But they badly miscalculated.  He replied to their tough question with a tougher question.  They planned to embarrass him.  But he embarrassed them.  Reduced to silence, they were forced to admit the hypocrisy of their self-righteousness.  They walked away and left her standing there before the only one who was truly righteous.  But Righteousness did not condemn.  He forgave.  Now that’s different!  It really hadn’t been seen ever before, at least not like this.  “See I am doing something new!  Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”  (v. 19 of Isaiah 43, but please, read the whole chapter!).

Jesus offers this anonymous adulteress a brand new start.  She could have been Mary Magdalene, as in Mel Gibson’s film.  Or she could have been anyone.  We are all guilty of adultery, at least in sense that the book of Hosea uses the word.  God is the spouse who has given us everything and deserves our exclusive loyalty.  We should worship the ground he walks on.  But instead we’ve cheated on him, looking for thrills from other lovers who have not delivered what they promised.  Given that he is the source of Life itself, rejecting Him means choosing death.

It seems so easy for Jesus to say to the adulteress (and to all of us) “neither do I condemn you.”  With those words, he saved her from death and gave her a new lease on life.  So what did it cost her?  “Go and sin no more” is her program.  She must change her life.

But what did it cost Him?  Everything.  He was required not just to change his life, but to lose it.  In Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” one of the most poignant scenes is when mother Mary rushes to be with Jesus as he collapses under the weight of the cross.  In that agonizing moment that he looks up at her and says, “See, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

A famous German theologian murdered by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pointed out the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”  Grace is free.  It is the absolutely unmerited gift of pardon and loving friendship extended to us by God in a way that transforms us and makes all things new.  But such grace is not cheap.  It was paid for by the suffering of God’s Son, suffering that he willingly embraced out of love for us.

Saul needed this grace desperately.  He occupied a conspicuous place among the self-righteous, a member of the blood-thirsty crowd that stoned Stephen.  When on the road to Damascus he realized who he was and what he deserved, he saw the grace offered to him as more precious than gold.  It was the pearl of great price.  In light of this treasure, all else appeared as trash (he actually uses a rather vulgar word for “compost” in Phil 3:8).  He was not satisfied to be a passive spectator.  Rather he wanted to share personally in Christ’s sufferings and so come to experience the exhilarating power of his resurrection, the love that is stronger than death.  He saw the heavenly finish line ahead and decided to go for the gold.

That grace is available to you.  The question is, how precious do you view it?  What value do you place on it?  It is offered to you daily through the Eucharist, the Word of God, and prayer.  Are you too busy to fit these into your schedule?   How much effort do you make to grasp the prize?  Are you sprinting, walking, or just moping?

Actions speak louder than words.  Let’s examine where we spend our time, money and energy.  That will tell us what it is that we really value most.

I don’t care what President Obama says, you may not remain on our health care policy until you are 26.

For the record, you also may not move into the basement and install black lights or hang Che Guevara posters (or posters of Barack Obama in the style of Che), nor may you consider our laundry room an intergenerational gathering place.

At 26, you will have been a legal adult for five years and will have obtained an education or professional training. You will have been taught to drive, cook, operate a power drill, call the cable company when the service goes down and, most important, prepare your own income-tax return.

You will be old enough to get married, enter into a binding legal contract, start a business, buy a home and even rent a car.

Twenty-six isn’t terribly old, but it’s old enough to know better. It is not adolescence, no matter what the American Psychological Association says.

Not to worry. We have confidence in you. Adulthood is not as hard as it looks.

Love and kisses, Mom.

Perhaps because the president’s own children are still so young, he doesn’t realize that success in parenting is defined by our children’s independence.

Children seek independence naturally from the time they are toddlers, yelling “All by myself!” at the least interference from an adult.

They follow this instinct as adolescents by lying about their whereabouts, erasing their text messages and wearing styles that makes us cringe with embarrassment.

Nothing is as important as this innate quest for independence because it is the essential element to becoming an adult.

For the sake of our nation’s future, it’s an instinct whose smoldering ashes ought to be fanned, not squelched by the lure of “slackerdom.”

