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My brothers and sisters in Christ each time we hear the Holy Gospel at Mass God our Father teaches us something of great importance, and He also asks something of us of very great importance, each time we hear the Gospel then, we listen carefully: "Oh Lord, what are You teaching me? Oh Lord, what are You asking of me?" And so, what does our Lord teach us today? Well, many things.
When we read the Gospel of Saint John the Baptist who dedicates himself to prepare mankind, to receive Jesus Christ born as a child for our salvation, Saint John prepares the way by proclaiming a baptism of repentance. We’ve heard those words many times but we wonder: why this sort of way? Why would he prepare mankind for so great a message with a baptism of repentance of sins? Well, Saint John is preparing us to receive Jesus as our Savior. Our Lord is not a teacher, He is not a good guy, He is not a nice person, He is all of those things but that is not why we love Him. We love Him because He is our Savior, He is God from God Who saves us from our sins, and if we are not sinners, if we don’t need a baptism of repentance then we do not need a Savior. If we convince ourselves that we are not sinners, we will see little need to follow Jesus, and we will have little desire to love Jesus. But if we are sinners and our Good Lord with the greatest of love saves us from this terrible reality, then our love for Him knows no bounds. And that is why Saint John proclaims a baptism of repentance, that is what our Lord is teaching us today: We are sinners, thanks be to God we need so great a Savior.
Now, what is the important thing that God is asking of us in this Holy Gospel? It has to do with where Saint John proclaims the coming of Christ Jesus the Savior. Where does Saint John preach? He announces our Lord in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a terrible wilderness, why such an odd place?
When I was a seminarian I had  a chance to visit Saint John’s desert, it is called the Meged desert, and when I was there it was a hundred and twenty degrees, and that was April. Why did Saint John choose such a terrible wilderness instead of the middle of a great city? What is the important thing that God asks of us today? What in the world does it have to do with this wilderness?
What is God asking of is today? Listen, is as simple as this, He is asking us to help Him to save souls; He asks us to cooperate with God in saving souls, nothing is more important, nothing is more pleasing to God than if by our love and our prayers and our faith and our service of God He can use us to save souls, and there are lots to be saved. And is it possible that the best place to help God save souls is in the middle of a wilderness. And now perhaps you are thinking: "Father Hilton, what in the world are you talking about? We live in the middle of a city not in the middle of a wilderness."
God wants us to cooperate with Him in saving souls by loving and serving our Father with all of our strength, and where do we do this? We do it in the middle of the wilderness; a wilderness is where life is difficult, and whose life here is not difficult? A wilderness is where we are hungry and thirsty, and who here is not hungry and thirsty for the graces of the Good God? A wilderness is where we get lost and we can’t find our way. And who here stumbles and has a hard time finding our way? Aren’t we all hungry and thirsty for God? And don’t we all seem to be losing our way?
Our Holy Father when He came to Denver told us, we are living in the middle of a wilderness. In the middle of a country where so many people are hungry and thirsty and have lost their way because they have forgotten the good God, and without them we are truly in the wilderness. He calls our culture a culture of death; not because we are rotten people, that’s not his point, we are people of great heroism and we all know many such a people, but our culture is forgetful of God, and many have become so forgetful, there is so much evil around us....  The alarm clock went off this morning and there was that program "All Things Considered" I think that’s what it is, early, early in the morning, and I woke up and there was an expert on the Internet, on the computer Internet talking about how adults are using the chat rooms and Internet to pray on children, ten, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they teach them the most explicit pornographic things in order to lure them and to meet with this young pre-teenagers, and it’s taking place throughout the country. The evil of that is absolutely startling. That is just one example of the wilderness of evil in the midst (of which) we live. And if we wait to proclaim God’s salvation until we find the ideal place and the ideal time, perhaps we’ll never end up proclaiming Him at all and we’ll never end up being used by the Good Lord to save souls.
In other words, God uses us to save souls in the middle of the wilderness.
I’ve been reading a book by Fr. Walter Ciszek, he was an American Jesuit and he wrote a book called "He Leadeth Me" and if you’d like a copy of it check by the adult education office, we can order it for you, it is the most wonderful book. He was a priest, Polish-American descent and he learned Russian and Polish, he learned the Eastern Rites of the Church and he studied for years so that he could into Russia in the nineteen thirties and forties, he desired to go and in the middle of communist Russia to begin to serve as a priest for those who most needed him. He entered Russia in nineteen thirty nine as a priest secretly with a group of Polish workers. They were shipped by train close to the Siberian wilderness and there he served as a heavy laborer with all of the Polish immigrants. He went to be their priest, but when he and another priest, Father (Nedstrob) arrived at a placed called Teplaya-Gora they found (that) they couldn’t serve as priests. That the people were so terrified of the communists, were so filled with hopelessness that they would not listen, that they were afraid even to talk to them, and most of them never even knew they were priests. They spent all  of their days doing backbreaking labor and they could never even mention the name of Jesus our Lord to anyone. And they began to wonder: "What in the world are we doing in this terrible wilderness? We need to escape and go back where people will accept us as priests".
This is what he wrote, I don’t normally read, but this is so wonderful I wanted to read it to you:

