Christmas-2012

Glory to God in the highest and PEACE to people of good will. We repeat this message of the angels  in our Gloria every Sunday except in Advent and lent. Peace is something every generation sought after. In fact every generation thought that their previous generation had more peace and less crimes, violence and wars.

Why is it that we don’t have peace within ourselves and between ourselves in spite of our celebrating the birth of the prince of peace year after year. ? Peace comes from forgiveness. You may have heard this saying:

If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer. But our greatest need was forgiveness, So God sent us a Saviour. Roy Lessin.

The primary mission of Jesus was to forgive sins. The angel said: You shall name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Therefore Peace flows from forgiveness. Right after the first sin, we see the rupture of peace between the first couple. Adam said: SHE gave me the fruit. They started to accuse each other.

Absence of peace is always the result of un-forgiveness. Un-forgiveness leads to bitterness, anger, grudge, and murder. So the cause of rupture of peace is the failure to deal with sin that is within ourselves.

Our public schools have been teaching children that evil does not reside in their souls and is therefore, by default, circumstantial. They teach evil does not reside in you, it is something outside of you. So, instead of fighting the evil inside, one is tempted to go and fight evil outside of oneself. This is what Adam Lanza did, by shooting the innocent children in New town, Ct. He thought evil resided in his mom and the children whom she spend most of her time with. So he decided to destroy them both. Even some of us may think the cause was: his psychology, his mother, the divorce. It’s something outside him, instead of looking at the real cause that was in him.

The London Daily Mail reported on Dec. 19 that a former classmate claimed Lanza “worshipped the devil and had an online page dedicated to Satan. And he played violent video games. He encouraged the evil take deep root in him by using to these evil practices. So, his psychological imbalance was only the secondary reasons. Not all people who have similar imbalances go shooting like he did.

So, what we have here is not a gun problem but a sin problem. Sin can only be handled by God. Only he can forgive our sins. Instead of inviting God into our life we turn God further away from our nation. And the further we drive Him out of our society, out of our schools and courts, and out of our media and out of our homes, or the more we give mere lip service to religion, the worse, things can get.

Our schools no longer teach the Ten Commandments, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled school prayer was unconstitutional in 1962. As long as the nation continues to “marginalize God” in its public life, the country can expect “more and more of these types of tragedies.”

We are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience and no self-control and no teaching of religious values. When we send our kids to games on Sundays without giving them a chance to attend the Church, you can expect them to behave weirdly.

The greatest wrong with the present generation is that they say there is no absolute good. They say they know and can decide for themselves what is good. This morning one young man came to me and during the course of the conversation he said: Even though I don’t fully believe the bible or in the Church, I am good. I said, who said you are good. What is the criterion to decide you are good. Is there any criterion by which you judged yourself as good ?  One young man came to Jesus and addressed him: Good teacher … Jesus reacted this way..why do you call me good..? Only God is good. It was not that Jesus was not good. It was not that he was not God.. but he wanted to tell him that everything is judged good or bad in reference to God. So away from God you can judge nothing to be good. The closer you are to divine values you are good. Even if some one who does not believe in God is said to be good, it is because he draws goodness from God without openly admitting it. Today’s generation says abortion is good, gay marriage is good. The pope said this week ‘there can be no peace with out dealing with abortion and gay marriage’. Because they stand contradicting to biblical values.

The Pope said the family in Western society is undergoing a "crisis that threatens it to its foundations," owing to false ideas of human nature that equate freedom with selfishness and present God-given sexual identities as a matter of individual choice to the profound detriment of humanity dignity.

It’s not accidental that there’s no room for the Christ-child at the inn. This rejection is a perennial attitude of the whole human race. We have to change that now as ‘there is no room for him in this country, except on the dollar bill which is also kind of being challenged.

Let’s remember the words of St.John: to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God.” Let’s respond to God’s call to holiness, let’s be the living residences of the Incarnate God; remembering that the more we push him out of our life, we become lost in our sin and left with peace-less life.