A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. One of the scribes came up to ask Jesus, which is the first of all the commandments? Jesus replied, and I ask you to note this extremely carefully because this is our lord speaking. And the question was, what is the first of all the commandments? And our blessed lord replied, hear, o Israel, the lord our god is lord alone.
Therefore, you shall love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And this, our lord continues, is the second commandment. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Notice, you love your neighbor as yourself. So you have to love yourself as a as a standard of loving your neighbor.
And then our lord continues, there is no other commandment greater than these. The scribe said to our lord, excellent teacher. You are right in saying, he is the one. There is no other than he. And, yes, to love him with all our heart, with all our thoughts, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
All of this is worth more than any burnt offering or sacrifice. Jesus approved the insight of this answer and said to the man, you are not far from the reign of god. No one had the courage to ask Jesus any more questions, And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
This morning, we have red vestments, the sign of a martyr, not only of one martyr, but of Charles Luwanga and 21 young boys. They were pages. The martyrdom took place in 1886 in Uganda, Central East Africa. He was only 26 years old, that is Luwanga, when he suffered martyrdom. For being a Christian and for doing his best to preserve the purity of the young boys in the court.
They all died for their faith. Whenever I read this sort of a story, shivers go up my spine because I ask myself, would I have done it? And supposing I have to face such a choice someday, I don't like to ask the question because I hate to face the answer. But the point I wanna make this morning is this, you hear so much today about the sanctity of life. I don't know where this word sanctity comes from as applied to life.
We kill mosquitoes by the millions. What makes life so sanctified? It's what you do with it. Luonga was only 26 years old when he died, and he died willingly. He didn't have to profess Christianity.
And then thinking of this man, Charles Luonga, in 1886, I think of a man like Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, martyr, who when he was en route from Antioch to Rome to face what he knew ahead of time was to be thrown to the beast, to be torn apart by them, when he could have gotten out of it easily. When Saint Ignatius begged his Roman friends in his letter to and we have this letter. I'm not this is I just read it this morning. He begged his friends, his fellow Christians not to intercede for him, that this was his great chance to meet his god, and they would be doing him no favor in getting in his way. Now I'm you see, I am not downgrading human life.
But in a nation where we have a million and a half legal abortions a year, most of them paid for by public funds, and at the same time we talk about, oh, the the the fantastic threat of the nuclear holocaust. How do you put all of this together and make sense out of it? What is the meaning of physical life? You see, we Christians have gotten secularized. This idea of making this world a great world, making life here comfortable, seeking fulfillment.
Did you read the article about the mister where he he was a former priest, James Carroll, the novelist, how he now has found fulfillment. Of course, he's left his priesthood. Had a full page on the social section the day before yesterday. Now he had now he is fulfilled. What is life worth?
What is it for? I remember distinctly when we were being inundated with with this slogan, when you lose your health, you've lost everything. What kind of Christian thinking is that? It isn't Christian at all, and yet some of this has come into it. We cannot avoid this.
We're living in the world. And when you fall into a barrel of pitch, you get pitched, you get tarred even if the feathers aren't there. And so we've got to get our thinking straight. When a little baby is brought to that opening in our altar ring and is baptized, what is the church telling you? It sees this little child who may not be more than a few weeks old.
It already sees this little baby at the end of life entering eternity. That's what the church thinks of life. We are born for God. We are not born to be happy in this life except with the happiness that comes from being a god fearing Christian, which is a joyful thing. I have yet to find a martyr going to his martyrdom, knowing what he's doing, doing it in cold blood.
I don't know a single instance where the martyr didn't go joyfully and praying for his or her persecutors. Of course, you you can't escape thinking of a man like a cardinal fisher or or or Thomas Moore, but these are only two. Today, we are celebrating Charles Luonga from from Uganda. But the thing we must realize is what is this life all about? What's it worth?
Are we going to be sucked into this thinking which is really basically Marxist or if you want to call it dialectical materialism, which is a much better word than all the rest because this that describes it. Because this has a vision, and don't underrate it. It has a vision of making this world paradise because they look upon a human being as infinitely perfectible. And we are beginning to show just look what's happening in South America. Look at what we call this theology which tries to Christianize Marx.
How in the world can you ever do that? And yet this is being done. We are forgetting Christ. We are forgetting his message. We are forgetting the meaning of his message, which is what we do with our lives, and this is a personal choice.
And that brings me back firmly to what I ask you to note carefully, that second reading today. You hear so much about love of neighbor. Then you hear something occasionally about the love of god. But how much do you hear about the love of yourself? And our blessed Lord said this morning that there are two commandments, and the first one has has to do with God, not with me and not with my neighbor, but with God almighty.
He comes first, last, and in between. And the second commandment is to love yourself and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you get tired of my saying this, I'm sorry because someone has to say it. I just read yesterday from a Catholic writer that the great change from Vatican two that we have found that salvation is in community. That's ridiculous.
What's community? They talk about community as a barrel of wine that you can go out and take a cup out of it and drink it and then be go off on your merry way. Community is nothing more than human beings. There is no reality to a thing called community outside of the reality of individual human beings unless you're an out an out Platonist. And so our blessed lord has told us so simply in today's gospel, love god.
Love yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself, but love god first. And everything in life then takes its worth from that. It doesn't take its worth from living. It doesn't take its worth from longevity.
It doesn't take its worth from the so called fulfillment we have in this life. Christ never said we were going to be fulfilled in this life. Then why do we try it when he said you're not gonna get it? We're we're really crazy. And yet that's see, after all, sin is absurd.
Keep that in mind. Sin is absurd. It's irrational. It's also a break, a fracture between me and God. And so it comes back to this very our blessed lord laid it right on the line.
We have today remembering the Charles Luonga and his 21 companions. We have men like Ignatius of Antioch, and all and he and he died, you know, around a 100 AD. Notice, a 100 AD. He knew Polycarp, and Polycarp knew that some of the disciples you might say he was second generation Christian, saintly nations. These are our companions.
These are the men and women we must take as our models because what they did with god's help, we can do. In the name of the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen.