A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus went out to the mountain to pray, spending the night alone in communion with god. At daybreak, he called his disciples and selected 12 of them to be his apostles. Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter, Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James, son of Alpheus, and Simon called the zealot, Judas, son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who turned traitor. And this is the gospel of the lord.
The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. There's one thing you hear a great deal of today, and that's community. We must do things in community, and there's great emphasis upon getting together for prayer services and any number of, what we call paraliturgical services. I love those words. You know, you have paramedics and stuff, so we have paraliturgical.
I have nothing against all those things at all. The only thing I have against it is the way it's presented as if it was the only way, as if we had to do that whether we liked it or not. That we must be constantly rubbing shoulders with a lot of people who, for the most part, we may find repulsive. We don't like a lot of things about them, and we don't like to be with them. Maybe we do and maybe we don't.
The only thing I have to say about it is this, it's not the way our blessed lord handled this situation of worship. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm satisfied. More than satisfied, I I I honestly confess it's it's quite an undertaking to follow Jesus Christ. Now yesterday, I remarked in my well chosen remarks that to be a Catholic means to live intention. And we talked about this great question of faith, good works.
How it's so easy to be liberated by saying everything counts only on the basis of faith. Everything counts only on the basis of works. And that freezes because that relieves all this tension of trying to put the two together. But the Catholic is bound by his faith to put the two together. Saint Paul, as we've been reading in his in Romans, he may be emphasizing almost ad nausea, the importance of faith so that Luther's when he came to translating the Vulgate into German, felt he had to put the word only in there in order for the the the the German language to reflect what he took the Latin to say, that we are saved by faith alone.
And on the other hand, you have the Pelagian view, which crops up from time to die, that we don't need the grace of god. All we need is to have god, our creator, and our own natural powers, and that is enough. Good works are what count. Catholic has to hold the two together. And so with this matter of of social worship, our blessed lord gave us an example.
He was faithful to the synagogue, not just to going up to Jerusalem three or four times a year, to the temple where there was sacrifice. Remember, was only in the temple you had sacrifice, where you had an acting priesthood, only in the temple. So since the time of Titus, there has been no temple, there's been no sacrifice, there's been no acting priesthood among the Jews. Think of that. And that's about that's the first century AD titles.
Now at the same time, our blessed lord was extremely faithful in observing the Sabbath and being present in the synagogue. He did join his fellow citizens in worshiping god according to the law in the synagogue. At the same time, there is not a let's not talk about what our lord said. Let's talk about what he did. What did he do?
The in this reading today from Saint Luke, when he was faced with this extremely important proposition that he had to select his 12 disciples, and notice one twelfth of it was wrong, so he even made a mistake. How about that? And if you count Peter, it's two twelfths. That's one sixth. That's not so that's not such a good average.
But anyway, here he is on the eve of making this big decision of of picking the 12 who are going to be the closest people to him, the men who will be with him day in and day out, who will hear him and will be able to converse with him and ask questions, and above all, to carry the good news to the world. What does he do? Go down to the synagogue and get the whole community of Nazareth together? He goes up to a mountain alone to pray. Now you say there he is up there running down liturgical service.
I am doing nothing of the sort. I'm only saying what Christ said. I'm only encouraging people to do what Christ did. That there's got to be in our lives not only public worship, which is liturgical worship, that's what the word liturgy means, but there's got to be personal religion. A great French theologian, Grand Maison, has a wrote a a booklet on this something.
He called it personal religion. Personal religion. You know, in a sense, there can't be any religion unless it's personal. There is no there is no reality called the community. All you have is an assembly of individual persons.
That's all you have. If you talk about a community, it's an abstraction. It may be a concrete term, I admit that. But the thing is, there is no reality that you can put your hand on and say that's a that's community. Because if you do, what what's there?
Human beings, Mamie O'Brien, Jack Smith, two year old James, individual human beings. And if you have 3,000,000 of them, you still have individual human beings. And it's got to be individual human beings who individually raise their mind and their heart to God to acknowledge his power, his omnipotence, to bless him, to thank him, and to ask his part. It's that simple. But there's one thing I wanna bring out here.
