On the way back from a week-long retreat this past Friday night, as a priest friend and I were driving up from the Atlanta airport, our conversation turned to the reality that religious faith is dying in much of the world, at least the nominally Christian world.  My friend put this sad fact in a way I have never heard before.  He said, “Imagine a world, so distant in time from the life of Jesus Christ, a world grown so old (and cold) in sin that it forgets that the Incarnation ever happened.”  No more Christmasses, no more Easter mornings greeted with the ringing of bells and the joyful, “Christus resurrexit!”  Feast days dropped from the calendar; fasts replaced with diet plans.  Could this be possible?  Our Lord Himself, while still on this earth, wondered the same thing: “And when I return,” He asked His followers, “will I find faith on the earth?”

     One of the prophets, too, warned God’s people that the Lord had said that His Spirit would not always strive with the hearts of men.  Imagine a world, having been visited by its very Creator, forgetting that Christ ever came, forgetting that there is anything higher and better than a few years of prospering on this earth, nothing lower than the grave; no hell to fear, no heaven to aspire to, to hope for.  Fyodor Dostoevsky has described such a world in his great and tragic novel The Brothers Karamazov, a world that acknowledges only the here-and-now, where bread – that is, food and pleasure – is the only and highest good, where few or none die of famine but more and more people succumb to boredom and perhaps suicide.  Imagine the awful possibility that the God who came in Person to show us the way, to proclaim an undying Kingdom above and beyond this world, to redeem us from our sins – imagine God shaking the dust from His feet in testimony against a world that has shunned Him!

     The great danger, as Dostoevsky warned in his novel, is the forgetting not of God per se – for we humans can make almost anything into a god and worship it – the danger is in forgetting Jesus Christ Who is the revelation of the one true God.  I wonder if this very thing is not happening.  I hear and read Catholics, for one example among so many, who speak and write of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as if it were something along the lines of a celebration of ourselves.  Yet our Lord, when He first instituted the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, said so clearly, so plainly, “Do this in memory – in memory – of me.”  Recently, while traveling I stopped off at a monastery, and during the tour of the newly built chapel, one of the monks explained the reason for the imageless environment – no crucifix even: so that we all might come up with our own image of God.  Ah, yes, the crucifix, that sign, that irritating and entrancing symbol of agony and self-giving, that awful reminder of the heavy claim that Christ has upon us.  Who would turn away from such an image of God, a God who willingly and lovingly offers up Himself for us, who does not abandon us to our waywardness in this world of His making, but rather comes after us, pursues us to His very death?  How can one forget that?  And yet it’s happening: forgetting Him for much less than thirty pieces of silver and settling for our own image of God – that is, whatever it is that makes us comfortable.

     Our own image of God… when Jesus Christ is, as St. Paul described Him in another epistle, the very image of the invisible God.  Christ is the infinite God of glory, power, majesty and righteousness made visible, made flesh of the Virgin Mary.  “That which was from the beginning,” wrote St. John, he who had suffered so much because of his untiring witness to Christ, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us”... Jesus Christ.

     It’s this theme that St. Paul is taking up in today’s second reading.  The apostle is reminding the Christians of the church of Ephesus that all their joy, all their hope, their redemption and salvation, the key to the meaning of everything, the source and end of their faith, the way, the truth and the life, God’s very means of choosing them – us – is and can only be Jesus Christ.  “In Christ,” Paul writes over and over again.  That is, in our union with Christ secured by God’s grace in baptism and the most holy Eucharist – in our union with the Savior we have “every spiritual blessing in the heavens.”  In Christ we are made God’s own children.  “In Christ and through his blood” – through His one sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, offered anew upon this altar – “we have been redeemed and our sins forgiven.”  In Christ, we were chosen, “predestined to praise [God’s] glory,” our lives turned around away from futility and meaninglessness and redirected toward the unending marvel of all that God has promised to those who do not – how on earth could we? – who do not forget His Son, but follow Him, stay in union with Him, so as to even suffer for Him and His Gospel, and rise with Him to eternal glory.

     Will God ever shake the dust from His feet in testimony against a world that rejects Him?  It is a question too terrible to think about much.  Meanwhile, let us shake the dust off our feet of everything that hinders us from relishing and growing in our union with Jesus Christ in His holy Church, especially now as we approach the altar and receive Him in Holy Communion.... communion with Him who said of the Eucharist, “Do this in memory of me.”