Saturday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090112.cfm

Blessed John XXIII
blesses the students
at Saint Meinrad Archabbey

Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise,and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong,and God chose the lowly and despised of the world,those who count for nothing,to reduce to nothing those who are something,so that no human being might boast before God.


It has been a long time since the Church or any part of the Christian movement could claim “the best and brightest minds of the time.” No Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo or Thomas Aquinas has raised our standing among the sophisticated elite as those men did in their time. The most influential thinkers of the 20th century were disinterested in God or religion. Freud, Marx and Einstein and others reshaped the world with their ideas but gave little credit to a deity.

To be sure, we’ve had many good leaders, men and women, but none to command respect among the intellectual elite. At times we wonder if God has abandoned us to fend for ourselves in a strange new world shaped by secular prophets.

But we’re still here, despite the hopeful predictions of the elite. Religion, like crabgrass, keeps popping up everywhere. Even Islam, which many suppose should have disappeared with the dinosaurs, is alive and well. If anything, the age of science has passed into “post-modernity” and left the world vulnerable to conspiracy theories, spiritualism, and gospels of feel-good prosperity. Atheists who believe the scientific method can discover all truth are a vanishing breed and will probably disappear long before Islam was supposed to. Although they still churn out their philosophical theories from their ivory towers as they are paid to do, not many are listening.

But without the brilliant minds, who will reframe the Gospel for the misled masses of today? Millions of people are like sheep without a shepherd; they lap up faux gospels of prosperity and wellness and shun the orthodox traditions of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and mainline Protestantism. They pick and choose religious ideas and symbols from every alien religion, and create gods from Hollywood comic books. They ignore the dark night of Original Sin even as they fantasize about Dark Knights in Gotham City. In the long run their madmen buy semi-automatic weapons and grasp fifteen minutes of fame, a dubious moment of "freedom" .

I Maccabees tells how Judas Maccabees and his rebels drove the gentile invaders out of Jerusalem and set about purifying the Temple:

They deliberated what to do about the altar of burnt-offering, which had been profaned. And they thought it best to tear it down, so that it would not be a lasting shame to them that the Gentiles had defiled it. So they tore down the altar, and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.

Until a "prophet" of extraordinary brilliance arises who can preach the Gospel to the elite and find a hearing among them, you and I live by light we are given. We try as best we can to discern right from wrong, when to tolerate and when to judge, when to embrace and when to shun, when to commiserate and when to shame, when to speak and when to be silent, when to argue and when to agree -- and so forth. We have only nibbled at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and can only hope to know the difference. But our faith in God still makes us shine like sparks through stubble, and for that we are grateful.