Intervention
Does God intervene in the happenings of the
world?
Does He intervene in the happenings of our
own individual lives?
Our Christian faith tells us that, Yes, He does.
So we make our prayers of petition.
Sometimes we’re amazed that, against
extreme odds, we do get the outcome we prayed for.
Other times it seems that God doesn’t even
listen.
No matter how hard how many of us pray, we
don’t get what we asked for.
Even something that seems to be universally
good, like peace in the world.
The disappointment, the feeling that we’re
not being heard, can be enough to shake our faith.
We can be tempted to join with the Deists.
They see God as the Great Creator, or the Prime
Mover, or the First Cause.
But they believe He has no continuing
interaction with His creation.
He set everything in motion, and let it go.
Today we have widespread secularism and a
disturbing level of anti-religion rhetoric.
Yet some people say that Christianity
should be recognized as the religion of America.
They say that’s what our country was
founded upon.
But in fact, Deism was the hot
philosophy/theology among some of the leading thinkers of the time.
There’s evidence that many founders,
including Jefferson and Franklin and Washington were Deists.
Or at least strongly influenced by Deism.
I think a lot of Americans today would
still identify with some aspects of Deism.
They see, by reason, that there must have
been a Prime Mover, a Creator, a First Cause.
They’re a step ahead of the atheists who
somehow reject even the idea of a First
Cause.
But, unlike the Christians, the Deists want
to operate by reason alone.
So, while reason tells them that there must
have been a Creator—by whatever name,
Reason can’t tell them much more about that
Creator.
And so, they feel distant from Him.
We Christians get our more detailed
knowledge of God from Revelation.
Revelations from Sacred Scripture, and
particularly those from Jesus himself.
Revelation that we have a God who loves us
and wants to interact with us.
A God who wants us to love him in return.
A God who does intervene in our world and
our lives.
The most dramatic intervention being his
sending his Son and his Spirit to us.
His coming to dwell among us and within us.
Todays, Scripture passages reveal a lot
about our God and His interventions.
If you remember your Holy Days of
Obligation,
We had the feast of the Immaculate
Conception on December 8th.
That conception where we say God intervened
in the usual course of things.
And at that instant when He created that
new soul, at that instant of new life,
God exempted that special child from the
taint of original sin.
From that universally human imperfection;
from that human tendency to sin.
Of course God could do that.
And, with the aid of scriptural revelation,
we reason that God would, and in fact
did, do that.
To prepare a pure, perfect host for his own
entry into the human world, in Jesus.
A host that had never been subject to sin,
not even inherited sin.
Here we are on September 8th, exactly
nine months after that Immaculate Conception.
So today, we celebrate the Feast of the
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the
Romans shows God’s personal involvement with each of us.
We are called according to a purpose that
God has for each of us.
God foreknew
each of us before we came to be—that’s how we came to be.
And his ultimate purpose is that we be
conformed to his Son, and justified and glorified.
Our Gospel passage reveals God again
intervening in our world.
And in individual lives—in this case, the
lives of Mary and Joseph.
Sending the Holy Spirit and Jesus to her,
and an angel to him.
Deists reject revelation, because it can’t
be confirmed by reason alone.
It gets into the messier area of faith.
Can what’s been revealed be proven through
human reason alone?—No.
Can what’s been revealed be disproven through human reason?—No.
And so we Christians carry on by reason and
by faith.
And with the personal help of God’s interventions.
Tuesday 23rd Week Ordinary Time
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