Morally Lazy - Homily 24th Sunday OT-C

(Readings)

Society is morally lazy It accepts sinfulness as normal in the world.

Deacons often have to help prepare couples for marriage. One thing marriage prep reveals is most couples are already living together.

Recently a couple came for marriage prep wanting a full mass for their wedding. The reason they wanted a full mass was because their faith was important to them. Their faith was important; but, they lived together.

I explained the first thing to do was stop living together and go to confession. It was like I asked them to sin instead of asking them to stop sinning.

I reasoned one of them could get an apartment or live with parents or stay with friends until after the wedding.

They had excuses. We can’t afford it. We’ve lived together for years, my parents live too far away. Everyone would think something was wrong in our relationship if we moved apart.

Moral laziness is when it is easier for us to sin than to do what is right. It is seeing sin and accepting it.

That is what we find in the First Reading. The Israelites have just been freed from slavery in Egypt by all the miracles that God did for them. Instead of giving thanks to God, they collected their gold and precious metals to melt and mold into a golden calf and declared it their God.

God saw and said they were depraved.

They had become morally lazy and God was angry. He said to Moses – These people are hopeless (a stiff necked people.) I will destroy them and make you a great nation.

Moses begged God for mercy.

God was merciful. But, God wanted Moses to be merciful. If you don’t see the sinfulness in what others are doing, you can’t be merciful. If you can’t see the wrong, you too have become depraved; morally lazy.

If Moses didn’t see anything wrong with the way the people were acting, then Moses would have been morally lazy as well; but, he was not.  

Moses does not try to excuse the Israelites behavior. He doesn’t try to accept it as not being sinful.

Moses was merciful. Moses begged God to forgive them because of who and what the Israelites once were: God remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were your servants; pleasing to you!

For the sake of what the Israelite people were in the past, have mercy on them. Moses was pleading with the LORD, these people were good and they can change to be good again.

And, God was merciful.

The Second Reading is about mercy too. Paul explains that he once was a persecutor of Christ’s people and God’s had mercy to him. He doesn’t make excuse for his once evil ways. That would have made him morally lazy.

Instead, Paul says despite all his sins; God had mercy on him anyway, because God saw the man Paul could become.

For the sake of the man Paul would be, God had mercy on him.

Society has become morally lazy. We live in this society where we are like the loss sheep or the wayward son. We wander off because we think a life of moral laziness or a life of dissipation is what we really want.

We’ve all been to that place. I’ve been there at one time in my life.  

But ignoring the wrong in the world around us is laziness, too. When you look at family or friends or even the leaders in our community and the world, see clearly the truth of sinfulness and immorality for what it is.

We live in a world where society no longer respects life or cares for the poorest of the poor or has mercy for others and forgives. If we don't recognize this we are morally lazy. 

Then there are those who are morally lazy like the faithful son. He did not have mercy and forgive.

It is why we need the message of our readings. God is merciful. No matter how far we wander from him by our sin and laziness, through Christ we are forgiven and able to return to his open arms.

Sin does not make the person. Love does.

A person is made of who they were in the past, an innocent child a mother loved. A person is made of who they can become. Like Paul, we can become glorious in the love of Christ.

Lord, have mercy on all of us. Each of us, have mercy for the rest of us. Have mercy for the person we were and can still be.

Be good be holy and preach the gospel by the way you live and love one another. Amen.