A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. The crowd remained on the other side of the lake. Now the next day, they realized that there had been only one boat on that side and that Jesus had not left in that boat with the disciples. Rather, they, the disciples, had left in that boat by themselves. Then some boats came out from Tiberias near the place where they had eaten the bread that the lord had given thanks for.
Once the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there. Of course, you know this is following the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. So once the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were with them on that side of the lake over by Tiberias, They too embarked in their boats and then proceeded to Capernaum, that's across the lake up in the Northwest Corner, looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, rabbi, when did you come here? Jesus answered, I assure you, you are not looking for me because you have seen signs, but because you have eaten your fill of bread.
You should not be working for perishable food, but for food that remains unto life eternal. Food which the son of man will give you. It is on him that god the father has set his seal. At this, the people said to Jesus, what must we do to perform the works of god? Jesus answered, this is the work of god.
Have faith in the one whom he has sent. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As I have mentioned on more than one occasion, perhaps odd nauseam, I have been involved in reading a very long book about Saint Augustine Bishop. That's Saint Augustine of Hippo, the author of the Confessions and the City of God, which most people will tell you are two of the most notable books written by man or woman, and yet few people read either one of them, of course.
We carefully avoid doing anything like that. But anyway, he's a famous famous man, you know. Now he lived from March to 04/30. It's a very important date because he's just about a general well, let's say two generations removed from Constantine. When you had a tremendous reversal in the whole Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire went all the way from the Far Eastern lands of the Mediterranean all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, and all the lands north of the sea and south of the sea, Egypt and over in Africa.
He is from Africa. Hippo is in Africa, the northern part, right about opposite the toe of Italy. Now, the one of the things that impressed me most in this very difficult reading, because it's so detailed, about every other sentence there's a footnote, but this is the kind of stuff that is solid, you know, was the great conflict that Augustine had to try to rescue the Christians from their paganism. Now it was one thing for the emperor Constantine to with one flare of his guess he got in front of his computer and sent out a message off to the empire to all their different stations, was then duly distributed on first class the Iraq's copies that now the gods are gone. No more gods, no more goddesses.
We're only going to have one god and his son Jesus Christ. Well, that was the way it was done, but on the other hand that didn't actually affect it. It didn't it didn't bring it about. For generations and for generations, the ordinary people clung to their pagan practices, and especially practices which had to do with good luck, with bad luck, and with death and dying. But now here so it it was not an easy time, and at the and during the same period, you had all kinds of extremely severe heresies like the Donatist and the Manichae's and Pelagianism.
So Augustine over there in Hippo was having a pretty hot time of it, trying to keep his little old bark of Peter afloat, but he did against all the odds against all the odds that the church of Rome, the Catholic church seems to come up like a court. Now here's my point, and it's not a new one, but I take it very seriously. When Augustine stood up on his chair, as it's called the Cathedra, and addressed the people of Hippo, or when he went down to the great city of Carthage and addressed his people there, or if he got up in the public place and addressed the whole population of Hippo or of Carthage, there would not be a single atheist in the crowd. There wouldn't be a single person there who didn't believe in their hereafter. There wouldn't be a single person, I mean, formally.
There wouldn't be a single person there who didn't have a close relationship with life here and the domination of our life by gods or goddesses or something. But something, something above man, something superior. There wouldn't be anybody in his whole audience who would be in that category, who would be completely godless. The problem was to have them from keeping having too many gods and goddesses. The problem was to keep them from from going to exaggerated extremes in their recognition of the dead and the and the vitality of the dead and and the pietas, the piety, notice that's no translation at all, that binds me to my ancestors.
Ancestors. The problem was to soften it, to keep it from being exaggerated. Today, you can meet people going into certain Protestant sects who don't even believe in immortality at all. Very simply, Augustine, with all his problems, did not live in a godless world. We do.
We do. We live in a godless world. By godless, I mean, not that God is out of it. I mean by that, as you would probably have guessed, I hope, that we're living in a world that in that as a world, as a society I mean ours, our western culture has rejected the concept of God and replaced it with not a god or a goddess, not with a multitude of gods or goddesses, but with an abstraction which we call man, or the proletariat, or humanity, or society. I don't care what you call it, but it comes down to man, m a n or w o m a n.
That's all. That's all. That's the world we're living in. Why, for example, did them does right now, I just read the book review. You all have well, I'm sure you you all ought to remember Whitaker Chambers and the trial of his, and the and the book that Chambers wrote called Witness.
If you haven't read it, I hope you get it and read it, at least the introduction, his letter to my children. But why does a man like Sidney Hook, who's still living, who who himself is an ex communist, why is it that he in a very in a very recent book with you from the from the London Times, why does he praise Whitaker Chambers and then said, unfortunately, he brings God into it? Because that witness on the title of Chambers' book means I'm witnessing to God and my faith in God. That's what it means. Doesn't mean witness in the quarry against his.
That was only incidental. Why does a man like Cook take that at it? Because you see, Chambers said, you only have a choice between two things. Either you go with God or you go with communism and atheism. And this was in 1948, and you can see where the world has gone.
We are making a choice, and it ain't for God as a as a society. So I've said this many times, but you see when you read this kind of thing and when you see how the lives of those people were enmeshed, immersed, submerged in gods and goddesses, in in in some kind of religious practices. They would scarcely make a move without going to a fortune teller or go to someone who who examined the entrails of birds or some kind of business like that. This was big business. I mean business, dollars and cents or statues.
So that the people surrounding Augustine, there's a people surrounding Saint Paul, the people surrounding Peter, James, and John. None of these civilizations were atheistic or godless. We, in the twentieth century, have achieved it. We have done just that. We have, for the first time in human history, a large segment of the of our world as we know it, explicitly on principle, atheistic.
I said atheistic, not agnostic, that's even worse, but atheistic. And and absolutely cultivating what? Man and the world. Call it secularism. There's no better word.
Now, this is the world we're living in. Don't ever mistake. This is the world we're living. This is the world you're making your daily bread in. This is the world you're bringing your children up in, your grandchildren, yourself, your families.
This is the world in which that you inhabit. And don't mistake the enemy. It is an enemy of God, and yours is the choice. Justice Chambers said, in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.