Yet last week at a rally to generate support for his sinking signature health reform bill, Mr. Obama announced with fervor that the plan includes a provision for unmarried adults up to age 26 to be covered on their parents’ policies, irrespective of their educational status or employment.

The “young adults” in Mr. Obama’s audience cheered as if the school principal had just told them they were getting an extra recess, while he smiled with self-satisfaction as if this act of largesse is his right to bestow.

Keep in mind that such coverage isn’t really free. It just feels that way to the president and the young adults who won’t be paying for it.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, a health-policy think tank, Americans age 19 to 29 account for 30 percent of the uninsured. They achieve this status by “aging out” of their parents’ health insurance plans while working in jobs that don’t offer health benefits.

But extending the period of dependency on their parents will only serve to further erode the already-shrinking sense of adulthood among “young adults” while offering no permanent solution to the problem of unaffordability. (Even the moniker young adults implies they’re not the real thing, but rather a less capable version.)

In a free market, insurers should be able to offer health care products designed to meet the needs of consumers of all ages. Given their relative good health, a product for younger adults should be nominal and profitable. But insurers must be free to offer only the coverage this segment wants and needs, not a regulation-saturated policy that offsets their grandparent’s medical bills. Even a caveman can see that.

Given how fast and loose he plays with other people money — specifically the productive fruits of future generations — it’s no surprise that Mr. Obama instead wants parents to underwrite the needs of our adult children.

Twenty-six year-olds are not “kids,” as one liberal commentator on a weekend news program audaciously called them, and mandating that certain adults pay for the insurance of other able-bodied adults — even ones to whom we’re related — is not a mark of a free society.

On the other hand, if Mr. Obama’s audience is any indication, Generation Y is quickly turning into the first fully dependent generation in a Socialist America. Perhaps we ought to call it Generation S.

It’s no wonder the “free” that made this crowd erupt was the promise of a free ride.

Back in the ’80s, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to address each other’s countries on TV.  After the addresses were over, various media types interviewed people from each country to give their assessment of the speeches.  One of the Soviet citizens interviewed remarked that when Gorbachev (or any Soviet leader) spoke, he always made you feel as though he were speaking to a million people, but when Reagan spoke, he made you feel he was speaking just to you.  They greatly preferred Reagan to Gorby and for a sensible reason: nobody likes feeling like an ingredient in a statistical bloc.  We are persons, not statistics.  That’s why God chooses you — you yourself — and calls you by name out of all the peoples of the earth.

It is significant that when God becomes man, His first word to us is not, “Keep it up!” or “What do you think?” but “Repent!”  Many people are put off by that, as they would be by a total stranger walking up and saying, “Stop it!”  But then, Jesus is not a total stranger.  He knows us better than anybody, which is why His first word is “Repent!”  Not one of us can hear that word with an ounce of reflection and not immediately recognize those things of which we need to repent.  That’s why we reflect so rarely.  The good news is that Jesus did not come merely to depress us with the fact that there’s plenty wrong with us.  He came to deliver us from the sins He called us to see and repent of.  Today, hear the voice of Jesus and repent.  He will surely forgive and deliver you from all sin.

Normally, that would be a matter between the parents and the school and not the stuff of national news. But not this time.

That’s because the parents in question are a lesbian couple.

Father Bill Breslin, the parish priest, explained that the decision was motivated by concern for the children’s well-being. According to Breslin, “If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad…We don’t want to put any child in that tough position.”

That prompted Breslin to ask an obvious question: “Why would good parents want their children to learn something they don’t believe in?” He noted that “there are so many schools in Boulder that see the meaning of sexuality in an entirely different way than the Catholic Church does. Why not send their children there?”

Not surprisingly, what’s best for the children isn’t what’s at stake for the Church’s critics. Students from Iliff School of Theology, a liberal Protestant institution, protested outside of the Archdiocese of Denver’s offices, holding up signs that read “Standing on the Side of Love.”

Please.

As Archbishop Charles Chaput, a formidable defender of orthodoxy, explains, Catholic schools “exist primarily to serve Catholic families with an education shaped by Catholic faith and moral formation.” So it’s reasonable, he says, to expect “school families to live their Catholic identity faithfully.”

