A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The lord said, that is our lord, if one of you had a servant plowing or herding sheep and he came in from the fields, would you say to him, come and sit down to dinner? Would you not rather say, prepare my supper, put on your apron, and wait on me while I eat and drink? You can eat and drink afterwards. Would he be grateful to the servant who was only carrying out his orders?
It is quite the same with you who hear me. When you have done everything you have been commanded to do, then say, we are useless servants. We have done no more than our duty, and this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Today, the church is celebrating the feast of the dedication of Saint John Lateran. A magnificent church which many of you have seen. Gorgeous edifice. The liturgy of the mass, the intro and so forth, speaks of the church as the Jerusalem of the eternal city and in a sense our salvation. It In the metaphorical, allegorical sense, I want to talk briefly about the idea of churches as a building.
Stone and wood and masonry and concrete and steel and carpet and marble, whatever. There's just something about the physical edifice we call a church that corresponds to something in man for social worship. This is just an anthropological fact. Now most recently, just within the last forty eight hours, I finished reading a report, a factual report on a very startling and astonishing phenomenon that's taking place down in El Paso, and across the river, the Rio Grande into Juarez. El Paso is a pretty good sized city.
Juarez is the fourth largest city of Mexico, and they're separated by only the Rio Grande, which isn't much of a river at that place, but spot. Now, what's going on down there is extremely amazing. I don't know how it but let's put it what's going on that I'm talking about is taking place on the city dump. Around that dump, that is the city of Juarez, accumulated human beings in considerable numbers who made their living and who make their living, going to the dump, salvaging what they can salvage, selling it, and living on the pittance that is saved over from what they didn't drink up in the cantinas. Then something very startling happened.
Father Richard Thomas went down there, but it's more to it than just his going there. How much of it is his doing? I don't know. I only know what I read in this book which just came out. But here you had these extremely poor people, poor in every way, physically, materially, morally, intellectually.
Anyway, they were just that they were the bottom of it. They were underneath the bottom of the barrel. And a transformation is is is, this is present tense, is taking place among these people. Certainly father Tom Richard Thomas had a lot to do with it and his associates, the volunteers who have come from both Mexico and America, who have helped these, what do you call them, beggars? Anyway, they're the sorters of the junk of the dump into a community, a very prayerful community, well organized, well pretty well organized, morally stable, and progressive in the sense in which they are living together, sharing in a communal life, and above all, they have reached a high level of spirituality in what we might wanna call the charismatic movement.
Because this is very much part of this of the scene. Now, the thing that struck me was this, that in their poverty, when they started to get things together, one of their it was just a a common by common consent. The thing they most wanted was to get a church. A building that they could dedicate to God and where they could go to worship God together. To get out of the basement, to get out of their tents, to get out of their huts, and to have some special building.
I'm talking about just a physical building. Nothing metaphorical, nothing poetical, nothing allegorical, just a good solid honest to God building. This was just by a kind of a universal consent which had top priority over everything else. I think of that story of of judge Young Dol about the handless Christ and the destroyed village in the first world war where when after the village was destroyed, what was the first thing the villagers wanted to restore? Their little church.
Now you don't have to have a church to worship God. You don't need a building to pray. We know that. God's everywhere. He's no more in this building as a building than he is outside there in the valley or the mountains or in the storms or in the in the beautiful weather we've been having.
He's every place. He's omnipotent, omnipresent, we say. But this business of having a physical building, a very special building. See, and this is why I think it's frightfully important that the building reserved for for worship should be reserved for worship. I don't go along at all for these multiple purpose buildings.
You see, our great economists say it doesn't make sense to have a magnificent building empty six days a week. Well, first of all, who says it ought to be empty six days a week? But with leaving that aside, let's not get into that business. But the thing is there is something we need in a physical building called a church. Whether you call it a temple, I don't care what you call a pyramid.
Remember, this isn't something identical that that's unique to Christianity. You find it every as I say, it's an anthropological fact. What do we think of our church? What does it mean to you? I mean this edifice.
I'm not talking allegorically. I'm using not the word church in the sense of the mystical body of Christ. I mean this building here. Just this morning, just this morning, as I was opening the doors of the church, a lady was walking by with her dogs. And as she passed the the church, she blessed herself.
We used to do that all the time. The church, we used to have a steeple. What in in the in Europe, when you go and and go around and try what's the first thing you see of Charcot? It's that huge beautiful spire of the cathedral. In many, many instances, when you travel in Europe, the first thing you see of a city is the spire of the church, not a skyscraper.
We have eliminated that. Let us realize this that the that the church is an important adjunct to our social worship, and man is bound to social worship. And the church is what focuses that. We need it. It means a great deal.
And it's and the idea of embellishment. You see, people who are interested in what we call the bottom line of a ledger, they don't understand this at all. That well well that people can be starving and like to see a silver and gold on their statues. See, that's beyond their comprehension. I understand it perfectly.
So can anybody who has a little bit of understanding of human nature and and what it means to worship God, I can understand that perfectly. We want god to have a little more than we have. In the name of the father and of the son, holy spirit. Amen.