Timothy Birdnow

A little Sunday sermon.

I fear our religious leaders - especially Catholic leaders - are myopic and feckless. Case in point:

This morning I was under the weather so did not go to morning mass. Instead I watched it on television. The priest read the Gospel - the story Jesus told about Lazarus the beggar and the rich man. As you may remember Lazarus was destitute and lived on the streets, hanging around outside of the rich mans' home in the hopes of getting some wasted food from the trash. He died and was taken to "Abraham's bosom" aka paradise (NOT Heaven as Jesus had yet to open that to people). When the rich man died he was in Hell, suffering terribly. He asked Abraham to send Lazarus down with some water on his finger to cool his mouth and Abraham said no because there was a "great chasm" between paradise and Hell.

Now this priest gave his homily and missed the whole point of this.

First he talked about how young people are so upset by the divide in our society and wanted to fix it but didn't know what to do. (He was intimating that Jesus was the answer.) Well DUH! If Humanity knew how to fix the divide in our society don't these dumb kids think someone would have done so by now? And one must ask if this divide SHOULD be fixed, as it is about fundamental worldviews and the destiny of us all. In fact, it's about more than that; it is the war between good and evil, God and Satan and his followers (including people). It is a divide both uncrossable and one that shouldn't BE crossed.

Doubt that? I'm pretty sure the priest would. But what does the Bible say on this?

Jesus Himself never promised peace and unity. On the contrary, he warned "I have not come to bring peace but the sword" in Matthew 10: 34-36. He knew His coming was not going to cool things down but lead to open hostility and war between His followers and the followers of the Evil One - the rest of the world.

In Luke 12:52 Jesus says:

" For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

If Jesus wanted harmony and unity He would not have warned of this.

And of course the Book of Genesis speaks of Babel, where the King Nimrod sought to unify all the people of the world and they were smitten with a divergence of languages.

The fact is God does not want us to be one big happy family. That is because the Devil rules this world, and many seek friendship with the world. There can be no peace as longa s that is the case.

Nor should there be. Christians are all soldiers in a war between God and Satan, good and evil. We stand on one side. The world stands with El Diablo on the other. The world seeks unity because it is in the nature of evil to coalesce under a specific banner, ultimately under the banner of Satan. Evil sows division, don't get me wrong, but they do it as an attack on the enemy, namely, Christ and His Church NOT on their own. Jesus said " a kingdom divided cannot stand" when accused of invoking Satan to perform miracles. It's clear the world seeks unity among their own members.

We seek unity under Christ.

But even there it's not absolute. Jesus rebuked His disciples when they made some people not of their company stop casting out demons. He didn't care about unity so much as right thinking and right behavior.

The quest for unity is primarily a ruse, a ruse to seduce people into jumping on the worldly bandwagon.

This pastor seemed clueless to all of this. He clearly thought unity was a good thing. It's not.

The dichotomous split between worldly and Godly has given us the great divide between left and right we have had for centuries, and it isn't going away. When it does so then will come the end.

It is this foolish pursuit of "unity" and good feelings that leads the Church into endless compromise, and it is why we have seen our moral code degrade and the pews empty as the Church has become nothing but a hollowed-out shell. There is no longer a spiritual core. The Church is now about good feelings and simple-minded platitudes.

In the Book of Revelation Jesus addresses the different Churches, which represent different ages. He comes lastly to the Church of Laodecia. Laodecia was famous for it's water springs, and there were two types - hot and cold. People came from all over to drink that water, which was full of minerals and quite healthy. It was delicious hot or cold. But if it became tepid, it tasted awful. Jesus warned the Church there that they would become tepid, and that as a result He would "spew you out of my mouth". Laodecia was a church which practiced only superficiality. There was no real core, no real hot center. It was dancing along with the rest. And so Jesus had no use for it whatsoever. And this was a prophecy, not just against that particular church but against the last age. The Church of the endtimes would be lukewarm. It would taste terrible because it would have nothing to offer except easy platitudes and outstretched arms to the world. It will have forgotten the whole purpose of Christ and His mission to save souls.

Unity should not be our goal. There is far more important work for God's Church then sucking up to a bunch of lost souls and telling them it's o.k. to be lost.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 975 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Very good, Monsignor Birdnow. But can't we just all get along?  

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at September 25, 2022 09:00 PM (GIKgf)

2 Sadly Dana that is not for this world. We gave that up when Eve bit into that apple.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at September 26, 2022 07:17 AM (wFp8l)

3 I fear our religious leaders - especially Catholic leaders - are myopic and feckless. Case in point:

Posted by: Breitling Replica at June 02, 2023 08:43 AM (SUYyh)

Hide Comments | Add Comment