A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to his disciples, I solemnly assure you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. The man who loves his life loses it, while the man who hates his life in this world preserves it to life eternal. If anyone would serve me, let him follow me.
Where I am, there will my servant be. Anyone who serves me, the father will honor. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Praise be to you, Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. The church does its best to bring home to us through every channel of the our ways of knowing its message. And the message of the church is very simple. It's salvation. That it that's the that's the end line.
That's the goal. That's the finish line. That's the purpose. That's the reason for its existence, is to give men and women in this world the helps they need to survive this world for eternity, not for this world. There is no surviving this world even if we do our best.
Now one of the ways the church does it is through liturgy and, for example, through vestments. One day you'll see white, one day you'll see purple, one day you'll see green, one day you'll see red. Has this any meaning for you? Does it make any sense to you when I just read a prayer here that god gloriously terminated the life of Lawrence with martyrdom. What a glorious end.
That's what the church said. We wear the vestments to remind ourselves that today we are commemorating, that is me bringing back into the present, something of the past. In a very real sense, Lawrence, the deacon who was martyred, is of the past. But in a very real sense, not just in the sense of of my bringing him back into the present tense of memory, not if you're a Catholic, not if you believe in the mystical body of Jesus Christ, Lawrence is one of us, and we're one with him in a unity, effective unity, a unity of causality. He can help us.
But the point I want to make today is the redness of these vestments signifying the martyrdom, which the church calls a glorious gift. How many of us want that gift? I don't see it isn't very human to be running down to offer yourself in martyrdom, yet that has happened. But it's it's not according to human nature that we do a thing like that. Quite the reverse.
But here is the church honoring to the best of its powers, the fact that a man gave his life for his faith in Jesus Christ. His name was Lawrence. He was a deacon. Furthermore, the church is reminding us of that union we have with him. And notice the text of our now is our lord speaking here?
This isn't somebody interpreting his words, and the translation here, it it varies, but it doesn't have a substantial variation. Christ says if you try to save your life in this world, you're going to lose it. And if you lose it in this world for his sake, you will keep it for eternity. That's what Christ said. Now they're pretty you see, you can't make any sense out of that if from a worldly point of view.
And we come back we constantly come back to our blessed lord's words, my kingdom is not of this world. Not of this world. And yet today, I mean today, in August '82, there is an even among churchmen of our own, they are as much embroiled in this world and in its aims to make this world a perfect Marxian paradise as any Marxist, and I'm not exaggerating this at all. They even claim to be Christian Marx ists, if you can have such a reconciliation of contraries or contradictories. There was a man in the sixteenth century named Erasmus.
Erasmus was a very difficult man to or is a difficult man to put a label on. He is accused, and he was accused while he was still among the living, as being the one who laid the aid of the reformation which Luther hatched. Now Erasmus had a he had a very comfortable view of Christianity. It was a view where we would all be at peace. Christ said, I've come to bring a sword.
But Erasmus, he would not in all of the conflicts and the controversies of the day, he tried to to have a middle, a negotiated course. He tried to have a comfortable compromise so that half the time you didn't know whose side he was on. And I found a little difficult just saying to putting a tag on that, but I found a label yesterday. I found a label, a man by the name of Dickens writing a book on the counter reformation. He refers to Erasmus's Christianity as Christianity without tears.
Can you have a Christianity without tears? Can you have a life without tears? Well, we may we may try to have a life without tears in this world. We may try to have a Christianity without tears. But I can assure you if we succeed in getting that, it won't be the Christianity of Jesus Christ.
Because he himself said very simply, unless you take up your cross daily and carry it with me, you cannot be my disciple. So he said that in absolutely as clearly as that. So what is our blessed lord inviting us to? To a life of misery? Are we born pessimists as soon as we are baptized?
Is baptism an initiatory right into a world of despair, of lost hope, a world without a smile or devoid completely of joy, it's just the reverse. Christ said, if you lose your life for my sake, that's very important. There have been plenty of examples where people have given up their lives for causes. It's it's humdrum. Martyrs, you can get by the dozen for almost any cause.
Well, let's say any cause. Any cause. So the the important phrase there is giving up your life for my for Jesus' sake. There's the important. It's not carrying your cost.
It's carrying your cost with Christ. Then what does he tell you if you do that? You will find your life. By casting it away for his sake, you get it back. That's what he said.
That's what Jesus said. He said if you carry your cross, you will with him, you will find that burden light and sweet. I hate that word sweet, but it's in Latin, it's. But we don't have a better translation. But we get the point perfectly well that if you carry your cross and it's inevitable that we have crosses.
Don't forget. You can't escape that. If you carry the cross with Jesus, he has said, you will be my disciple, and you will find that burden. If you carry it with me, you will find it light, delectable, agreeable. Chesterton, you know, was a great man of paradoxes, and and McAllister isn't.
But it's cert the Christ is certainly full of paradoxes. And this is one of his worst ones or one of his best, however you look at it, that if you cast your life away for his sake, you will find it. Now what do we mean by casting our life away? We're not just talking about martyrdom. It means every time you make a choice, every time you make a decision, it may be about buying a pair of shoes, buying a house, the education of a child, a new job, a volunteer service that you feel you might want to do, Every decision you make, having surgery, going to a doctor, having a fight with your spouse, having an argument with a boss, any decision you make puts you in a position of taking sides.
And that's when you decide whether or not you're carrying the cross with Christ or whether or not you are throwing your life away to find it in him. In other words, whose side are you choosing up on? Whose side are you joining? What is the moving, the ultimate? There's no there's no reason for apologies in bringing ultimates into the ephemeral passing problems of the day.
Unless you do that, how can you be a Christian? Unless you bring Christ into your life, how can you be a Christian? And you can't bring Christ into your life without his cross. And so you have that choice day in and day out. It isn't a matter of walking up and putting your head on a chopping block.
It's a for the most part, it's a very practical matter, even a humdrum matter. How do I resolve this quarrel? How do I resolve this difference of opinion? How do I resolve this coolness? What do I do about it?
How do I handle what seems to be an affront? There are the tests. Every single judgment or decision you make of that sort, you are or ought to be making a decision on whose side you are playing ball. Are you with Jesus Christ and carrying his cross, throwing away your life for his sake, Losing it, Christ said, or are you deciding to stay with him as you see his will for you? And staying with him, you find your life.
You find it. You find it with all its joy, all its confidence, all its fulfillment as we use that awful word today. And, also, you find that carrying that cross with Jesus Christ, it does indeed become light and the burden sweet. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.