A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to his disciples, when the paraclete comes, the spirit of truth who comes from the father and whom I myself will send from the father, he will bear witness on my behalf. You must bear witness as well for you have been with me from the beginning. I have told you all of this to keep your faith from being shaken. Not only will they expel you from the synagogues, a time will come when anyone who puts you to death will claim to be serving god.
All this they will do to you because they know neither the father nor me. But I told you these things that when that hour comes, you you may remember my telling you of them. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. If we take seriously what our blessed lord says today to his disciples, and the reason we're reading it is for us to hear it and to take it to heart and to see how it applies to us, this is another illustration of what you might call the severity of being a follower of Jesus Christ.
Now there's a very striking sentence here among many of them. It says that a time will come when anyone that puts you to death will claim to be serving god. Now you think over what that means. And this is what our Lord's telling his disciples, those who were nearest and dearest and closest to him, those to whom he's he's entrusting the future of his church. This is what he's telling them they're going to face.
This is the peace of Christ that he's talking that our blessed lord is talking about. It's frightening. It's all it it's awesome. There's no other word for it. As I've said many times, to be a Christian means not to be of this world.
Who said it? Jesus Christ said it. Now if that's true, then the the more you're recognized and accepted as a friend of this world, the more father you are from Jesus Christ. Think that all that's no I mean, this is the absolute logic of the situation. When we talk about peace, and I whatever the thing word means, whatever it means, when we talk about the peace of Jesus Christ, we better be as careful as when we talk about the love of God for us.
It's dynamite, absolute dynamite. It's explosive if it's anything. Of course, if it isn't anything, it's a nothing. And if it's a nothing, nothing will happen. And that's what is actually happening in too many instances.
In many instances, Christianity is simply a surface thing. It's a social thing. It's like belonging to a country club, belonging to, oh, any old thing. It doesn't bear upon people's daily living, and you can verify this today very easily, very easily. One of the simplest tests of one's Christianity is to ask yourself, what are my first principles?
What do I decide a particular situate how do I make a decision about a particular situation? What principle do I invoke? And the key to that is the little word because. So if here's the way it becomes, you'll say, this is what I should do. This is what I am going to do because how do you finish that sentence?
In logic, that's called an enthymie. It's a syllogism in which a premise is missing, and the premise is the major premise. And that's the one you supply. It's a very easy test about anything, anything that comes up. You say, this I'm going to do, this is true, or any way you want to phrase it, because.
Now what's the because? What do put in there? Because it will give me more money, because it will give me more health, because it will give me a happier family, because it will give me a a a more security, because it will give me an advantage in some particular area that I want to go. None of those things is wrong. Not a one of them is wrong in itself in itself.
Because what's the overriding principle? What's the overriding principle? Why do I want this? Why do I want this? Because fill in the gap.
This will tell you this will tell you where your allegiance is. This will tell you who you what what your gods are. We have many gods. They're all fighting. You take the the people crossing the Sinai Desert.
They it's a constant story. Here they they here they bow down and worship their god, their their one god, their true god, the god who fed them, who clothed them. Remember, all during the forty years, their clothes didn't wear out. Their shoes didn't wear out. The god who gave them their meat, who gave them their drink, who gave them their manna, their food, their bread.
So one minute, they're all for him. They bow down his everything to him. Oh god, we will never desert you. Off they go, and they go they intermarry. They they not only do that, but they become one with their pagan neighbors even to human sacrifice.
And then god pulls them back with that choker around the neck. And once again, they bow down, and there's only one true god, and we're gonna serve him and on and on. Dang. Off they go again. It's the story of the exodus, and it's a story of our lives.
It's a story of our lives. Because we these gods are all pulling us. And it's it's just how much do attention do we give them? How much do we accept them? How much do they captivate us?
There's how much do they captivate us? And you see the struggle is inescapable. We're in this world. But Christ said, don't be of it. Don't be of it.
Now that's a pretty severe order. Don't be you've got to be in it, but you mustn't be of it. In other words, it mustn't captivate you. The world, as we're using that word, is here. The more you're identified with it, the farther you are away from Jesus Christ.
That's what he said. And notice, you'll even be accused by those who are saying they're serving him, because the lord says that here. It's a complicated picture, very complicated, and you don't have to think of the sixteenth century to see its counterpart in our own lives in the twentieth century. And so I want to go back in this connection to a a sentence from the first reading about our dear little old friend Lydia. Notice what it said there, that the one who listened to Paul was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple goods from the town of Thyatira.
Now here's the point. She already reverenced God. That is before Paul came, before he gave her the good news. She already reverenced God, and then the Lord opened her heart to accept what Paul was saying. Now I think there's you see, we we take our faith so much for granted.
Let us never forget that it's a gift of God almighty. I'm not going to explain it. It's a tremendous mystery that some have it and some don't have it. This is the great problem of Calvin and of Luther, And I have great sympathy for their problem, little for their solution. But the thing is, this is the way it is.
We have to cultivate our faith. We have to work at it. We can never relax. And you see, the easiest way for us to be separated from it isn't by in some challenge to it, direct challenge. Oh, the devil has more sense than that.
He sets up these little gods, and they can captivate us if we let them. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.