← Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
9/28/25 The god of Our Generation
00:24:12
When comfort is our god, we end up underliving our lives.
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Welcome to Sunday Homilies with me, Fr. Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the One who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this and other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up@ascensionpress.com Sunday or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe in your podcast app for weekly notifications. God Bless the Lord be with you and with your spirit. A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Luke Glory to you, o Lord. Chapter 16, verses 19 through 31 Jesus said to the Pharisees, there was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen, and dined sumptuously each day, and lying at his door was a porn man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man's table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores. When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. And from the netherworld where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off with Lazarus at his side, and he cried out, father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames. Abraham replied, my child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime, while likewise Lazarus received what was bad. But now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented. Moreover, between us and you, a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours, or from your side to ours. Then he said, then I beg you, Father, send him to my Father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them lest they too come to this place of torment. But Abraham replied, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them. He said, oh no, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent. Then Abraham said, if they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. Might you have a seat? So a number of years ago I read this book, not two or three years ago, and I've talked about it before, but but in the book the author talks about this thing called a masogi. So if you remember this at all, masogi is it originates in, like, Shinto Japan, where it's a purification kind of, right? A ritual where you might go into, like, a freezing stream or into, like, really cold ocean kind of a situation. The idea is you go in one way and that process of enduring some kind of distress changes you. It purifies your heart, right? So we here in the west have taken this idea of masogi and have made it into basically a challenge where a person is either emotionally or physically or mentally stretched, right? So in the book and other places, there are some examples. The author, for one example, he and I think four other friends, they took this massively heavy rock and they were in the Pacific Ocean, and they carried it on the ocean floor for five miles, right? They would take turns diving down and, like, walking on the ocean floor with this rock and then go up. And the next day I would drive, dive down. They wanted to go five miles underwater with the rock. That was their masogi. Other examples are like, any kind of extreme athletic event, like running a marathon or ultramarathon or hiking some, like, massive mountain peak. I've heard of people's Musogis being something along the lines of like a digital detox that for 48 hours, 72 hours, however long it is. Just like there's no online anything, no media whatsoever. That kind of idea could be a big challenge for somebody. Others might say, you know, cold plunge or even like a cold shower every day for a week. That kind of situation. Something that challenges even something simple like. Like a solo wilderness overnight where you don't bring a lot of gear, but just try to endure the discomfort for one night. Or someone might say, I'm going to walk 20 miles this Saturday, walk 30 miles this Saturday, whatever the thing is, can be fasting, but for like, a classic masogi. Classic being it's 30 years old, basically. But classic misogy has two rules. And the two rules are you have to have only a 50% chance of success. And the second rule is don't die, right? So it's a challenge, actually. The risk of failure is very, very high, but you can't die in the process of it. Now, that's from the book, a good book called the Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. And the thesis of that book, the Comfort Crisis, is this, that we have kind of a modern obsession with convenience and comfort that has actually hurt us. That our obsession with convenience and comfort has made us weaker, less resilient, actually less happy and unfulfilled. And so he cites a number of issues. For example, he says Here we are living in virtually constant climate control where we spend almost year round in 72 degrees. And because of that, apparently it wrecks our body's adaptability and our ability to even burn calories effectively. Not only that, but another example he gives is that we have such easy access to hyper processed foods that are really, really tasty and really calorically dense, in addition to the fact that we have the rise of automated movement so like cars and elevators and escalators and apps that bring whatever we want to us, that what happens as a result is over 80% of American adults are not moving enough that the average number of steps an American adult gets in is like 4800, which is less than is half what the rest of the world gets. Not only that, we are eating roughly 500 calories more per day than we did back in 1970. And as a result of that, that convenience, right? As a result of that comfort, we have record obesity and we have record chronic illnesses that are afflicting us. We just think it's normal. You know, another, another thing he pointed out, he had a great quote in the book, and the quote is this. He said, finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead thanks to the iPhone. Because that's when the iPhone was released. And he said boredom, we don't experience boredom anymore, right? Because we want to be comfortable, we want to scroll, we have endless entertainment, we have endless streaming, we fill every moment with scrolling and with noise. And just think about this, what does that do to us? Well, it robs us of boredom. And one of the things that the researchers have shown is that boredom is essential for creativity. Boredom is essential for problem solving, boredom is essential for self reflection. In fact, studies have shown that people who can can't tolerate boredom are more prone to anxiety, they're more prone to impulsive behavior, and they exhibit poor decision making just because we're not bored. And the last example he might give is right now we're in this place where we're so obsessed with comfort that we have no real risk, we have no real challenges. In fact, there's research that highlights and underscores the fact that a lack of childhood outdoor play and risk taking gives rise to increased adult anxiety, that when people don't face challenges early on in their lives, they become less confident and more fearful later on in their lives. And this whole thing, this whole notion is so pervasive, this captivity to comfort, that a man named Matthew Chandler, he once said this, he once made this big statement when I heard It I just was so captivated by it. The statement is that comfort is the God of our generation. That comfort is the God of our generation. And again, I've shared that idea with so many people in the last number of weeks, and the number of people who have kind of affirmed it seem to indicate that it's clear most of their affirmations are this. I say comfort is the God of our generation. And people are like just kind of this grunt. And why? Because so many of us, we could say our lives are defined by, well, I just want to be comfortable, right? How many of us are just like, I just want to be comfortable in that sense of we're bothered by each inconvenience. Well, this is taking so long. Like a microwave oven, it's taking so long. Or delivery is taking so long. Or even the idea of I'm freezing when we're just mildly chilled, or I'm just starving. When the last meal we had was four hours ago. In fact, I remember my older, one of my older sisters, when her kids would ever say, whenever they would say, I'm starving, she would say, wait, are you. When did you out last eat? Well, I last ate either last night or I ate last eight this morning. And he'd say, she would just be. Matter of fact, she'd say, in that case, you're hungry, you're not starving, get over it. Because there's this reality, of course, that we just have that thing that says, I, I just want to be comfortable. And so, so much of our lives is this desire to escape. I mean, how. When was the last time we spent any time in silence rather than just, I'll put something on quick, put some, something in my ears, put something in front of me, just something in the background. And we're just desiring. I always think about this whenever we're in the midst of a line or in the midst of any kind of place and the desire to pull out our phones. What I'm saying is this. I no longer want to be here. I no longer want to be in this world. I'm going to escape to another one. And that refrain, that refrain, I, I just want to be comfortable. It's not just about now for so many people that's become our goal for life. I just want to be comfortable. Later on I'm going to do this so later on I can be comfortable. I'm going to live this way, get this kind of job. I'm going to live this kind of certain way so that I can have a comfortable life. And Paradoxically, this is the crazy thing that Michael Easter points out. Paradoxically, because of so much comfort, we now experience these negative effects, and we end up under living our lives because comfort has become the God of our generation. And the result is virtually all of us who are captive to comfort end up under living our lives. And of course, this is nothing new. I mean, again, this is the God of our generation. But it's happened many generations. In fact, look at the first reading today from the prophet Amos. What is he describing? He's describing people in Judah and people in Israel. And I love how he describes them because it's very, very close to how we live. He says, woe to the complacent in Zion. They're lying upon beds of ivory stretched comfortably on their couches, right? They're not just lying on beds of, like, you know, wood, straw beds of ivory stretched out on their couches. You can imagine ourselves just, like, flopping down and just kind of putting ourselves out. They eat lambs from the flock, calves from the stall. And again, you're eating veal, you're eating the tenderest of meats. The improvised music of the heart, so jazz, which is a great sign of comfort. He says they drink wine from bowls. Now, you might have just heard that and thought, oh, yeah, wine for bowls. No, you're drinking wine out of bowls. What's wrong with you? It's not just out of a glass. This is out of the biggest vessel we have. And they anoint themselves not just with oil, they anoint themselves with the best of oil. So it seems like even if comfort is the God of our generation, that desire has been around for a really long time. And here's the question, where does that come from? Because we know this. We know that comfort's not bad. Comfort's a good thing, I'd say, with this. It comes from the garden. Here's what I mean. I've said this many, many times that when God made us and put us in the garden, everything's good, right? And God in the garden, he makes us for at least three things. He makes us for love. He makes us for labor. He makes us for leisure. So here's leisure that is connected to comfort. But because of the fall, we've taken these good