The Wages of Sin

This past week the liturgical calendar called for reading chapters 6 thru 8 of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans on the subject of sin and redemption.  Like every human person, St. Paul struggled with sin:

“I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh.
The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.
For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.
For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,
but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind,
taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Miserable one that I am!  Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” (Rom 7:18-20, 22-24)

Every one of us struggles with sin.  Our mortal bodies crave many things: pleasure, gratification, power, comfort, convenience, security, and occasionally retribution or revenge.  In the heat of the moment we think these things will bring us happiness and satisfaction, but instead they only result in fueling our desire, sometimes to the point of becoming habitual or even obsessive.  We may think we are exercising freedom when they make selfish choices, but in reality we are becoming enslaved by sin.  Again, St. Paul: “But what profit did you get then from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.” (Rom 6:21)

St. Paul warns us that, “the wages of sin is death.” (Rom 6:23)  This is no exaggeration.  We rationalize that our actions are harmless as long as no one gets hurt, or when they are done in private, but we are wrong.  Everything we do, matters.   Our actions define our character and our manner of thinking.  For example, pornography is considered a victimless crime, but it demeans the dignity of another person, reducing them nothing more than an object for self-gratification.   The guy from Cleveland (Raul Castro) who enslaved three women for years, claimed that he watched so much pornography, his desires were uncontrollable.  While this may be an extreme case, every time we put our bodily desires ahead of respect for the dignity of another person, we sin.  The reason the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception and sterilization is that they separate sex from the responsibility for controlling our sexual appetites, making us selfishly think we are entitled to unlimited gratification, on demand.  This kind of thinking destroys relationships, not just because it may lead to sexual infidelity, but because of the self-centered mindset it engenders.  Self-centeredness is at the heart of many, if not all broken relationships, including marriages.  God has given us the wonderful gift of sexuality as a means of bonding a man and women together in permanent relationship, and empowering us to participate in the creation of new life.  But when sex is turned into a plaything, and an assumed entitlement, regardless of our marital status, it is demeaned and perverted.  This is why sex outside of marriage is sinful.  It also results in death: the death of unborn children; death caused by AIDS; and death by many forms of cancer, some of which can only be transmitted by sexual contact with multiple partners.   Promoting contraception and abortion is not “women’s health,” it is quite the opposite.  Birth control drugs are class A carcinogens, and there is a very well-documented link between the early use of birth control by teens and breast cancer.  Even greater is the risk of breast cancer among women who have had abortions.   This is the real “war on women,” and it is being launched, funded, and now mandated by our federal government.  Despite an Executive Order promising no tax dollars would be used to fund abortion, every new Health Insurance Exchange plan must provide coverage for both contraception and abortion, including plans subsidized with federal tax dollars.  This doesn’t’ even count the $360 million given each year to Planned Parenthood, or the millions given to the UN Population Council for the purpose of funding “women’s health.”

It seems to me that our country is now in the business of promoting sinful activity, and the result is the culture of death that now pervades our society.  Not only have 40 million souls been sacrificed by abortion, the incidence of breast and cervical cancer has skyrocketed, and the basic unit of civilized society, the family, has been devastated.  Forty per cent of children (those who survive the threat of abortion), are born to single mothers, and 50% of marriages end in divorce, all because we have come to believe that we are entitled to personal happiness at any cost. 

How can we ever find our way out of this mess?  The answer lies in Sunday’s gospel in which Jesus gives us the parable to two people praying in the temple. One, a Pharisee, thanked God that he was better than everyone else, and the second was a penitent sinner who repeatedly said, “Oh God, be merciful to me a sinner.”  (Luke 18:13)   If we persist in thinking we are better than others, and entitled to happiness, we are doomed as individuals and as a nation.  But if we acknowledge our sinfulness and humbly beg God for mercy, we will be rewarded with eternal life.  What could possibly be more important than that?