 "Tortured by these questions and doubts, Father (Nedstrob) and I were sorely tempted to find some way to leave Russia and return to Poland. That was the temptation that Father (Nedstrob) and I faced at Teplaya-Gora and although our situation may have been somewhat unique, the temptation itself was not, it is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had in the first flash of his vision and enthusiasm. It is the same temptation to leave faced by young couples in marriages when the honeymoon is over and they must face a seemingly endless future of living together and scratching out an existence in the same old place and the same old way. It is a temptation to say: ‘This life is not what I bargained for’, it is not at all what I wanted either, if I had known it would be like this I would never had made this promise. You must forgive me God but I want to go back, You cannot hold me to a promise made in ignorance without any previous knowledge of the true facts of life. It is not fair, I never thought it would be like this, I simply cannot stand it and I will not stay, I will not serve."

Father Ciszek is in the middle of a wilderness and he tries to escape from the terrible situation he is in, and how many of us have felt that same temptation, to try and escape the difficult situation we are in. Our sixty percent divorce rate tells us that many are trying to escape the difficult situations we are in, but that is the wilderness, the wilderness of Saint John, where we proclaim the Gospel and God uses us to save souls today in the middle of the bad situations we are in, not in some sort of ideal future where all is well. The only thing that supported Father Ciszek and allowed him strength to continue was the Holy Mass, and this is what he said about that:

"Our ones spiritual consolation was the Mass, occasionally we were able to get away just the two of us into the forest and there celebrate a Mass in secret. We wore no vestments, the stump of a tree served as our altar and we had to be constantly on guard against discovery. We preached little homilies after the Gospel, first Father (Nedstrob) then I. It was amazing how impressive the Gospel message could be in such a wilderness, our spirits would seemed to drink in the words, savor them and feel the divine power in them, and at the moment of consecration God became present in a new way at Teplaya-Gora. He was there where the Sacrifice of Calvary had never been celebrated before. In that Sacrament we could offer up all our sacrifices with His; could ask His blessing on those who themselves were perhaps praying in secret. The consolation of that sacrifice would stay with me as we returned home through the darkness and silence of the forest."

And so that is why you and I come to Mass, in order to receive the strength and consolation in the middle of the wilderness so that we might have strength to save souls.
I just want to close with one more quotation. Father Ciszek is in the middle of a wilderness and we are in the middle of the wilderness. Father Ciszek was tempted to rebel and escape the terrible situation he was in, but God taught him, it was there and only there that he could do the will of God. Even if it meant being a prisoner and he was a prisoner for twenty-three years in the Siberian work-camps. Right after he offered this Mass he was caught and he was made a prisoner and he spent twenty-three years in the Soviet work-camps, and was not released until the nineteen sixties. But there in Russia is where God wanted to make him a saint and where you are today is where God wants to make you a saint, and use you to save souls, that is your wilderness, and this is what Father Ciszek discovered:

"And then one day together it dawned on us, God granted us the grace to see the solution to our dilemma, the answer to our temptation to flee. It was the grace quite simply to look at our own situation from His eyes rather than ours, it was the grace not to judge our efforts by human standards of by what we ourselves wanted or expected to happen, bur rather according to God’s design. Our sole purpose at Teplaya-Gora as indeed in our whole lives was to do the will of God. Not the will of God as we might wish it or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. His will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day, the people, the places, the circumstances He set before us. These were the things God knew were important."