A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus, seeing the people crowd around him, gave orders to cross the lake to the other shore. A scribe approached Jesus and said to him, teacher, wherever you go, I will come after you. Jesus said to the man, the foxes have lairs, the birds in the sky have their nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay even his head. Another, a disciple, said to Jesus, Lord, let me go and bury my father.
Jesus said to him, follow me and let the dead bury the dead. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
It's difficult for us to appreciate the severity of these words of our lord. And this is not the only instance of this kind of thing where someone pleads off to follow Jesus here and now because they have to go home and bury the dead. Now today, we that this doesn't mean much to us. Not nothing comparable to what it meant to a Greek or to a Roman. Well, leave the Romans out.
But to a Greek and to a Jew. Not to bury the dead was a heinous crime. And we have the famous story of Antigone by Sophocles, which is the which is the great classic of this particular problem, where she gave up her life in order to give a formal a formal burial to her own brother, cost her her life. So when our lord says, look, don't go home. Follow me.
He's asking more of this meant more than just leaving your boats, leaving your living father, and following Jesus, Jesus, as our blessed lord said and commanded his first handful of disciples. And we're told here this is one of his disciples. We don't know who it was. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it was one of the 12. What it means it was one it was a special person.
It wasn't just somebody out of the mob, of the crowd. It was a disciple. Furthermore, to just to go home and bury the dead wouldn't wouldn't have taken much time a day, two, three, four, five, seven days, at the most, even if you walked. But Christ says, no. Let the dead bury their dead.
You follow me. This doctrine of Jesus Christ, you see, this is these are the things you don't hear about. This picture of our blessed lord, you know, has always benevolent in its joy and light and happiness and peace, whatever we world we mean by it, tranquility, everything so nice and cute. That's no picture of Jesus Christ. Not at all.
That's no representation of his message. To be a Christian is to be different. To be a Christian means means following Christ. Whatever else it means, nobody can deny that it means following Christ. And to follow Christ, look where it put him, on the cross.
Secondly, the only, the single, the exclusive standard that Jesus gave us for following him was picking up our cross and following him. There's no other standard that I know of. That is the exclusive standard. We forget this. We forget it.
You don't see this on Easter cards. You don't see it around Christmas time when for some reason everybody gets very religious. You see, the point we I've been reading the letters of Warren Lewis, that is the brother of Clive Staple Lewis. Not his letters, but his diaries. He kept some kind of a diary for about thirty years.
And it's very revealing because Warren Lewis also, and completely independent of his brother, went from a some kind of a Christian, some kind, in Ulster, to being an atheist then to becoming a full fledged Christian. That doesn't mean that he ever became close to being very much concerned with dogma or with church any more than Lewis was. But the point that that I mean, there's one instance where Warren, it was he was a his career was in the army, where he was in a discussion about religion. And he he said to this guy, he said, look. He said, it's either Christ and everything or Christ and nothing.
You know, he didn't mean that the life would be nothing, but you can't be half baked Christian. Not really. Of course, that this is where most of us find ourselves, willy nilly. But the thing is you can't have and maintain reasonably that position. If you're committed to Christ, the whole world is transformed, and so are you.
Your attitude is changed. Everything about you is changed. You are not of this world. You're in it, but you're not of it. And but but you see, this is what in all this maze of religiosity we forget, and religious observances and all of this.
Not that those things are bad, far from it. We need them. We need them to fulfill our vocation. But the point is they are not our vocation. Our vocation is to love, is to know, and love, and serve God almighty.
I have told you repeatedly in my sixteen years here, where it's the only time I've been exposed to what you would call the parochial life. Rest of my life, I was in the classroom, one way or another. I've had a number of people come with with problems. Not once has a person come and said, what is God's will? Not once.
Now I'm not saying they didn't believe in God. Of course they believed in God. Of course they were Christians. But they were solely immersed in their problems and all the ramifications of it, they were so completely, taken over by their problem that they lost sight of the big thing. Why did God make you?
Why did God make you? The Penny catechism, the Penny Baltimore catechism. It's almost blasphemy, you know, to mention it. I dare mention it. And the question was, why did God make you?
And that tiny little answer that these little kids learned, and there is nothing can match it in importance in their whole life, the answer was God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. That is matchless. Whoever wrote that. That came out of the Baltimore Conference. But that is matchless.
There you have a whole philosophy of life. That puts everything in order. That creates order in disorder. That gives you a anchor in great confusion and tumult and turmoil. You may be tossed around, indeed you will be, but if you have that truth in your heart and in your soul and in your very being that God made you for him, to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this life.
You will never be a feather in the wind. You will never be tossed around aimlessly without a goal. I think the German is not like that. And so in this, what our blessed lord is saying today, you you cannot put anybody in the same category as god almighty, even yourself, even your neighbor, even your child, even your spouse. You've got to put god first and keep him there, articulately, explicitly as possible.
That's what we're called upon to do to be Christians. I'm not telling you anything new. I'm telling myself this because we don't realize it. We don't live it. It doesn't illuminate our lives enough.
It'll never do it enough. In this world, all we can do is try. And remember, that's all our blessed lord asks. He never asks us to be perfect. He asks us to carry our cross behind him.
In the name of the father, of the son, the holy spirit. Amen.