Suppose You Show Up At The Banquet With No Oil?

Thirty-Second Sunday in Course 2023

Every human being yearns for true happiness. The problem with us as we grow up, however, is that our earliest experiences even before birth start us off in life as materialists. After conception, we are either growing or we are dying, so we are nutrition hogs; under certain conditions, we will deprive our mothers of material from their own bodies in order to use them building our own. As infants, we are only concerned–and we show that by bawling loudly–about material things like wet diapers, growling tummies, and deficient stimulation. Our parents, therefore, to sensitize us to more important things like worshiping God, have to consciously sing hymns to us, even before birth, pray with us even before we can talk ourselves, and take us to church. Otherwise we reach adolescence and adulthood totally unaware of our ultimate end. The psalmist here identified that end, that ultimate happiness, with the vision of God. In worship, this was a guy who felt like he was “feasting as with marrow and fat.” But he realized that his experience went way beyond what he could sense with his material senses. The experience of God is transcendent, in a sense more real than anything we’ve felt or smelled or seen. It is an experience of ultimate goodness, awesome beauty, and absolute truth. As the Wisdom writings tell us, such wisdom requires a patient search.

And such experiences are often too transient, and hard to explain. St. Paul reckons them to be like a reunion with Christ, soaring above the earth to a choir of trumpets. Matthew tells us that the union with Christ is like a wedding banquet, which only those found worthy–with the costly oil of holiness–are admitted to. Attaining such a state requires our constant effort, our daily attention to prayer–yes contemplative prayer–and loving work for our neighbor.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to a news bulletin that chilled my blood. The voters of Ohio had approved a constitutional amendment that permits what the promoters call “reproductive freedom.” Right down at the bottom of the list of so-called “rights” now encouraged by a law that the Ohio legislature cannot change is “abortion.” This means that it is perfectly legal to murder a human being while in the womb of his/her mother from conception all the way until birth. And you can bet that the taxpayers of Ohio will, sooner rather than later, have to pay for these legal murders, even while the baby is about to be born. A young woman can at the age of thirteen or fourteen request death for her pre-born infant, and the killer doesn’t even have to notify her parents. Already the abortion loving lobby is writing bills to remove any parental involvement from the decision. What my wife did for our teenage daughter–tell her doctor to stuff the suggestion of aborting our first grandson–would be illegal in Ohio. My wife would go to jail, and probably I would, too.

How does this connect with the Word of God we just heard? Performing, promoting or supporting abortion–child murder–is the kind of thing a materialist would do. It denies that all human beings have the right to life given by God, who makes us in His image and likeness, and guaranteed not just by the Declaration of Independence, but by a stronger document called the Ten Commandments.

So let’s consider a hypothetical nation with two hypothetical political parties, Red and Blue. It’s a hypothetical nation and hypothetical parties so I’m not accused of being political in the pulpit.

The red party supports the natural law as given in the Commandments, and confirms the right to life of all humans from conception to natural death. They run on that platform, which also confirms things like national independence, a strong economy, lower taxes and regulation, secure borders and small government regulated by the principle of subsidiarity. The blue party denies the right to life of certain people, especially before birth, and–being in control as the election begins–spends more money than it collects, passes high taxes, heavily regulates industry and opens up the national border to all comers. Their policies are very unpopular. But they look at the Ohio results from last week and decide that people all over the country want abortion for all nine months of pregnancy, paid for by the taxation of everyone.

So at the election, that’s all they run on, because they believe the availability of child murder will surpass every other issue in the minds of voters. That is, they run on a platform of doing evil and making everyone agree with supporting that evil.

I pray–and invite you to pray with me–that no party at any time in history ever try to do this, thus denying the sovereignty of God over life, and especially that such a hypothetical party never wins. I believe that would be a national uprising against God and God’s law, and a thumbing of the collective nose against Him, who really wants to be merciful to the merciful. It would be terrifying to face or even contemplate the wrath such an outcome would invite. Don’t show up at the heavenly wedding banquet with no oil in the lamp.