#catholic #sermon

• Superbowl billboard during halftime show: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love”. Comment on Twitter that got four million views: “Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person”.
• But the halftime performer Bad Bunny was singing songs that were completely sensual and debased, and calling it love, while the dancers were cavorting in a perverse way on the stage.
• What we have here is a debate about the meaning of love. Both sides agree that love is good. But they disagree on what love is. One side believes that love is pleasure; the other side believes that love is sacrifice.
  • Those who believe that love is pleasure think that any enjoyment that any two people have with one another is good, as long as there is mutual consent.
  • They believe that all forms of pleasure should be tolerated and celebrated, just because of the fact that they provide pleasure.
  • They believe that all those who criticize the idea that “love is pleasure” are engaging in hate because they say that such people are opposed to love.
• St. Augustine famously described these two competing ideas on love in his master work The City of God: “Two loves have built two cities: the love of self even to the despising of God, the city of the earth; the love of God even to the despising of self, the city of God. One glorifies itself in self, and the other in the Lord.”
• There is a famous Catholic manual on the spiritual life and it lays down two important principles on this topic of love that help guide us. (Tanquerey, par. 310-311)
• The first principle is that the essence of your perfection is charity. What this means is the primary thing that indicates your worth as a human being, your goodness, your value in the eyes of God, is your level of true love, the Catholic idea of love.
• We know that Our Lord confirms this in the Gospel when He says that the way we obtain everlasting life is by fulfilling to two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor.
• This is what St. Paul confirms in today’s epistle wherein he seeks to prove that charity is the greatest of the virtues. He excludes the false notion of love when he says, “Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, is not pretentious, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked; thinks no evil, does not rejoice over wickedness, but rejoices with the truth.”
• Then he goes on to say that charity is the essence of our perfection by explaining that charity is the virtue that remains when we are in our perfect state, while faith and hope go away. “There remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”. That is where our perfection lies.
• The reason why our perfection lies in charity is that supernatural charity unites us directly to God. There is nothing that unites us more to God that true supernatural charity. But our whole perfection is in uniting ourselves with God. That is what makes us perfect.
• The second principle that we must understand about love is that love requires sacrifice. We do not subscribe to this false notion of love wherein love consists in giving yourself pleasure, wherein using another person for your enjoyment is considered our perfection.