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JESUS’ WARNING Yesterday’s Scripture readings for Daily Mass are noteworthy: Baruch 1:15-22Psalm 79:1-2, 3-5, 8, 9Luke 10:13-16 Baruch was the scribe and friend of the prophet Jeremiah who gave us a book by his name and the book of Lamentations. He worked with the prophet during his struggle with King Jehoiakim of Judah from 609 to 598 BC. We know this from chapters 36 and 45 of Jeremiah. While Jeremiah ended up going to Egypt with some of the people who escaped from Jerusalem during the Babylonian deportation, Baruch had been taken to Babylon with the exiles and likely was a contemporary of the prophet Ezekiel. While the book by the name of Baruch is not in Protestant editions of the Bible, it has always been accepted as canonical by both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches since the first few centuries after Christ. Its essential message is no different than the other books of the Bible: repentance and obedience to God. That is something on which all three of us – Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox – can agree. Chapter 1 and the beginning of 2 of Baruch are of especial interest in these post-modern, neo-pagan times that so parallel the state of ancient Judah just before and at the start of the Babylonian captivity. In verse 11 of chapter 1 Baruch enjoins the exiles to pray for the life of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar. Imagine that! The people are told to pray for the welfare of an evil, pagan king whose armies have just taken them into exile and destroyed their capital city and their glorious national shrine, the Temple of Solomon. This presages the New Testament instructions that Sts. Paul and Peter gave us in Romans 13:1-7 and 1st Peter 2:13-17 during the reign of evil Emperor Nero to obey and respect secular authority. Today we have an evil President and Vice President, and such evil leaders are God’s punishment for the idolatrous and adulterous generation we have become. Yet to the extent that what they command does not violate God’s Law, we are to obey them, and additionally, we are to pray for their welfare however much we detest and abhor their wrongful social and economic policies and programs. Then follows the confession of sin from 1:15 to 2:10. The message is clear: the deportation into Babylon is because the people had forsaken God’s ways, and when that happens, God is no longer able to protect the nation from its outside invaders. What could be truer of these United States today? With our LGBTQ perversion and our murderous baby-sacrificing that we call a “woman’s right to choose,” how can God protect this nation from Muslim terrorists, the Chinese communists and Russia’s new hypersonic weapons and nuclear powered, nuclear armed torpedoes? Baruch 1:15 says, “Righteousness belongs to the Lord.” If we forsake that, then how can we expect to be recipients of such righteousness? But let us finish the sentence Baruch wrote: “But confusion of face, as at this day, to us, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to our kings and our princes and our priests and our prophets and our fathers, because we have sinned before the Lord, and have disobeyed him, and have not heeded the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in the statutes of the Lord which he set before us.” Baruch’s thought continues along this line in chapter 2 where he describes the horrid conditions of famine caused by the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem: “Under the whole heaven there has not been done the like of what he has done in Jerusalem, in accordance with what is written in the law of Moses, that we should eat, one the flesh of his son and another the flesh of his daughter.” The people of Judah had been sacrificing their babies to the Canaanite god Moloch, so the Lord God allowed Nebuchadnezzar to lay siege to the city, cutting off their food supply for so long that now they began cannibalism and ate their own young. We know this happened from Lamentations 2:20 and 4:10. Why should God treat these United States any differently as we sacrifice our pre-babies to medical experimentation and testing, all in the name of a “woman’s right to choose?” Baruch 2 summarizes the warning that God gave the Hebrews in Deuteronomy 28:15-68; there are consequences for disobedience. God cannot protect a people who reject His protection. The next reading for Daily Mass was Psalm 79, one of the penitential Psalms probably written during or after the Babylonian exile. It describes how the heathen have laid Jerusalem in ruins and despoiled the Temple. It asks how long God will be angry at His Chosen People. But verse 9 voices the call to repentance that our nation – the United States of America – had better cry out before it is too late: “Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name; deliver us, and forgive our sins, for thy name’s sake!” If as verse 13 states we are to be the flock of the Lord’s pasture, then as a nation we must follow the Good Shepherd, restoring our Judeo-Christian heritage, destroying LGBTQ culture and outlawing baby-murdering instead of opening ourselves to become victims of Muslim terrorism, Chinese communism and Russian aggression. Finally, in the Daily Mass reading from the New Testament, Jesus Himself warns cities in Judea and environs (Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum) of what happens due to idolatry and disobedience. Below is the applicable text from Luke 10:13-15 with names of the those changed to modern ones in America: “Woe to you, New York City! Woe to you, Los Angeles! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it shall be more tolerable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Washington, DC, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades.” Everything that Baruch wrote about 2600 years ago will happen to this nation unless we repent.