things, love and labor and leisure, and they become twisted. And so our experience, all three of these things is often distorted. So with love, we go to one or two extremes. Either we have this desire to use each other. Even though we're made to love each other, we're desire to Use each other or to be indifferent to each other. Either I can't use you enough or I don't care about you at all. When it comes to labor, we're tempted to either see labor as toil, it's just simply drudgery, or it's our identity. It's everything we are. And when it comes to leisure, the same thing is true. We vacillate. We bounce back and forth between here's leisure. For us right now in our day and age, leisure is either collapse, you got a day off, Just fall face down on the. On the couch, collapse. Or leisure for us is I can't stop. I can't stop scrolling. I have a break. So I can't stop eating. I can't stop drinking, can't stop streaming, I can't stop binging. Whatever that thing is, that is has been our experience. I have a break and I can't stop. Remember, when we say that comfort is the God of our generation, that means it's an idol. Keep this in mind. Idols. We rarely make idols out of bad things. We almost always take something that's good and make it an ultimate thing. That's what an idol is. Taking a good thing and making it into an ultimate thing. We make it into the thing that we love the most or we make it into the thing that we serve the most. We make it into the thing that we build our lives around. And how many of us have built our lives around this idea? I just want to be comfortable. We can know that comfort's become the God of our generation. If it's one of the things that we fear losing the most. If we look in our hearts, we can see that that's one of the reasons why comfort has become the God of our generation. Again, remember. Remember that comfort is a good thing. We don't demonize comfort because we know this. We know. Right? We know that deprivation can often lead to desperation in so many of us. So again, it's not like discomfort's the best thing ever. Deprivation can often lead to desperation. In fact, I remember hearing a story, a historian was talking about the Great Depression and how actually devastating the Great Depression was. How it. How it. He said, you can. We can hardly understand what that did to the American psyche. Having so little and being in such constant discomfort and such constant deprivation leading to desperation. He actually talked about this. He. He said he talked to his dad, his father, who had joined the army for World War II and the. The Air Force. He was a bombardier. And he said, he asked his father, he Said, how could you take. It's called Benzedrine, which is to help them keep awake for these 16 hour bombing runs. They have to stay awake somehow. How could you take that on a regular basis? And then sleeping pills to fall asleep when you got back home. And then when you had a sinus infection, he said you had to go up 30,000ft and your eardrums blew out. And then they told you when you're flying, not even wear parachutes, because if you get over to Japan and you crash, they're going to execute you and behead you. And he said, well, compared to the Depression, it wasn't that bad. He said. He said it was the first time in his life he ever had steak and ice cream. So I'm not saying that deprivation is the best. It isn't. Deprivation can often lead to desperation. We know that sometimes we can do the worst things when we're deprived of something. Deprivation can lead to desperation. But also we know this comfort can often lead to complacency. It's one of the reasons why In Proverbs, chapter 30, there's this incredibly beautiful and poignant proverb for us today. It says this, it says, it's a prayer. And it says, keep deception and lies far from me. Oh God, give me neither poverty nor riches. Right. Don't either. Give me neither comfort nor deprivation. Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise I may have too much and disown you and say, who's the Lord? That's comfort leading to complacency. Or I may become poor and steal and so dishonor the name of my Lord. That's deprivation leading to desperation. And yet what are we made to live in neither place? We're actually made to live a full life, and yet we end up under living our lives. So we go back to what Michael Easter said. He called it toughening. Now, this is the thing, he says this, this is this theoretical idea that being completely overwhelmed by negative, stressful things isn't good. Great, got it. But it also theorized that being totally sheltered isn't optimal either, that there should be some amount of stress that gives you optimal psychological and physical well being. And actually there was a research that was done in Stanford with these squirrel monkeys. What they did with these squirrel monkeys, a group of them is every, I think it was every 10 weeks, every one week out of every 10 weeks as they were being raised, they removed them from their families and they had to live on their own. And after one week, they reintroduced them back to their families and keep going on as they raised this. It said, when these monkeys grew up, they were significantly more resilient and capable in the real world than their sheltered siblings. When they grew up. They were the leaders. They were the doers. That's what we're called to be. Yet if we underlive our life, even more importantly, if comfort is our God, then we end up missing God. In fact, we end up missing on God's will in our lives, because that's the goal. The goal isn't being uncomfortable. The goal of our lives is God. The goal of our lives is God's will. The obstacle is that we're living in captivity to comfort. The obstacle is that we're unwilling to be uncomfortable. And so this whole message right now, this is not, hey, we're going to go out there and we're going to pursue discomfort. That's