Order

The Kingdom of God is not disordered. It is good and right and well-regulated. Certainly, the Kingdom of God is not disorderly. This is the point of the War in Heaven. Disorderly angels have been expelled. Their plenary congregation, so far beneath Heaven's incommensurable goodness, is known as Pandemonium, meaning "all demons," but, of course, also "chaos."

Here is the fundamental boundary drawn across each human character: well-regulated order versus destructive chaos, goodness versus evil. I do not say the we become evil creatures (though this can happen, as a demon completely takes over our souls by our assent). I say that we have compromised and permitted evil to dwell in us where it gets a foothold.

Here also is the great bulwark represented by the Creation. The barren universe .... lifeless stones spinning in a void, I say the barren universe around us tends always toward disorder. Sir Isaac Newton's physics revealed that every random event contributes to the disorder of the universe, ever tending towards chaos. Chaos invades our everyday lives everywhere. How well we know on the farm! Garden hoses tangle, long lengths of rope without exception become intractable bundles, iron rusts and disintegrates, wood rots however much we strive to preserve it. And, of greatest interest, we all must decline and fall apart.

Imposing order upon chaos, even fashioning an intricately ordered Creation from it, is a primary attribute of God. We hear it echoing through the Scriptures: YHWH tames the sea monster Leviathan. The unruly sea was the symbol par excellence of chaos in the ancient world. The Son of God, the Logos, masters the waves and the winds. God, and God alone, is the source and guarantor of orderliness. We seek to be covered beneath His wing. He alone is the rock, the sure defense, against universal mayhem as the universe — including our homes, our families, our towns, our cities, our transportation systems, our infrastructures everywhere — all deteriorate back into the void from which all things began, rotting along the way.

When we speak of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, so often we focus on three days, beginning with His arrest and concluding with His awful Crucifixion. But, in fact, His passion began from the moment of His conception as He voluntarily submitted to suffering, setting aside His splendid state of unbounded Divinity in order to enter the horrible confinement of our humanity. We use the word κένωσις / kenósis following St. Paul (Phil 2:7) saying that God emptied Himself.

Have you ever departed from your clean, orderly, and well-provisioned home enter true squalor? Have you been in the fourth world, where little children must compete with stubborn pigs to feed on garbage along a beach? (Most assuredly, this summons vivid pictures in the minds of the Sisters who lived in such a world.)

Have you seen inner-city housing projects where garbage is thrown into the building's central courtyard, layer after layer ascending stories upward toward light refracting through a haze of methane gas, riddled through with tunneling rats? If you have, then you have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding God's journey from the courts of Heaven descending down into our world of rebellion, unruly passions, treachery, egos run amok, and general chaos. For Heaven's perfect goodness and well-regulated order are far, far away in every sense from our life of our cities, which is a distillation of the human spirit.

Am I being unfair? Have I spoken amiss? Do we still see America as a collection of God-loving families, Boy Scout troops saluting the flag, children learning their prayers, and mothers and fathers who are faithful to each other? O yes! This world did exist!

Roughly half all marriages will end in divorce. Ten million people age twelve and older are hooked on opioids. (How many twelve-year-olds are hooked!) According to a recent study of Christianity in the U.S., 40% of all married pastors have had sexual relations with congregation members. (Nearly half!) More than a third of all pastors say they cannot stop using pornography. Sixty percent of all Roman Catholic priests pursue the homosexual lifestyle with its mania spilling over onto millions of boys, whose traumas have changed them forever.

Do not be fooled by assurances of reform. When figures like Wilton Gregory, a foremost (though behind-the-scenes) activist for this lifestyle, is appointed archbishop to the most important see in the United States, there is nothing left to say.

Yes, even the hallowed sanctuary of the Church, once thought to be a refuge from the fever of the world, has become a dangerous place. For years Boston Magazine's "Best in Boston" issue selected the Jesuit Urban Center as "Best Spot for Cruising" .... now collapsed under the weight of its notoriety. You see, people stopped contributing.

The goodly flocks of the Lord, alas, are dominated by wolves: sheer pandemonium.

No. I do not exaggerate. And it is unseemly, rising to the level of moral crime, to remain silent. For silence implies assent. "Well, Father, you've made this point!" I hear people say. "Yes, but I hear no replies. I see no response." Certainly I have staked my whole life to doing the right thing .... at great cost.

Still today, the faithful see what they want to see. It is inconvenient to do otherwise. And they fix their gaze on the imperative to forgive forgetting that forgiveness proceeds only from regret and a sincere petition to be forgiven. How many times must I forgive the one who begs my forgiveness? Indefinitely. There is no limit set on forgiveness.

As for those who no interest in receiving your forgiveness, please do not precede them affirming their sin and their lifestyles at every turn in the road. For in circumstances of insolence or rebellion, the Lord counsels a very different course: depart and shake the dust of that place off of you! This is not a suggestion. This is a Divine command. We hear and obey.

