The first reading two Sundays ago ended with the Lord, represented by three celestial visitors, telling the elderly Abraham that he and his wife Sarah would have a baby. That passage was from chapter 18 of Genesis and ended at verse 10. Verse 12 shares how Sarah laughed at the baby announcement. That was not a very good idea by Sarah. The Lord turned to Abraham and asked, “Why did she laugh?” Sarah then got scared and said, “I didn’t laugh.” But the Lord answered, “Yes, you did laugh.”
This trinity of mysterious visitors were hardly joking about the baby, for they were in a solemn and serious mood. How could it have been otherwise? They were on their way to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
This Sunday’s passage begins at verse 20 of Genesis 18:
The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me.
There are four sins in the Bible that cry out to heaven for vengeance. One of them, sodomy, the sin of Sodom, is found five verses after the end of today’s reading. Genesis 19:5 begins an ugly and horrifying episode involving attempted rape. It ends with the angels telling Abraham’s nephew Lot to get out of town as quickly as possible before they destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Old Testament books Judges and Leviticus are very clear regarding the grave sin of unnatural sexual acts. And the New Testament letters Jude, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, and 2 Peter all reference the grave sin found in chapter 19 of Genesis. Today, however, this grave sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance is not only tolerated in our modern culture, but celebrated with pride. How did it come to this?
It all began with contraception. They told us it would be good for marriages, which was a total lie. Instead of delivering babies, it has delivered divorce, broken families, impoverished women and children, loneliness, and all types of sexual deviancy, including homosexual acts. That is what happens when the marriage act, designed for procreation within the confines of marriage, is turned into a sterile act for pleasure. This is why the Church, for 2000 years, has taught against the dangers of contraception. And this why Christ Himself made marriage a sacrament, a sacred bond between a man and a woman.
This Church teaching was reiterated during a time of cultural, sexual, and liturgical revolution in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (“On Human Life”), dated July 25, 1968. It states:
Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point—have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anticonceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion. (par. 17)
In St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he writes:
Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery . . . drunkenness . . . carousing . . . and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. (Gal. 5:19-21)
Fornication, impurity, and drunkenness are obvious sins of the flesh. But Paul places something in the midst of them that at first glance doesn’t seem to fit: sorcery. Sorcery involves black magic, spells, and potions, so why would this be in the middle of Paul’s list of sexual sins?
Paul’s letters, like the entire New Testament, were written in Greek. And the Greek word for sorcery in this list to the Galatians was pharmakeia, as in pharmacy or pharmaceutical. Bible scholars have long contended, with good reason, that the sorcery in question was artificial birth control, contraception.
So, contraception is not a cutting-edge, modern invention. It’s as old as the hills. Evidence of its practice dates back to least 2800 BC. Through the centuries, an array of concoctions or “potions” have been applied before or after the marital act, including things such as crocodile dung, acacia tips, giant fennel, myrrh, Queen Anne’s lace, willow, and pomegranate. If these precautions failed, then “Plan B” was enacted: exposure. A newborn child would be left to die by starvation or sold into slavery.
It’s interesting that presently the state of Missouri is suing Planned Parenthood, the huge abortion/contraception/transgender-affirming company. Missouri is suing Planned Parenthood for falsely claiming, among other things, that its chemical abortion pill is just as safe as Tylenol. Meanwhile, ten percent of the woman taking this pill have experienced brutally painful and life-threatening complications.
The “being sold into slavery” component is still present, too. It has been reported that the number of missing children who were trafficked across our southern border in recent years is now 450,000. Many of those children were dropped off at strip clubs and supermarket parking lots. But in a world that calls the killing of children in their mother’s wombs “healthcare,” it stands to reason that some parents will leave them to sexual slavery.
In 1930, the Anglican Church was the first to cave to worldly pressure regarding contraception. On March 22, 1931, the Washington Post wrote:
Carried to its logical conclusion, [contraception] . . . would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous.
In 1931, the then Fr. Fulton Sheen wrote about the Protestant surrender on contraception, writing:
Since a week ago last Saturday we can no longer expect them to defend the law of God. These (Protestant) sects will work out the very logic of their ways and in fifty or one hundred years there will be only the (Catholic) Church and paganism. We will be left to fight the battle alone—and we will. (Sheen, 1931, p. 143)
Bishop Sheen was of course correct. So many Protestant churches have all but been toppled by the enemies of Christ. Someone recently sent me the biography of the Planned Parenthood CEO in Kansas City, who is not a healthcare professional, but an activist lawyer. In her bio, she credits her father, a Presbyterian minister who served on Planned Parenthood’s board, for creating in her “a passion” for abortion. Toppled indeed.
My friends, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. And the rest of our sinful world will be turned to dust and ashes as well. It’s all going to get toppled, for this world was not made to last. Let’s get serious about that fact and keep knocking on Christ’s door.
Go knock on the door of the confessional. Christ is waiting for you there to tell Him that you are sorry for what you’ve done in the past, and that you will turn back to Him and keep His commandments. He is gently telling you to open the door to Him while you have time. That way when you depart this world and see Him face to face, He won’t say, “Why were you laughing at what I commanded you to do? It wasn’t a joke. It was serious and solemn business: your salvation. How could it have been otherwise?”
Image from Wikimedia Commons