not what it is. The message is we need to be willing to pursue God's will and have absolutely no fear of discomfort. Because why? Because if we're bound by a love of comfort, we'll never be able to love anything else. This is the truth. If we're bound by a love of comfort, we will never be able to love anything else. Because we all know this. Ever since the fall, when all that love and labor and leisure, all that broke, you know what? Since then, we're still made to love. But love always involves sacrifice. This is the goal of life. The goal of life is to love with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, the Lord God, to love our neighbor as ourself. And yet, if I love comfort, I'll never be able to love, because love always involves sacrifice. One thing we have to know, though, of course, is this love we're called to. It's not arbitrary like the discomfort that the sacrifice that is connected to love. It's actually intrinsic. What I mean by that is there was this movie back in the day with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan, I think. And it was this, like, kind of dark comedy situation where Matthew Broderick's character was in love with Meg Ryan, and she was trying to get away from him, but he was just obsessed with. And at one point, I remember this scene, and it just has burned in my brain. I've thought about it maybe once every month for the rest of my life as I saw it in high school. And it's Matthew Broderick, and he's sitting at this table trying to convince Meg Ryan's character that he loves her so much. And he says, how Much do I love you? He says, do I love you enough to break my own finger? And they're at this dinner table, and he just, like, breaks his finger. He's like, oh, that's love. And I remember thinking, that's crazy. That's nuts. And remember thinking, wait, what's the difference between that and the cross? Because we say, like, well, here's God proves his love for us here. And dying on the cross, what's the difference? And the difference is this. What Matthew Broderick's character did was arbitrary. I'm going to prove my love for you by suffering unnecessarily. The cross is intrinsic. The love and sacrifice connected in the cross is what? Jesus didn't pursue the cross, he pursued us. And the way he had to love us was through that road of the cross. I was talking to a young woman recently, and she shared that both of her parents are very ill. And she said, you know, some days it's really easy to just avoid going over to their house. Some days it's just really easy to just stay away because I know it cost me something. She says, some days I'm really inclined to be captive by comfort. But she says, but I know this. I know whenever I go over there just to be with my parents and be with them in their sickness, it's always better than if I avoid it. And to put to death that God of comfort and replace it with real love, even though it's uncomfortable, it's always worth it. Because oftentimes comfort leads to complacency. And the people that we should be loving, we're not able to look at the Gospel today. Here's the rich man and Lazarus. And this Lazarus is right in front of the rich man. But because he is captive to his comfort, he doesn't even notice. He doesn't even see him, doesn't even do anything. So this is the last thing. So here's the question. If comfort is the God of our generation, then what do we do with this? And I'd say this. We do what Christians have done for generations. In fact, St. Paul writes it to Timothy today, St. Paul writing to Timothy, he says this. He says, okay, compete well for the faith. He doesn't say, glide into heaven. He says, compete well for the faith. Lay hold of eternal life, to which you are called when you made that noble confession in the presence of many witnesses. Basically, if we have a false God, we do what every generation has done. We put that false God to death. In fact, there's this term we use in Catholic circles called mortification. Mortification comes from that word in Spanish, like morir to die. When we do mortifications, we're putting something to death. And sometimes we're putting our fear to death. Sometimes we're putting our self love to death. In this case, we're putting putting our idol of comfort to death. So what do we do? Well, you could call masogis if you want to. We can call them mortifications where on a daily basis, weekly basis, we can say, okay, what's a small way that I can choose this act of mortification of something like here's a fast. Maybe it's from food, maybe it's from drink, maybe it's. Maybe it's from media, maybe it's from screens, maybe it is cold showers. And to be able to say okay each day or regularly at least, I'm going to choose some kind of active mortification. And in doing that, what I'm going to do is I am not pursuing discomfort, I'm pursuing God's will. And I'm demonstrating that the fear of discomfort has no place in my life or even this. Not only active mortifications, but another thing called passive mortifications. We basically are the inconveniences that come to us. To be able to see that person got in our way. Like, okay, Lord, I accept that inconvenient. No problem. Okay. It's harder than I like. All right, no problem. It's colder than I like. Okay, no problem. This is a farther walk than I was prepared for. No problem. It's that inconvenience that comes our way that hopefully wakes us up from complacency and helps us not only remember that God is God, but that people are around us, that he's called us to love and that we are called to not underlive our lives. The invitation is to refuse to dread discomfort and to pursue God's will with no fear of difficulty. I think it's true that comfort has become the God of our generation, that we don't have to worship that God. Our goal is God himself. And we're called to escape captivity, to comfort and to no longer fear and no longer dread discomfort.