You. A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. One of the guests at a party said to Jesus, happy is he who eats bread in the kingdom of God. Jesus replied, a man was giving a large dinner and he invited many. At dinner time, he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, come along, everything is now ready.
But the guests who had been invited began to excuse themselves one and all. The first one said to the servant, I have bought some land and must go out and inspect it, please excuse me. Another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I'm going out to test them. Please excuse me. A third one said, I am newly married and so cannot come.
The servant returning reported all of this to his master. The master of the house grew angry at the account. He said to his servant, go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor and the crippled, the blind, and the lame. The servant reported after some time, your orders have all been carried out, my lord, yet there is still room. The master then said to the servant, go out into the highways and along the hedgerows and force them to come in.
I want my house to be full, but I tell you that not one of those invited shall taste a morsel of my dinner. And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Some time ago, it's been a good while ago.
This epistle from Saint Paul to the Romans was read at a Sunday mass. And after mass, a parishioner came up and said, I hate Saint Paul. I said, why do you hate Saint Paul? He said, well, every time I hear that reading, it makes me sick at my stomach. Because I said, why did why why is that?
And the the parishioner replied, because it sets up a standard which I find it ridiculous to try to keep. So they got nauseated with it. Well, I understand that, you know. Now I don't know how much of it you remember from the reading this morning, but this goes down into the nitty gritty of daily living. Let me just read you a few things about it.
First of all, Paul says that with the gifts we have, those gifts we should use. And he says we all have different gifts, but use them. Use your gift, whatever it be, and don't just not use yours because you don't have somebody else's. Then he says perform works of mercy and be cheerful. Well, that's a big order for some people to ask them to be cheerful.
Then he says, love's got to be sincere. Then he says, detest, that means to hate what's evil. Cling to good. Love one another with affection of brothers. Anticipate in showing respect to one another.
Anticipate showing respect to one another. Don't grow slack in spirit. Well, you know how easy it is. We all can make a big thrust for a while and then wham down we go. Then he says rejoice in hope.
Now hope is something that you don't have but he says rejoice in it. Be patient under trial. Anybody can be patient when there's no trial. He says persevere in prayer. Prayer is not easy.
It's not a lot of fun. Paul says persevere in. Look to the needs of the saints as your own. Be generous in offering hospitality. Bless your persecutors.
Bless and don't curse them. Rejoice with those who weep. I mean, rejoice with those who are happy and so forth, and weep with those who weep. In other words, we are one with our brethren. We can go to the marriage feast and have a lot of fun.
We can be there when there's a corpse in the living room. Now anybody now this when I read this, you see, then I think of that tabernacle up there and only on your left side, there's a heap of envelopes this high. And in in all in those envelopes, we have a slip of paper. And on many of the slips of paper, there are ten and twelve names. But all of them have some names of faithful, of people.
These are individuals. These are not myths and dreams or universals or ideas. These are men and women who have lived and who are remembered and who have passed on. There they are. They're being remembered now during the month of November.
Now, when we think of the past, all of us would know how much better we could have made it with a little more effort. Well, in what direction? By and large, I know I know notice I'm saying by and large, life isn't made up of great big decisions, great big tragedies. We're born once and we die once. That's only twice in some seventy years maybe.
But day in and day you get married once or twice. You get ordained once in your life. You know, there are big things and there there there's there's great big mountain tops of joy and there are real low troughs of of of sorrow and tragedy and all the rest. But by and large, by and large, see, life isn't made up of those great big things. It's like listening to a bunch of sailors, you know, small boats.
They come together, they'll start talking. What do they talk about? That storm we had out there. Do you remember that storm? And then they go into all the harrowing details of how they almost lost their boat or they did lose their boat.
Then someone says, yeah, that was a bad one, but you should have been with me. And you say, ye god, what a life. These people must be fools to be going out there in boats when you have all this kind of stuff. Notice, in maybe fifty years of sailing, they had they're talking about one storm. They don't talk about those days in and days out when nothing really big happened.
And so it is with our our life. It's it's not made up of great big things whether they be great joys or great tragedies. It's made up of day in and day out, humdrum, monotonous you want to call it, events. Now what do we bring to that daily living with our associates? And let let's right begin with our own homes.
Let's not think of the Eskimo or the or the Indians and Timbuktu or something. Let's think of our own immediate lives. If we took what Saint Paul here says, and plenty of people who have no aspirations to being Christians have done this. These things are not specifically Christian because it's one of the great scandals you know where you have a bunch of Christians is they say, well gee, these these people look look how they talk, listen to their ideals, but look at their lives. How do they differ from the people who make no such claim to being sons and daughters of Christ in the family of the church and all of this?
Sometimes the answer isn't very flattering. Now Saint Paul didn't write this letter to notice he's writing to Romans. Proud people. And yet notice what he tells them what they should do as Christians. This is nitty gritty stuff.
This is the stuff of daily living. This is the kind of thing we actually encounter. Now how do we handle it? You see, what I'm saying is this, you cannot really, a Christian, can't handle their daily living unless they keep one eye on eternity. That's what those all those names up there tell me.
These people, all those names, hundreds of them, have lived, have moved, have had their joys, have had their sorrows, and they have passed on. And we're exactly in the same path. We're just at a different we're just in a different stage along the way. That's all. Friday of Thursday of last week I visited a man dying with a massive heart attack in Sibley.
Sunday afternoon here's a newborn baby I baptized. The church speaking to the little baby speaks as if it was already before the throne of God because there is where it will be sooner or later. And when that little baby that I baptized Sunday stands before the throne of God or or is on its deathbed, whether it be sixty years it's lived or seventy years or eighty years or ninety years, it will seem as a dream. What will count as the present? Now the the point of my remarks is I want you to think of this.
What Saint Paul said there, I wish you had it in your miscellent. Tear it out and take it with you and put it into practice. These are simple things we can do. This doesn't call for great heroics. It calls for being a good honest to God Christian.
We're not asked to put our cell our lives in jeopardy for the faith. Maybe if that were true would do better job with the little things, I don't know. But we are called upon to do these little things. And when we read this from Saint Paul or take his his famous letter on love, what love is, And then we go around telling we profess to love our neighbor. That's in the same category as this.
And yet that's Paul's writing to a to a bunch of newly made Christians. He's saying this is the way you're supposed to live. Now it would make it easier for us if we I mean, would make us easier to appreciate the value of life. The value of our daily living. The value of these little nitty gritty day in and day out relationships we have with with a number of human beings, they aren't many.
It would help us to appreciate all of this at its true worth if we could look at it a bit thinking in terms of all those names on the tabernacle shelf or the altar there. In other words, if we have one eye on eternity, it will help us to see much more faithfully, truly, universally, profoundly, efficiently, operationally. It will help us to see all of this in the present tense of today. 11/03/1981. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, today.
Now you see, thinking of death is not morose. Every mass we say, and when I say it, I wonder if people have any conception of what they're saying, that we wanna hasten to meet our our Christ. That means dying. How many of us view death joyfully? Well, I don't.
Some saints have, but some saints didn't. We don't have to view death as a terrible physical evil, the worst of physical evils. Physical evil. Physical evil. When you cut a tree down, that's the worst thing can happen to that tree.
But on the other hand, who says that we are like a tree? Who says that my life is just like a cat or a dog or a fine bear in the Appalachians? Who says that? We say quite differently what I said to that little child Sunday afternoon. Take this light, take this garment, carry it through life.
You're living for eternity. You're a child of God now. You're no longer in that realm of the natural order. Do we believe this? If we do, let's try to live it today.
In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.