If they do not hear your words. To hear the words of God is to obey the words of God.

For we are able to clear our vision. We are are able "to right the ship" with a simple remedy, practiced every day. It is easy to do. I commend it. It has become my constant habit. Acknowledge your guardian angels. Speak to your guardian angel. Consult your guardian angel. Include your guardian angel in every important conversation and decision and prayer. Address your angel directly: "Dear Friend," "Beloved Angel," "Blessed Presence." "Gracious one." Your guardian angel will receive those addresses with pleasure.

Guardian angels come to us not through fairy tales (however sentimentalized they are in nineteenth-century popular art). It is God Who has granted us this lifelong relationship at our baptism. "It is not good for man to be alone," God had said from the beginning. And so we are given a greatest gift: loyal friendship, a wise guide, loving devotion. And in this friendship, we see the world through the more prudent, the more knowledgeable, the more experienced, and, of course, the wiser eyes of our angelic friend. By virtue of this, we see things as God would see them. For Jesus has taught that even children enjoy high dignity (an alien idea in the ancient world) on account of their guardian angels:

Now here is a friend!

Here we find ourselves indeed among well-regulated society — among angels, archangels, and all the company of Heaven. Consider the Kingdom of Heaven, where God says "Come," and we come, and He says "Go," and we go gladly, and He says "Do this," and we do it with a sense of privilege.

Surely, if the rough and tumble of army life can achieve this level of orderliness, then perhaps it is not too much for God to expect the same from the ones who call themselves Christian. Our God famously is a calling God, but I wonder how many of us will take His call when they see it come in on Caller-ID.

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A centurion greets the Lord Jesus, approaching Him with the reverence due any great lord. He brings a petition before Him. Would the Lord Jesus turn his healing attention toward the centurion's home, where his servant was suffering. The centurion knows orderliness. He has men under his command — eighty legionaries or 480 if he is a senior centurion. He beholds the vast orderliness of the Roman world, where lines of command touch every Roman soldier and citizen, all tracing back into the hand of Caesar. He can only begin to imagine the most perfect order of God's Empire. He understands that it is only for God to speak the word, and it will be done.

We who have read the Holy Scriptures are able to share the centurion's mind. In an early Latin translation of Genesis we read:

That is, the act of speech is one and the same with the action it commands. This is the sum of its reality: to be spoken is to be accomplished.

The young Mary participates in this perfection of order with her famous words

The saying is the doing.

But is this the state of our minds? Is this the state of our hearts, famously quarrelsome? Do we even notice when Divine appointments appear before us as most assuredly they do? My experience teaches me that we trip over them everywhere we go.

Why are we so distracted .... to the point where we could even doubt the presence of God and His angels? This is a deadly kind of lethargy and trance.

Our Gospel lesson this morning depicts the Lord tirelessly pressing on in His service of humility and presence. He will not be pushed back or discouraged. But surely He does notice. He does notice when His love is poured out so abundantly .... but rarely taken note of .... much less requited.

Let us awaken from the world! Let us set our lives in good order! Let us take our place among the ranks of saints, angels, yes, and Roman centurions. And let us say, "Lord I am not worthy that shouldst come under my roof .... but only speak the word," and it will be done as you have said.

We love this idea when the subject is our benefit, but do we also love this idea when the subject is His command in our lives? "It will be done as you have said!"

And let us also, who are called to be the Lord's disciples, follow the example of our Most Holy Mother: "Be it unto me according to Thy word" .... never counting the cost.

Whether the example be St. Joseph of Nazareth or the Lord Himself, the imposing paradigms of Christian life all tell the same story. When God calls, when God makes our responsibilities clear, we must say, "Here I am, Lord! Send me!" We must understand that our lives will be changed, that our plans never really mattered in the first place. For only through God's plan and will can we attain to peace and fulfillment. He knows the way. We do not. He is to be trusted.

I recently shared the story of the young unmarried couple who came to me for counseling, who said, "But look at your life with your five university degrees and your Ivy League training! Your life is an example of being the master of your fate!" I replied, "Every significant thing I ever planned never came to be, and every significant thing that came to be, I never planned. I trusted Him, and He blessed me. He opened the way ahead for me." My intention was to make one point with them: that the abortion they contemplated would not make them the masters of their fate, but rather the opposite: to be cut off from God Who alone is the way ahead .... and the truth and the life. Trust Him.

All else, beside Him, is delusion and madness deteriorating back into the void from which it came. No one can stop this deterioration. No force on earth. No one can tame pandemonium.

By contrast, in the Heavenly courts, we discover courtesy. Amongst God's graces, we discover graciousness. Near to Divinity, we discover the Divine. With gentleman and gentle ladies, we discover gentle life. These are the qualities of God's bulwark against a bumptious and gritty world. These are the attributes of God, Who sent His Son into the world to shepherd us home. As the Father declared on the Mount of Transfiguration: "Hear Him!" "Listen to Him!"

May we all do so .... according to His word.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.