A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. People were speaking of how the temple was adorned with precious stones and votive offerings. And Jesus said, these things you are contemplating, the day will come when not one stove will be left upon another, but it will all be torn down. They asked him, when will this take place, teacher? And what sign will there be that it is going to happen?
Jesus replied, take care not to be misled. Many will come in my name saying, I am he. The time is at hand. Do not follow them. Neither must you be perturbed when you hear of wars and insurrections.
These things are bound to happen first, but the end does not follow immediately. Then Jesus said to them, further, nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, plagues, famines in various places, and in the sky, fearful omens and great signs. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord.
The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Last week, the New York Times had an article about the meeting in Washington here of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. And it had a statement from one of them which stressed three things, three of the most critical, pressing, urgent, dangers, or problems that the church has to face. And they were nuclear armament, abortion, and welfare, the poor.
I only saw the article in the New York Times. The word god didn't occur in at once. The and this was a direct quotation from the archbishop. The only time the word god occurred was when he said, please god, which anybody can say. There wasn't a word about faith or salvation or sin or virtue.
Those words weren't used at all. You wouldn't have to be in the least a believer in God to have written it or to support it or to reject it. Now, these are issues. These are very important issues for the world to face and not in I'm not in the least suggesting they are not. But whether or not they are as important as they seem to be in the moral order, that's questionable.
Let me give you a very concrete instance. We talk about abortion, and we talk about all these babies being destroyed. We talk about all these young lives being frustrated, and we go on and on. There's no sin on the part of those unborn babies whatsoever. There is no immorality in dying.
As far as the victim is concerned, there's nothing immoral in being murdered. The immorality is on the part of the murderer. The immorality is on the part of the sinner who brings this dastardly deed about. How often do you ever hear this referred referred to? To?
We talk about the evil of poverty. There's no immorality in being poor. And our blessed lord had very little to say about poverty except to bless. The sin that he, our blessed lord attacks is the sin of injustice, not on the poor, but on those who are guilty of mistreating them and treating them unjustly. But do you see the difference in approach here?
Now today, you hear and are going to hear more the fundamentalists. These people aren't afraid of talking about sin and immortality and heaven and hell and Jesus Christ and faith and god's grace. They're not afraid of talking about it. It's their life. Can we escape that same conclusion?
I just presided over the funeral of a very dear friend yesterday down in Washington Cathedral. When that man, my friend Reni stands or stood before God, he is standing there as an individual, and what's going to count is his personal holiness, and only God judges it. But that's what we all come down to. We all get put into the coffin or something like it. You see, the pursuit of holiness is not a community thing.
It's a personal thing. Now, again, I'm not at all saying that community isn't important. But today, we are talking so much about community that we forget the the essence of the whole thing. I just read yesterday from Christopher Derrick quoting one of our own Catholic theologians that the fact of Christ's resurrection is not so important. What matters is the community spirit.
This is from a Catholic theologian. This is discouraging. My friends, when we stand before god, we stand there as naked as the day we came into this world. He made us. We can't escape it.
Our blessed lord speaks so clearly. He tells, pick up my cross. That's you and that is I. I have to do that personally. Now I can't do it alone.
Christ never expected me to do it alone. I have time and again insisted how our blessed lord was so faithful to social worship, to being part of his community, community, but at the same time, our blessed lord was the one who when the going got tough in the real critical moments of his life, he withdrew to be alone with god. We can't do any better than taking as an example of our own lives, the life of Jesus Christ. In the