Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation

September 1, 2023

1 Thes 4:1-8, Ps 97, Mt 25:1-13

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.1.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* St. Paul reminds us in his first Letter to the Thessalonians today of our call to holiness, which is a call to the perfection of Christ-like love. This is what St. Paul earnestly asked and exhorted the new Christians there, the way they should conduct themselves to please God and follow the instructions he gave them through the Lord Jesus. The opposite of that call to sanctity, the opposite of God’s will for us to become holy as he is holy, St. Paul says immediately thereafter, is “porneia,” which the New American Bible weakly translates as “immorality,” but it’s the Greek work for all sexual sins from which we can easily see the derivation of the word pornography. Lust and the sexual immorality to which it leads turns us from unselfish self-givers in the image of Christ to takers or consumers of others, from those who sacrifice for the good of others, to those who sacrifice others for their own pleasure. Saint John Paul II taught in his theology of the body that unchastity totally changes the intentionality of a human being from a lover to a luster, something that we call to mind today on the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, since the selfish exploitation of our common home often flows from the utilitarian, non-reverential and indeed selfish way we often take advantage of the summit of creation, which is other human human beings. St. Paul reminds us of something we and our culture needs to remember: we cannot be saints and sexually immoral at the same time. The devil unsurprisingly tries to corrupt our having been made in the image and likeness of God by corroding our understanding of and approach to human love, because lust will impact at its root our receiving God’s love, our loving him back and our loving others. That’s why St. Paul later in the passage tells us that we need to behave differently from the Gentiles who don’t know God, that we should never take advantage of or exploit a brother or a sister, that we should take spouses not in lust but in “holiness and honor.” God calls us, he stresses,  “not to impurity but to holiness,” and “whoever disregards this disregards God himself.”

* For this to happen, we need, to hate porneia, to despise unchastity, out of love for God, ourselves and others. In Psalm 97 today, it says, “The Lord loves those who hate evil.” If we love evil, we can’t receive God’s unconditional love to the extent he wants to give it to us, because we block ourselves to it through the sinful worship of some idol. There are many false prophets today in the Church who basically want to baptize porneia, to pretend as if it’s not that important, and who treat sexual immorality as at most a venial sin if not treating it almost as quasi-sacramental “loving” activity. We see it in the way that many treat divorce and remarriage, as if a second union while the first spouse remains living is somehow not adulterous as Jesus himself clearly calls it. We see it in the way that many relate to sex outside of marriage, saying “everyone does it,” and pretend as if those who think it’s a serious sin are the ones with a problem. We see it in the way people think that the use of pornography or masturbation are totally mainstream, morally unproblematic and irrelevant to God’s plans for us. And we see it today in a particularly aggressive way in the treatment of same-sex sexual activit...