A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to his disciples, As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They ate and drank. They took husbands and wives right up to the day that Noah entered the ark. And when the flood came, it destroyed them all.
It was much the same in the days of Lot. They ate and drank, they bought and sold, they built and planted. But on the day that Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, if a man is on the rooftop and his belongings are in the house, he should not go down to get them.
Neither should the man in the field return home. Remember Lot's wife. Whoever tries to spare his life will lose it. Whoever seems to forfeit it will keep his life. I tell you on that night, there will be two men in one bed.
One will be taken, the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together. One will be taken, the other left. Then they asked Jesus, where, Lord? And he answered, wherever the carcass is, there will the vultures be.
And this is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. Today is the feast of Saint Martin of Tours. His he covers roughly the whole of the fourth century, and is identified with the city of Tours in France.
Although, didn't come from France, but in those days those words didn't mean much. People were much more citizens of the world, of the empire. Now Martin of Tours, I say, is fourth century. And when I happened to be in that town some years ago, I can assure you some people talked about him as if he had died just the day before. His memory was very greed, very greed.
And if I recall correctly, they had the old cathedral. And of course with the modern demands for new roads going straight and all that, there was a question of destroying the old church in order to make room for a desirable road. They solved the problem by putting the road right through the church and leaving up the walls on either side to keep that man in mind, his great Saint Martin of Tours. Now the point I want to make noticed, his fourth century. Saint Augustine is fourth and fifth century.
Saint Benedict is comes another century after Saint Augustine. Saint Leo the first, and we could enumerate all these people. Now the point I'm coming to is this, we're hearing a great deal today about reconciliation among the scattered and separated Christians. There's no question that Christianity is shattered. That's for sure.
That's very sure. Another thing is it shouldn't be. That's for sure too. But it is. Now, when we talk about reconciliation, what are we talking about?
Are we talking about something where we could sit down around a table in a four or five star hotel and negotiate a labor contract. In other words, sit around and negotiate and compromise some kind of a workable plan whereby all these churches can get together. Well, there's a lot of that kind of thinking around. But there is a tremendous difference between talking about reconciliation of Christian churches and talking about working out a negotiated contract with labor, or the equivalent thereof. When you're negotiating a practical situation, you can give and you can take as you see fit.
But supposing you're dealing with something absolute, just supposing. Of course, if there is no absolute truth, then you can't be dealing with an absolute truth. Truth. And that's precisely the position of many people today. They'll say, oh, you can't know anything for sure.
There's this the black and the white, that's really that's very ancient. That's medieval thinking. This is not uncommon at all. There's a lot of downright skepticism about. Well, of course, if there's no if there is no absolute truth, then there is no relative truth.
And if there's no relative truth, there's no truth, period. Absolute, period. None. None. So let's not talk about it.
What are then something else becomes your standard. I never will forget, I think I mentioned this, but it I was not by any choice of mine. I traveled from Antwerp to Cologne with a young Yale student. And we were together three or four or five days. And he had a his father had prepared or a complete itinerary for him.
And any place we went, he had to check off, so his father would see that we had been there. And he nearly had me dragged me crazy because we didn't miss anything. Our last night together, we stayed up late because he wanted to sing see Hans Gehring, which was a great thrill of course. And I don't know how but out of the clear blue he said, Do you believe everything you say you believe? One word led to another.
And the other was, he was a very serious minded young man. He took religion very seriously. And finally, I made this statement with shocking. I've mentioned this on other occasions. Because I said, look, here we have all of this split up, splinter religious sects.
They all claim to be Christian, they all claim to be the Church of Christ, and they, in many instances, contradict each other or one another. And they did it from the very beginning, remember. There was no unanimity between Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther, or the rest of them. Now, I said, if they are equally true, which it was his position, you know, I said, then they are equally false. And if they're equally false, I don't want any parts of them.
And he he was shocked when I said that. He said, what do you mean? I said, you I mean that if they're all equally false, I don't want any parts of them. He said, you can't say a thing like that. Then I said, why can't I?
And his reply was, because religion keeps us civilized. Good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm all for civilization. But that's not truth necessarily at all.
You can have two very civilized people, and one may be a first class pagan, and the other one a Mohammed. Mohammed. Now, we've got to we've got to stay Saint Martin Luther was a man who stood up for his religion, and there was plenty of heresies in his day. Plenty of them. He stood up firmly for it.
Because there either there is something, a reality of absolute truth, or there is not. There are contradictory propositions and one has to be true. And if there is not, then why worry about anything? As a pragmatist says, don't ask whether something is true, ask what is its cash value? What is it good for?
But if there happens to be something that we call true, if there is something absolute, if Christ is the son of God, if Jesus Christ brought a message, then I don't want anything but his message. I could care less what a guy like Luther or Zwingli or Mellon Thorn said. Who are they to tell me anything? I wanna know what Jesus said. And did he leave a church or didn't he?
And if he did, what's the meaning of the word church? Now, I know there are all kinds of meanings for this word church. And a good Lutheran can say, I believe in the holy Catholic church. He can say that he can say it in good faith. I know that.
But the point is, is that the kind of church that Christ left? Because if he did, then something was terribly wrong for about 15 centuries, for fifteen hundred years. Because it's not until the sixteenth century that you have what is called today the Reformation. Now I know we had a split with the Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox, but there's been never any question about their the validity of their orders or their doctor, except the infallibility of the pope. So here's the question.
If you say that Christianity got on the right path only with Martin Luther, then somebody slipped up frightfully, horribly, for nearly fifteen hundred years. Is that a sensible attitude for a person to take who believes that Christ is the son of God and came to establish a church? That it took sixteen hundred years, fifteen hundred years, and then what do you have? Do you have somebody rising and do you have a unanimous attitude towards these great truths of faith and free will and all of that? Not at all.
The only thing the reformers could agree on 100% was a profound hatred of Rome and what they called the Roman church. They all agreed 100% on that. But when you come to anything else, you will get all kinds of opinions, either as even as regards the divinity of Jesus Christ. So if there is such a thing as truth, then we have to stand with a man like Saint Martin of Tours with the truth. With the truth.
Now it's not always easy to find the truth. But if God wants us to be saved, if we need his truth to be saved, it cannot be impossible to find his truth. In a certain sense, it's got to be simple because most of us are pretty simple. We need help. And so today, when we celebrate this feast of Saint Martin of Tours, that's what I recommend to you, to be firm in your faith.
You've got to know your faith. It's not enough to stand up for your faith. What are you standing up for? And to be and to be alert and to realize that when you're dealing with on a with with non Catholics, on a question of doctrine, doctrine is not negotiable. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.