How Our Nation Turned Its Back On God's Commandments Series

Homily for Monday of 13th week in Course

Gen 18; Mt 8:18-22

Have you ever wondered how Sodom and Gomorrah got to be the way they were in the time of Abraham and Lot? In their day gangs of violent homosexuals roamed the city night after night, invading the homes of law-abiding citizens, plundering, assaulting and violating the common laws of decency. When the angels of God visited the city, only Lot and his family were found to be upright, hospitable to strangers, worthy of salvation.

No city, no nation, no culture deliberately sets out to become a society of depraved criminals, to be forever remembered as abhorrent, to give its name to an unspeakable sin. But we who have lived through the past fifty years perhaps can guess how it is that Sodom and Gomorrah slid little by little into a culture of death. The first step was simple–the sin of self-abuse was gradually accepted as normal; since most young people experimented with sex, it couldn’t be wrong. By accepting evil as good, they began the slow confusion of their moral sense. If sex is primarily a vehicle for pleasure, then let young couples experiment with each other. Even in the days of the patriarchs there were primitive herbal contraceptives. Young love! Let them enjoy their youth. Of course, no technical fix for sin is 100% effective, so let’s eliminate the unwanted child. Thus abortion and infanticide crept into the culture. In time, what was optional became required–every firstborn had to be sacrificed to the insatiable god of death. They’re just potential human life anyway. And, anyway, you can always have another. So they imagined, anyway.

But, to be fair, we have to treat everyone equally. If two young men wanted to play around with sex, how can we refuse them that right? Or women, or children. And because the deepest conscience cries out against these injustices, we silence any voice in society that dares speak up in defense of truth and purity. They enforced a tolerance throughout society of any injustice, any perversion. People like Lot had to be driven out if they could not be cowed into silence.

I’ve been talking about Sodom and Gomorrah, but for the last half century our Western Society has been becoming Sodom and Gomorrah. The Supreme Court decreed that no one could make contraception illegal, and we all went along. Soon college campuses became centers of fornication. The Supreme Court decreed that this right of privacy extended to murdering a child in her mother’s womb, and most people nodded and went along. A few of us woke up at that point and began to speak against the crime. In time, some jurisdictions began to legalize killing grandma for the inheritance. Oh, I’m sorry, it was to relieve her pain. And, more lately, the Supreme Court screwed up its indignation once again and declared that sodomy is just fine. Please note that the first thing it did was release from prison a man convicted of sodomizing a fourteen year old boy. Statutory rape is about to be legalized. And not too many years ago old SCOTUS told us that mutual sexual abuse can now be judged equivalent to the marriage between one man and one woman.

I’m quite certain that Jesus’s words “some demons can only be driven out by prayer and fasting” are appropriate here. We need to pray that Western society repent and return to the natural law before the law of natural consequences brings some horrible disaster upon us. Jesus is calling us to follow Him, all the way to Calvary if needed. He told the man in today’s Gospel to stop temporizing and making excuses and just do it. So let’s slough off the unnecessary and just do it.