Our Lord tells us to beware false prophets. (Matt 7:15) We may think of prophets as raging madmen on street corners in big cities shouting that “the end is near!” But this is a caricature. In Sacred Scripture, the prophets are those God gives authority to interpret the Law so people know how to live their lives. False prophets claim to speak on behalf of God, but have not been given His authority to do so. Christ tells us that we can tell them apart by the fruits of their teachings.

Take communism, for example. The Church strongly condemned it, and rightly so as she possesses the true authority of prophecy. But many countries ignored the prophetic words of the Church. What happened? Societal collapse, the destruction of the value of human life, poverty, millions of people died by government violence, and many other ills. Another example is the so-called “Sexual Revolution.” Again, the Church condemned this, especially in Humanae Vitae. Sadly, false prophets throughout society and even within the Church ignored these warnings. Despite God explicitly condemning basically everything about the sexual revolution in Sacred Scripture, these false prophets said we would be OK and everything would be fine. I think it is safe to say that things are not OK: society has become vulgar, course, and hopeless.

False prophets, then, are still present among us. They lead us into sin. For those who never turn away from sin, the wage they earn is eternal separation from God and everlasting suffering and death. (see Romans 6:23) But even in this life, sin has consequences. We suffer because every sin brings more evil into this world.

But, God will not tolerate his children to suffer sin forever. In Genesis 18, the Lord goes down to Sodom and Gomorrah to investigate the cries of suffering against them and to pronounce judgment. Abraham intercedes on behalf of the righteous in those cities. God, in his mercy, tells Abraham that the righteous within the cities will not be destroyed. How does this story end? Lot’s family is offered salvation, some of them choose it, and the cities are destroyed by sulfurous fire that rained down from heaven. . If you read Genesis 19–and do not read it with your kids because it is pretty terrible–you see that these cities invited destruction on themselves because of their complete and utter depravity.

God’s judgment is, perhaps, less dramatic these days, but it still exists. In his mercy, God sent his Son who taught us to repent and follow him. He then, in his mercy, called us to be missionaries, preaching repentance and salvation to all nations. If they reject us, as so many rejected the Old Testament prophets, they reject God.

To repent ourselves and to then preach repentance the Good News of salvation offered by Christ, we must know the sins of the world. When we hear the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, we generally think of one particular kind of sin. While this is certainly a part of it, there was much more wrong in those cities. The prophet Ezekiel reveals the sins of Sodom as he denounces Jerusalem itself. He prophesies:

I swear that your sister Sodom with her daughters have not done the things you [i.e. Jerusalem] and your daughters have done!
Now look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy.
Instead, they became arrogant and committed abominations before me; then, as you have seen, I removed them.
Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more abominable things than they did. You even made your sisters look righteous, with all the abominations you have done.

It started with pride. In their wealth and power, they grew gluttonous and addicted to luxury. They grew complacent and arrogant. Then their selfishness led them to ignore the poor and to take whatever they wanted and to ignore and even antagonize God through abominations. That word, “abomination,” is used in scripture to mean idolatry, false worship, and sexual immorality. That is: any sexual act not between a husband and wife, but especially such acts between those of the same sex.

Sodom fell into these sins. Jerusalem fell into these sins. Our entire western culture is well down this same sinful path.

We were anointed with Chrism and called to be prophets at our baptism. Will we be false prophets and follow society’s path? Or will we be true prophets who repent in our own lives, and then help others repent so they can join us in salvation?