Now, Catholic schools do accept students of other faiths and no faith. They accept children of single parents and divorced parents. But they also expect that these parents will not offer a “serious counter-witness” to Catholic teaching in their actions.

It’s difficult to imagine a more obvious “counter-witness” than the case of the lesbian couple in Boulder. Orthodox Christians of all denominations hold that sexual intimacy outside a marriage is morally wrong and that marriage is a covenant which can only occur between a man and a woman.

As Chaput says, these teachings “are central” to a Christian understanding of “human nature, family and happiness, as well as the organization of society.” Ignoring the contradiction would undermine the purpose for which Christian schools exist.

A Boulder gay rights group vowed that “decisions like this aren’t going to be tolerated.” I guess that means that in the name of “tolerance” and “love,” they won’t let Christians impose their faith on themselves.

This is exactly why Christian leaders from all denominations, including Archbishop Chaput, wrote the Manhattan Declaration—and why now nearly half a million Christians have signed it. Please, come to BreakPoint.org, and we’ll show you how you can sign the Manhattan Declaration yourself and take a stand for religious freedom, traditional marriage, and the sanctity of life.

We have to act. Because, given the trajectory of our culture, it won’t be long before many, indeed most of us, are facing the kind of challenges the Sacred Heart of Jesus School did. May we, please God, all of us stand for Truth.

The exiles who returned from Babylon got a bit distracted.  They were delivered from captivity in order to worship their God.  But they got caught up in the work of re-building their houses and farms and businesses and forgot the main thing: rebuilding the Temple of God.  And for all their efforts, it just didn’t seem to be coming together as it should.  They couldn’t figure out why.  Haggai was sent to remind them.  His point was the same as a later Messenger to the people of Israel, “Seek seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33).

One of the dangers of the spiritual life is false humility.  Sometimes, in order to avoid doing the right thing, we can pretend that we are too ignorant of God’s will to know what to do.  But as C.S. Lewis observed, the trouble with trying make yourself stupider than you really are is that you can often succeed.  Today’s verse speaks to that rather silly spiritual condition.  It is often the condition in which our culture finds itself, unable to render elementary justice to outrageous crimes because, after all, “Who are we to judge?”  “Not judging” does not mean abandoning the call to do justice.  It means not usurping the place of God.  Today, do justice, love mercy and walk in true humility before your God.

1) Intolerance in the name of “tolerance” must be named for what it is and publicly condemned. To deny religiously-informed moral argument a place in the public square is intolerant and anti-democratic. To identify the truths of biblical morality with bigotry and intolerance is a distortion of moral truth and an intolerant, uncivil act, which must be named as such. To imagine that any state…has the authority to redefine marriage, a human institution that [is prior to] the state ontologically as well as historically, is to open the door to what John Paul II called … “thinly disguised totalitarianism” – and this, too, must be said, publicly. This will require (western) Christians … to overcome what (sometimes) seems to be a deeply-engrained and internalized sense of marginalization within contemporary society.

2) We must speak openly … about the empirically demonstrable and deplorable effects of the sexual revolution on individuals and society, while calling our contemporaries to a new appreciation of the dignity and nobility of human love. In John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, believers and unbelievers alike have a more compelling account of our human embodiedness as male and female, and the reciprocity and fruitfulness “built into” that embodiedness and differentiation, than theories of human sexuality that reduce sexual differentiation to a question of plumbing and human love to another sport. … Young people, deeply wounded by a culture of promiscuity that tells them simultaneously that they must be sexually active and that sex could kill them, are yearning for the truth about love, as the remarkable impact of the Theology of the Body on … university campuses and in marriage-preparation programs demonstrates. This weapon in the conversion of culture (must) be fully … deployed: and if that requires making the public claim that the Catholic Church understands human sexuality better than the prophets of sexual liberation, then so be it.