There's something else I wanna say is that this this this aspect of prayer has been neglected. This great emphasis upon community worship has has perhaps inadvertently, I don't know, but it has acted against it. Where is there any insistence today officially on men and women of the Catholic faith, as we say, you know, as we in the ecumenical spirit, That where there's an emphasis upon morning and night prayer, where there's an emphasis upon you praying yourself apart from a lot of people or apart from popping into church or apart from popping any place. You don't have to run to find god. Where do you find that?
It's not existed. And then there was a period which of course it's now history, but there was a period when we were told you don't have to use formal prayer, to work is to pray. So if you work, you can offer god your word. Don't bother about getting down your knees and saying a rosary. Go out and give money to the poor, dig a ditch around your house to take away the rainwater from your foundation, have a dry basement, and offer it up the lord.
Just the same as saying your rosary. Hogwash. It's not the same. Now I'm not saying that if there's any that that that to say that that is false. It's absolutely true.
And you know how much I have said that from this pulpit. The work of the Lord to to transform, to, well, to metamorphosize our daily work and offer it as a prayer. I was brought up on the morning offering, but this is no substitute for personal prayer, for getting down on our own knees, as individuals on the mountaintop, or in your little hermitage, or in the little corner of your house that you can be alone with god. Now you see, so you have all of this, and our blessed lord did it all. He went to the temple in Jerusalem.
He never missed a feast as far as we know. He was faithful to the Sabbath in the synagogues. We know that for sure. At the same time, how often in the New Testament we're told where he left his disciples and went apart to be alone to pray. And folks, when the chips were really down, when he left the upper room, the last supper, and went across the valley and went up the hill to Kidron I mean, into the left the Valley Of Kidron, went up to the Garden Of Gethsemane, he took a he took some of his disciples, but then he he he left even those two or three alone and went by himself to beg his almighty father to be freed of the ordeal he saw he had to suffer.
This is a fact. Now my final point is this, and this is brought out very clearly by Catherine DeHutt, Baroness Catherine DeHutt or Fawn Hutt, however you wanna put it. This lady who was a great friend of Dorothy Day who's still living. She's she's a great she she's a great proponent of what she calls Russian mysticism. Well, don't let these words throw you, you know.
And she brings out constantly constantly this this idea idea of of of having a little corner where you can be alone with god. Now but when when a Christian is in that condition, as far removed as you want him to be or her to be, in fact or academically and theoretically, it can be a corner in your own house that may take you a million miles away from the kitchen and what you're going to have for supper and how you're going to get shoes for the kid the next morning or something. So it's not a matter of feet or miles. She insists, you see, that you're not there praying alone. You are church.
You are part of Christ's mystical body. You're not alone, and your prayer isn't a solitary prayer nor is it nor is is its objective isolated from the Christian community. Now this is a frightfully important point to keep in mind. If I get down on my knees and say my beads or or recite the Psalms or what have you in my room, when I when I say my office, you guys, how could I forget that? When I sit down or stand up or kneel and take that breviary, of course, we call it the liturgical hour, you see, But it's still the same thing.
Not as good as it as it was in the Latin, of course, but it's fair enough in English. So you take this and you pray. That is a that is an official prayer of the church, and we and we say that's a liturgical prayer. Because a priest does not say his office alone anymore than he says mass as a solitary person. It's a church praying.
And so when the individual Christian in is it in as much loneliness and solitariness as you can imagine, they are not alone. Their prayer is not an individual thing. They are with the church, the church militant, the mystical body of Christ. And so I I bring let's bring prayer back into our lives. Am I my own private personal prayer?
In some way or other, get it into your lives. And don't be don't be misled by saying I can I can exclude one or the other or the oh, no? You can't do that. CS Lewis, he did not like social worship at all, but he saw the importance of it. And as he said, in obedience, I do it, and he did it very faithfully, Indeed.
And so this, this reading this morning of our blessed lord on this very momentous occasion of his choosing his choosing his disciples, let's make it an occasion for bringing this back into our own lives. Our conviction that religion in the last analysis is personal. Me, a person. I have to go to god. I can get help from my fellow human beings.
They can get help from me. But in the last analysis, it's the person who has to appear before God with acts of adoration and thanksgiving, petition, and contrition. So let's hold it all together. It isn't a matter of an either or nor. It's a matter of both and and.
It's simply a matter, folks, of following Jesus Christ. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.