
My Dear Sisters and Brothers! Lincoln’s experience wasn’t unusual. The First Reading taken from the Prophet Isaiah comes from the time when the People of God lost everything. They were driven out of their homeland. They were exiles. However from this confronting situation come the words of God which they welcomed treasured and passed on to the next generations: “Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you.” God who created the world did not withdraw himself from the world but he is ever present. St John Chrysostom put it this way: “He provides and upholds all that he made.” “Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. - says Jesus in the Gospel – Are you not worth much more than they are?”
“But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.” The doubts and confusion which can be found in people’s hearts and minds have made their way into the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism quotes those doubts and confusion not only to answer them but also to acknowledge them and to send a message to the people who probe these questions, that their struggles are heard and respected. “With infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world ‘in a state of journeying’ towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.”
My Dear Friends in Christ! May the Holy Spirt enlighten us to be “Stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God,” mysteries which bring light into the experiences of those whom we meet in this state of journeying so that they “must think of us as Christ’s servants.” As those who like the Pastor Lincoln went to can see the active presence of Christ, even where the prevailing thought is that God is an absentee. “We cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it.”