3) The reduction of Christian history to the Crusades, the European wars of religion, Galileo’s trial, and the Inquisition must be publicly challenged, for these “black legends” … put obstacles in the way of the conversion of culture. … Contemporary scholarship has deepened our understanding of the Crusades as a legitimate, if often mismanaged and brutal, response to Islamic aggression, even as it has demonstrated that such horrors as the Thirty Years War were far more about politics than about the fine points of the theology of justification. As for the Inquisition, the Church has repented, publicly, of this and other unsavory alliances with state power; when will the (western) Left apologize for communism, which killed more men and women in a slow week than the Inquisition did in centuries? As for science, absent Christianity and its convictions about a world imprinted with the divine reason … it almost certainly would not have developed as it did in Europe (or anywhere else). I raise these matters of historical record, not to score debating points, but to suggest that part of the challenge we face today is to recognize … that the West is suffering from a false story about itself, and about the relationship of biblical religion to its formation and its history.

4) The Catholic Church, while enriching its interior life through a deepened encounter with the sources of its faith in the Bible, the Fathers, and the sacraments (ressourcement), and while developing ever more winsome ways to make the Church’s proposal to a post-Christian Europe (aggiornamento), must also join forces with men and women of conscience who may not be believers, in order to challenge publicly the (encroaching) dictatorship of relativism of which Cardinal Ratzinger warned (in April 2005). The Church’s engagement with … culture and politics, in other words, must be less diffident, less defensive, and more assertive – not in the sense of aggression, but of truth-telling “in and out of season” (2 Tim 4:2).

The British Telegraph reports, “Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in [a] virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level.”

Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-Sun would go home once a day to give their real baby powdered milk, and then go back to lavish care and attention on their online child. The virtual daughter was named Anima; the real daughter was never given a name.

Finally, they came home one day after a 12-hour session to find their baby dead. They were arrested after an autopsy showed that the unnamed little girl had died of prolonged malnutrition.

Tragically, on the other hand, the virtual girl is probably doing just fine.

Like me, you’re probably feeling a little sick to your stomach and outraged, and wondering what on earth could possess parents to do such a crazy thing. It’s tempting to write them off as just plain crazy, or some kind of extreme example of Internet addiction or other mental illness. But the disturbing fact is that every one of us who has ever indulged in any kind of prolonged escape from reality carries the seeds of this kind of addiction inside us.

William Saletan puts it this way in the online magazine, Slate: “Look in the mirror. Every time you answer your cell phone in traffic, squander your work day on YouTube, text a colleague during dinner, or turn on the TV to escape your kids, you’re leaving this world. You’re neglecting the people around you, sometimes at the risk of killing them.”

Saletan explains that gaming websites aren’t just games, they’re worlds—and those worlds “are becoming ever more compelling.” When real life gets to be too much to take, we can now log on to a world where everything goes smoothly and circumstances are easy to control. So we become more and more susceptible to being lured out of the real world into the artificial ones.

And this latest story isn’t the only example of the tragic results of that kind of escapism. Saletan notes, “At least two Korean men have died of exhaustion after round-the-clock video-game marathons. Another man, nagged by his real-world mother, allegedly resolved the dilemma by killing her. The dead baby is just another casualty of this war between the worlds.”

Virtual community is no substitute for real community—the kind of community we’re called on to help create in our families, churches, and neighborhoods.

These examples just show how dangerous it can be when we forget that responsibility. If it’s true that we’re facing a war of the worlds, Christians must take a stand for real life and real community. Reality may be messy and uncontrollable, but it’s a priceless gift given to us by our Creator—and so much more fulfilling than any fake world, or fake family, ever could be.

The “young man” in today’s verse was pretty much any modern person.  When he looked at life, he saw economic forecasts, newspaper headlines, morning cups of coffee, that living room carpet that needed vacuuming, leaky faucets, vague misgivings about his job, dim fritterings about youthful dreams unfulfilled, telephones ringing, and the sense that there was no place for his meaningless life to go.  When he looked back, he saw a wasted life.  When he looked forward, he saw old age and then the lights going out — forever.  He was a living incarnation of Scripture’s teaching that where there is no vision, the people perish.  He was perishing in his soul.  Then God opened his eyes and suddenly his vision was filled, not with hallucination (his whole previous life had been that) but with real vision.  He saw that God was there.  The universe came right side up and he realized that there is nothing ordinary about ordinary life.  The same is true for you, right now.  Sitting in the room with you right now are angelic presences every bit as real as you are.  And there, more real than anything else, is the Blessed Trinity Himself.  Open your eyes.