A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus looked up to heaven and said, I do not pray for my disciples alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their word that all may be one as you, father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. I have given them the glory you gave me that they may be one as we are one.
I, living in them, you, living in me, that their unity may be complete. So shall the world know that you sent me and that you love them as you love me. Father, all those you gave me, I would have in my company where I am to see this glory of mine, which is your gift to me because of the love you bore me before the world even began. Just father, the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these men have known that you sent me. To them, I have revealed your name, and I will continue to reveal it so that your love for me may live in them, and I also may live in them.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to lord Jesus. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This excerpt from the book of the acts of the apostles, This this reading today is extremely dramatic, absolute, and it has a very comical aspect. Really, if if you if you could imagine yourself, you know, up on some higher turret around the forum.
This is takes place in Jerusalem, remember, and where Paul has been accused, you see, by the chief priests, and that is the Jewish leaders. And according to Roman law, except for capital punishment, the Jews were allowed to to handle their own legal affairs. So Paul has been hailed before the Sanhedrin. Of course, the Roman commander's there just to, you know, just to keep his eye on them. So they are made up the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were the larger group. And at this time, the great controversy was, is there a life after this? Is there an a living soul man that endures beyond death? The Pharisees, yes, there is. This is the time of Christ now.
This isn't two or three hundred years before. Sadducees said, oh, no. Man has no immortal soul. There is no life after death. So you had Paul now is brought in to be tried by the Sanhedrin, made up of Pharisees and Sadducees.
So they bring him in, and he was a smart cookie. He knew this. Paul was Paul was a Pharisee himself and a very intelligent and a very well educated man. Don't forget he was a Roman citizen from towers too. That because that's gonna play a very important role.
So when he sees the situation, he simply sets the Pharisees and the Sadducees at each other's throats. So they almost forget him in their conflict with each other, except to to to be on the point of almost tearing the poor man apart over their argument with one another. So the Roman commander, he's getting worried that they're gonna pull Paul to pieces and kill him, so he yanks him out. It's a very fascinating story. And, of course, it winds up, you know, with Paul saying, I appeal to Caesar.
I'm a Roman citizen. So that's how he got from Jerusalem to Rome. Now what I think is terribly important for us, I mean, for us in our daily living. You see, we all expect too much vision. We all live too much in the future.
Now there's nothing that I said there which is against reasonable planning, reasonable care, reasonable efforts to secure the future in the sense of taking care of your children, taking care of your old age, and you know. There no. We're talking about looking into the future and dealing with it as a reality in a very fictitional way. Dealing with things that we don't even know are going to happen, but we fear are going to happen. And we're not sure they won't happen, so we deal with them as if they were going to happen.
No. So but we like to know where in other words, I can remember as a kid on the Patapsco River, when we'd want to get across at certain parts, you would see rocks. Well, if you look straight ahead, you say, how in the world am I ever going to get across there? Then you start out going from one rock to the next rock. And then when you're on that rock, you say, where's my next step?
If you had any sense, you didn't try to look too far ahead. But you see, in life, we like to look far ahead. We like to see the view. Just imagine the money. I say money because money tells you something about people.
When they're willing to spend money for something, they are taking it pretty seriously. And the fortunes that are spent every year on fortune telling or consultations with different people who, one way or another, authentically or not, are consulted with the hope, with the expectation of piercing the curtain of the present. We like to get beyond that. We like to see what's gonna happen next year. How next two years from now.
Will Johnny graduate? You know, all of this stuff. How will my children turn out? How will my jobs turn out? How am I gonna handle my life when I'm 10 years old?
Or, you know, all that kind of thing. We like to look in. That that's perfectly normal. But Christ said, if you follow me, you will say the Lord's prayer. And the Lord's prayer says, give us this day our daily bread.
Notice there's not a word in there about tomorrow's bread. When the Israelites left Egypt and spent forty years wandering around in the Sahara Desert and were fed with flesh and were fed with manna or bread, Remember, they only got one day supply at a time. If you took more than you needed for a day, it disappeared. So now we come back to Saint Paul. We started with and this is exactly what I want you to remember.
He says, here's what I Paul must have been terrible. He didn't know what was going to happen to him next. He had no idea what was going to happen to him. So he says, our lord appears to Paul and says, keep up your courage. Keep up your courage.
Just as you have given testimony to me in Jerusalem, so must you give testimony to me in Rome. Now can you imagine? Here we here's Paul in in Jerusalem. That's at the farthest end of the Mediterranean Sea. He's a Jew from Tarsus, that still farther east.
And now after going through all of these sufferings, his taking being taken a prisoner, his being scourged, and now being almost torn apart by the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and they're struggling with each other, Now he gets a message that you're going to roam. I wonder what his reaction was. And note, nothing said that how you're going to do it, what you're going to do there, what are you going to say, what's going to happen to you. Nothing. Take courage.
You're going to go to Rome. Now there's a tremendous lesson there for us, confidence in god, in our lord Jesus Christ. There's a tremendous truth sufficient for the day is the evil thereof thereof. Not tomorrow's, not next week's, and above all, not yesterday's, not last week's, not last year's. My grace, notice, when Saint Paul was at the end of his rope, Don't ever think you're the first one who gets to the end of your rope.
Christ got to the end of his rope. My god. My god. Why have you abandoned me? That was Christ, the son of god on the cross.
He was at the end of his robe. And Paul was at the end of his robe. He wanted to get out of the whole mess. He wanted to get out of it. He'd had enough of it.
And the boy says, my grace is sufficient for you. Present tense. Present tense. You've heard a lot about existential you know. But the there's there is nobody, a greater, more profound existentialist, than an honest to god Christian.
Believe me. We are exit we live in the present. And, you know, that's the only reality there is to time, is the present tense, which means the reality of realities. Time is nothing. Time's not a reality any more than community and society is a reality.
And so this I I love it. This this scene today of of Jerusalem, you know, and these two factions fighting, you can just see them. Their robes flaying around and their whiskers all going over, and they're shouting each other and yanking each other's beard, you know. And here's old Paul in the midst being pulled apart by them, and the Roman commanders, he's afraid they're gonna have some kind of an insurrection, so he yanks Paul out. It's a fantastic story.
Fantastic. And yet we hear the voice, take courage. Take courage. Don't be afraid. And I'll add, as Jesus said, I am with you.
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.