00a0 It is a Catholic way to form your conscience.\u00a0 It is not too late to join one of these groups.\u00a0 We will be signing folks up for these groups again as we enter Lent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now when your Faith is strong, and you know what our church teaches, it will be written on your hearts and minds.\u00a0 And like all people of good will, you will live that faith with conviction, even when the going gets tough, because the overwhelming majority of us want to do the right thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
9th Sunday of Ordinary Time Dt 11: 18, 26-28, 32; Rom 3: 21-25, 28: Mt 7: 21-27 Dc. Larry Brockman It isn’t good enough.\u00a0 It isn’t good enough to just say you believe- assenting to some vague sense of belief in the trinity, and that Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}