A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. People were speaking of how the temple of Jerusalem was adorned with precious stones and votive offerings. Jesus said, these things you are looking at. Why the day will come when not one stone will be left upon another, but it will all be torn down. They asked Jesus, when will this take place, and what will be the sign it is going to happen?
Jesus replied, take care not to be misled. Many will come in my name saying, I am he. The time is at hand. Do not follow them. Do not believe them.
Neither must you be perturbed when you hear of wars and insurrections. These things are bound to happen first, but the end does not follow immediately. And then Jesus continued, nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, plagues, and famines in various parts of the world, and in the sky, fearful omens and great signs. 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. A great rush of ideas surfaces with the readings of this morning and the feast we're celebrating, feast of Saint Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr. And she's also been noteworthy down the centuries traditionally as the patron of music.
Yesterday, we had the feast of the presentation of our blessed lady. We have all kinds of feasts celebrating all kinds of saints. Just yesterday, I was in communication with a nun who is now has been retired for a number of years. And she was she spent an extremely active life in hospital work in the Middle West, caring for the sick, building hospitals, financing them, you know, going an extremely active life. And now she's reduced practically to sitting in a chair and holding her hands.
I wrote her a little note because the thought struck me just as I was hammering the old typewriter. It's not at all what we do that matters before god. It's how we're doing it. The levels of our work, the kind of thing we do as we say in the service of God. And remember, that's the only service we're called upon to do in the ultimate sense because the service of God incorporates all other services.
It doesn't exclude them, but it incorporates them. But there's one ultimate one, and that's serving God. How do you do it? Who's to tell you how to do it? How do you know what you're supposed to be doing?
These are all practical questions, and unless you can answer them, it's a lot of hot air. But you see, when the chips are down after all, let's look at it. There's one of the Psalms in which it says, look, God doesn't need the world. He created it. God doesn't need sacrifices of bullocks and calves and pigeons and rabbits on an altar.
He created those things. What does he have any need for? God doesn't need us. We have a work to do, oh, and Newman is so wonderful on this. We have a work to do.
And in God's providence, if we don't do it, it never will be done. That's the way he runs his show. I don't understand all about it, but that's the way it is. We have a work to do. We should take that very seriously.
But we should be much more concerned about the why of it than the what. Why am I doing this? Are you single? Are you married? Are you widow?
Are you widower? Are you what are you? You say we are all different. Well, indeed, we are. There are no two ears alike.
There are no two sets of fingerprints alike. We are individuals, and God recognizes that. But when all of this has been said, we have one common goal, and that's to serve Jesus Christ. And what you do is immaterial relative to that. Now this isn't to downgrade our jobs.
This isn't to downgrade work. This isn't to downgrade enthusiasm for a work at hand because we aren't bet we can't serve God by doing a poor job. If you're a bricklayer, be the best kind of bricklayer. This is the theme of opus dei, the work of the Lord. Are you laying bricks, digging a ditch, riding a poon, bringing up a family, running a machine?
What are you doing? The work of the lord, the opus day. God doesn't need any of that. You need it. But above all, you need to know what you're doing.
You need to know what you're doing. Now this theme of the temple remember, the temple was begun in twenty BC by Herod. This temple that Christ was looking at. He's speaking in roughly '32 or thirty three AD. This Temple Of Herod wasn't finished until sixty four AD.
And six years later, it was totally destroyed by Titus, the year seventy AD. There was not a stone left upon a stone of the temple. Now don't say, oh, yes, but there was there was the Wailing Wall. The Wailing Wall was not the temple. The Wailing Wall was a rampart.
You could see some of you have seen it that was put down to support the mountain when Herod leveled off the top of it so he could make a temple twice the size of Solomon's. So the wailing wall is no argument against this prophecy of our lord. There was not a stone left upon a stone, and there isn't today. On the top of Mount Moriah, you have two mosques, not one, but two. And from seventy AD, there has been no temple, no sacrifice, no functioning priesthood in the Jewish religion.
And there's been there were there were one or two attempts to restore the temple, but it they those attempts amounted to absolutely nothing. There's been no serious effort to restore the temple, sacrifice, and an active priesthood. The point I want to make though is with all this talk, know, of the end of the world when people get so excited about it, think of Sunday night and that monstrosity that we saw or some people saw. Think of this, what matters isn't the end of the world, what matters is my end of the world. What kind of an edifice and temple am I building to God?
How am I building that temple? What's the brick and the mortar, the jewels, the precious stones, the votive offerings that's going into my building, my temple? Is it going to be destroyed and not a stone left upon a stone when the day of reckoning comes, which means the day I die? Let's not talk about all this business of the end of the world. Let's talk about the end of the world for me.
That has significance, folks. That's one thing none of us is going to escape, and it it for none of us is it very distant. That's the one that counts. And what kind of an edifice am I building? I come back now to our blessed lady, the feast of the presentation.
I come back to Saint Cecilia. Can you imagine the difference contrast there? Here you have a feast honoring the blessed mother, her presentation as a child in the temple in preparation for her motherhood of God. She was the mother of God, Theotokos. You know, it sounds almost scandalous to use words.
And at the same time, here we have a little virgin. The story is very nebulous, hangs by a thread, but the tradition is that she lived. There's certainly it's just her memories in the catacombs. I saw it. She honored as a martyr, and she has become the patron of music.
What in the world connection is there between music and the little Jewish girl becoming the mother of God? All the connection in the world because the world is god's and everything that in it is his and he doesn't need it. He gives it to us to be used, what? What? For our salvation.
It's that simple, isn't it? In theory. In practice, it's frightfully difficult. But here we have these examples. And if we can keep our thinking straight, there's a chance we can keep our lives straight.
But if your thinking is crooked, there's no chance of having your life straight. And it won't be God's fault if we go awry. He came to show us the way, the truth, and the life. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.