Can your faith overcome ISIS and Abortion?

“How long, O Lord, I cry for help and You do not listen.”  Have you ever experienced that in your life, where you cry out to God for His help and you feel like He is not listening to you?  You just scream and say “Come on, God, help me with this!”  I don’t know about you, but I have experienced that in my life.  There are times like that when we feel like God is not listening.   It takes every last ounce to cry out and scream to Him:  “God, why aren’t You doing anything?”

Look at the state of the world right now.  This was written by the Prophet Habakkuk long before Christ came into the world – and he is crying out. “Lord, I’m crying out, there’s violence and you don’t seem to be intervening. Why do you let me see ruin? Why must there be misery and my day’s destruction and violence are all before me? There’s strife and clamorous discord.”

When you think about it, don’t we see that in our world today? There is strife and violence.  There is clamorous discord and we wonder – “God, where are you?  Why aren’t you doing anything?”

Let’s dig a little deeper into this.  If you think about some of the things going on in our world today, you think about Isis and the terrorism that seems to just keep coming and coming.  And every time you think, there is another disaster!  You never know where the next one is going to happen, or what city it is going to happen in, or what part of the world it is going to happen in.

Today is Right to Life Sunday.  We think about the gravity and reality of how life just does not seem to hold the dignity that it ought to.  So far with Isis, there have been 1,200 people killed outside of Iraq and Syria.  There have been 1,200 murders so far by this terrorist attack.  How long will we continue to endure this?  How long is God going to let Isis continue to bring about terror in us?   By the way, it is not forever.  I will let you know.

Think about the reality of abortion that we face.  Just since yesterday when I was preparing for this homily, there were 2,907 abortions.  In the United States, since Roe vs. Wade was passed in 1980, there have been 59, 406, 940 abortions.  That is almost 60 million abortions in our country alone.  In the entire world, 1,430,110,161 abortions have been performed since I wrote this homily.  “How long, O Lord, will this violence continue?”

We hear about everything that is happening with Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.  After watching the Presidential Debate, one of the questions after the debate was, “Who won the debate?”  The comment was, “I’m not sure who won the Presidential Debate, but I’m sure of one thing:  the American people lost.”  “How long, O Lord, is this going to endure?”  I think that we have the tendency to want to put our hope in a leader, to want to put our faith in some establishment, but the reality is our faith comes from God.  The only one that is going to stop Isis is God.  The only one that is going to bring abortion to an end is God.  The only one that is going to stop all this clamor and this destruction, violence, discord, and strife in our world is God.

How much longer do we have to wait?  How long must we wait?  I love the end of the reading because He says to the Prophet Habbakuk – this is God speaking to him – and He says write this down.  I want this vision to be clearly written down upon tablets.  This is what we have here so that one can readily hear it.  For the vision has its time.  God’s vision does have its time.  It presses onto fulfillment.  God’s vision of peace on this Earth is pressing on right now to fulfillment.  It will not disappoint.  God will not disappoint us.  This peace that we all desire, this safety from oppression, this dignity for life that we all desire – it will be brought to fulfillment.  If it delays, wait for it.  It will surely come and it will not be late. The rash one has no integrity but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.

Ultimately, how do we bring an end to all of this?  How do we participate in bringing a dignity to life and an end of terror?  It is through our faith.  Jesus says, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree “be uprooted and thrown into the sea.”  I was thinking about that as I was watching the debate.  I thought, am I better off watching this or should I go into the chapel and pray?  I wish I would have gone into the chapel and prayed.  However, I felt like I needed to at least watch it to see what everyone else was seeing.  What if we had that faith?  What if we had that faith that God was going to protect us?  That God was going to bring about this end of terrorism?  That God will one day bring about the end to abortion?  We will look back and we will think. “Why as a country did we ever allow that?”  We will look back on it as we did in the absurdity of slavery.  Why did we ever think that was okay?  All we need is the faith of a mustard seed.

Jesus was saying to His disciples, “IF” you have the faith of a mustard seed!  He was saying you do not even have the faith of a mustard seed! If you at least have a little bit of faith, these things would happen.  I think He was speaking to all of us today, to the reality of our faith in God and what He can do is so little.  We hear about this in the opening prayer that if we have faith in Him, He can do things beyond what we could ever imagine or ever fathom.  Brothers and sisters that is why we are here today. We are here today to gather together as a community of faith.  We are here today on this feast of our namesake, St. Gabriel and the Archangels, with the great power and might that God has and is still doing in us and in this world.

I invite you to ultimately be patient.  To have hope, to not allow yourselves to get discouraged or disappointed.  If we think that God is delaying, just wait a little bit.  He is not delaying.  He will surely come.  He is never too late in His plan.  I invite everyone, especially in this time of discord in our world and of fear in our country, to have faith.  Never give up hope in God and ultimately realize that if we even have a tiny seed of faith, God can work wonders. It is your faith, ultimately, Christ working in you, your prayers, which will bring about the salvation of the world.