A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, none of those who cry out, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven. Anyone who hears my words and puts them into practice, that is does something about them, in fact, is like the wise man who built his house on solid rock. When the rainy season came and the torrents came and the winds blew and buffeted his house, the house did not collapse. It had been set solidly on rock.
Anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like the foolish man who built his house on sand. The rains fell, the torrents came, the winds blew, lashed out against his house, and it collapsed under all of the storm and was completely ruined. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to God. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
We are celebrating, you all you can't have missed it, the, three hundredth anniversary of the no. It's more than that, isn't it? Anniversary anyway, of the birth of Martin Luther. Now, whatever you may think about Martin Luther, he left his mark upon Western Christian. One of the most, significant, of his doctrines was this matter of the problem of the problem between faith and works.
Nope. No question. And it's still a problem. It's still a problem. And the emphasis you give this depends a great deal upon ulterior, remote principles.
Now if you look at action, you know, walking down the aisle of this church, coming to church, going through all these gestures of a ritual, giving money to the poor, burying the dead, taking care of orphans, world, We're we're to that. One you wanna think of. I don't care what it is. That is what we call good works. And the first thing you see about them is that none of them depends essentially upon religion.
That's the first thing. And the proof of it is look what has happened since Luther's time. Instead of talking about the charity of Christ, we talk about welfare. We talk about philanthropy. We talk about altruism.
Notice, God has nothing to do with any of these things. And if you want to have names of human beings who who could be attached to some of these doctrines, some of them were just first rate atheists, like John Stuart Mill or Auguste Comte. So, you see, we're not theorizing. We're looking at history and saying, this is the way it is. And you see, here's where Luther was right.
Let's not be afraid to say it. Merely going through the through the rituals of religion can in themselves mean absolutely nothing. And who could've who, I ask you, who could have been more stringent, more severe with what we're talking about than Jesus Christ. When to the best people of Israel, to the most religious people of Israel, to those who had the had the highest positions of honor as regards religion, he called them whited sepulchers. Woe to you scribes and pharisees, hypocrites.
Hypocrites. And I've I've told you time and time again, go back and read what that pharisee came into the temple and how he told god how good a man he was. He was good. All these fine things he did. And Christ said, forget it.
The sinners was more justified than he was. Now so that that's the that's the first that's one side of this question. And this is what we as Christians must realize, faith is the essence of being religious. The essence of religion is not man but God. The essence of religion is not my fulfillment, what I get out of it.
That is not the essence of religion. That's just little old me. And if that's all I'm looking for, you might stop in the nearest bar. The essence of religion is god. And if god has revealed himself to us somehow or other, then it's a matter of faith.
Notice, I'm saying faith and belief, not as Luther used those words of trust and confidence. Oh, no. I'm using them as in in the epistem as in order of knowledge, of certitude, of motives of credibility, and all the rest of this stuff. Now when Luther took it upon himself to translate the New Testament, when he came to this phrase of Saint Paul that man is justified by faith, in the German, he put in the word alone. He knew the word was not in Greek.
He knew that perfectly well. I mean, he this was brought to his attention. See, we're not theorizing about this. This isn't fiction at all. Now but Luther said, you have to put that word in alone to translate the sense because Saint Paul is telling us that the only thing that saves us is faith.
And Saint Paul is right. The only thing that saves us is faith in God and his son, Jesus Christ. He's right. But you see, if he's right, then how do you bring in good works? If all that matters is if all that matters is my attitude of soul, then how do you what good is good works?
Now Luther faced up to this problem. Remember, remember, on the continent of Europe, some of the foremost men and women were Lutherans in founding hospitals, orphanages, nursing. Think of that. So you see, they did not divorce themselves from good works. Although you although you have to say they were inconsistent, they couldn't justify it on Luther's principles.
Now we come back to our blessed Lord. And if you're you see, if yeah. These things are not so difficult if we go to Christ. Now it's not that we're going to understand all of this, believe me. It isn't that Christ said, look, folks, sit down.
I'll I'll lay this out for you. I'll explain all of this to you. Just just sit down be patient. And even with your understanding, I'll make it all clear to you. Christ never treated us that way.
Christ spoke with authority. Christ spoke with authority. He didn't argue. He didn't debate. He didn't say, well, now let's take a consensus.
Let's have a committee meeting. He said, I say. And that's how his church speaks when it speaks in his name. It doesn't argue. It doesn't debate.
It speaks with the authority of Jesus Christ. And what does our lord say? You have it today. You have it today. How can you how can you get out of it?
You may have all the faith in the world, Christ says, but unless you put that faith into practice in in these so called good works, you've built your house on sand. You've built your house on sand. Every time I read this, I think of that terrible hurricane we had a good many years ago that almost wiped out the Eastern Coast, Ocean City and Rehoboth. It there you saw what happened when houses are built on sand, washed away completely, not leaving a trace. And so our blessed lord, he says that you you of course, we need faith.
The only thing that saves us is is god and Christ. We can't even walk. We can't even pray. We can't we can't make an act of faith without Jesus Christ. We are contingent beings.
That little word contingent is one honey of a word if you think about it. We dangle ultimately, completely, essentially from god. You see how close we come to pantheists, but we're not pantheists. Although we are the first to say we are god dependent utterly upon you. Therefore, we have to have faith, and Luther was right in that.
It's only by faith that we are saved. Good works alone won't save you one iota bit. You I'm sure you are acquainted with this phenomenon. It's very human. That some of the most outstanding gangsters who didn't hesitate at all to eliminate the opposition were very generous to the orphans and the widows, extremely generous.
They were noteworthy for it. What does it prove? Well, I don't know what it proves. But, you see, it one thing it doesn't necessarily prove is that they are believers in Jesus Christ and are on the way to salvation. That's one thing it doesn't prove.
And so our lord is saying here today, he isn't saying that you that you don't need faith, but he is saying that unless you carry out his words into action, your faith is in vain. That's what our lord is saying. And so we come back to this to a solution to this problem, not to understanding it, but to saying how do we act. And we say that faith is absolutely essential. But you can't be saved without having your faith carry over into good works.
But good works, unenlightened by, that is without the fire of Christ's faith in them, worthless. Worthless. Worthless. I say again, worthless. If the whole world at this moment could be made equally have everybody have an equal bank account, that there would be no more poverty, there'd be no more disease, there'd be no more wars, would be would we be any closer to salvation?
Maybe yes, maybe no. But certainly in themselves, these things do not make bring us closer to Christ. And in my experience, they often bring us farther away from Christ. I've seen more lives ruined by affluence than I have by poverty. Believe me.
And so we have to come back to these basics. Build your house on a rock. That is faith in Jesus Christ. And then if you have that faith, then all the rest will follow. The good works will follow.
And they will be not only good works. They will be the divine works of salvation, and that's what matters. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.