The Sunday Sermon Archive

Dear Friend,

The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is presented to us today to honor and love, but also for us to learn and imitate. The Bible, the Lives of the Saints, and spiritual works are for our instruction and imitation more than our entertainment. Sadly, we too often read or hear spiritual things, only to conclude: "This is nice." Then, we return to living the same as before.

Today, more than ever before, we need the example and guidance of the Holy Family. All social order and progress are built upon the foundation of the family. Sadly, we look around the world and see the collapse of a lot of our social order, and we wonder why or how did this happen? We look for various programs or agencies to ameliorate the various malaise of our society and its citizens. These are simply "band-aid" approaches to the problems.

For example, we have "influencers" who tell us that guns are the problem. If we simply get rid of all the guns, we will be much better off. The anti-gun influencers mock those who desire to remove perversion and pornography from children's libraries. They tell us that books don't kill children, but guns do.

While I do agree that there is a problem with children using guns to kill others, it seems that guns are not the root problem here. While exposing children to evil literature is a greater problem, this is only scratching the surface of our societal problems as well. We should understand that evil literature is bad for everyone, not just children.

We need to find out why people (children and adults) feel drawn to bad literature or misuse of firearms. There is something more elemental that we are overlooking. There is a void in the lives of many children and adults. A void that they are desperately trying to fill, but they are looking in all the wrong directions.

We trace most of our societal problems back to the lack of virtuous family life. There has been a direct attack upon the family and family values for several generations. Wars (especially the "great" ones) sent men to foreign shores and wives and mothers out of the homes and into factories and the workforce. Very soon after this, we see the development of a false "feminism" movement to actually destroy womanhood and motherhood. Vanity then demanded a two-family income. This leaves children wards of the state to train and educate in public or controlled private schools. We then found the necessity of "legalizing" divorce, developing anti-conception drugs and mechanisms. Usually, these moves are made possible by our fallen nature's desire to be free and independent. "We will wait until the time is right to have children. When we can afford them." The time is never right, but then "accidents" happen, and unborn babies must be killed so that they will not interfere with our vain worldly goals and aspirations. This attack is then compounded with promoting "alternative" homosexual lifestyles and transgenderism.

Now we must look far and wide to find two-parent homes, and even harder to find biologically correct (Natural / Divinely ordered) family structures with a husband and wife/father and mother relationship. When we see these, it is even rarer to find that the family can survive on the financial income of one parent (ideally, the father). And dare we seek to find a family that lives modestly on a single income and takes seriously and in their own hands their Divinely mandated obligation of educating and training their children? Oh, and not just educating them for this world, but for Heaven?

When children are not seen as persons made in the image and likeness of God destined for Heaven, they are unwanted, unloved, and most often become self-centered (like their parents), entitled, demanding, without any moral restraint or boundaries. This situation engenders the constant seeking for pleasure rather than true happiness. The devils lead them to risqué, unhealthy, dangerous pleasures that prove detrimental to themselves, their family (if this can even be called a family), their neighbors, and all levels of society. With the state controlling their education, they receive a pagan, hedonistic outlook — enough information to get them into trouble. Every aspect of their instruction seems devoid of any moral or even ethical principles. The extent of their ethics is just enough to keep them "controlled" in a classroom. Seldom, if ever, do the teachers lift their students' minds to the spiritual realm, and even much less to thoughts of Heaven, Hell, God, Angels, and Devils.

As we begin this New Year, let us make the resolution of looking to the Holy Family as the Ideal to be learned from, memorized, copied, and imitated in our own lives. Their poverty, humility, simplicity, and holiness are not things to be despised but are virtues to be eagerly sought after. The wealth, luxury, self-indulgence, and sin that the world entices us with needs to be abhorred and despised for what it is — a demonic attack upon God's design and image as it is reflected in true families — in The Holy Family.

email: father@friarsminor.org Franciscan Benefactor Seraph Subscription Vocations Have you remembered God?

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