A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Herod, the teacher, heard of everything that Jesus was doing, and he was perplexed. For some were saying, John, that is John the Baptist whom he had beheaded, John has been raised up from the dead. Others were saying, Elijah has appeared. And still others, one of the prophets of old has arisen.
But Herod said that, John, I beheaded. Who is this man about whom I hear all these reports? Herod was very anxious and curious to see Jesus. 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. That last sentence is curious. That Herod was anxious to see Jesus. You see, the first thing that came to my mind, what did he do about it? Well, as far as we know, he did nothing On his own volition, later on he came into the picture.
But actually he did he didn't move positively to to invite Jesus, to put himself in the position of talking with him, or of hearing about him, or hearing I mean directly from him. He didn't do anything. This first reading this morning from Proverbs ties in very well with this feast of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Frenchman. He died in 1660. Think of him in terms of the seventeenth century.
Now, this is just the century after the Reformation century. This is the century after the Council of Trent. Keep that in mind. And keep in mind that Saint the work of Saint Vincent de Paul is very much with us today. Now Saint Vincent de Paul didn't come on to the world in one burst of light without antecedents.
See, this is the curious thing. When you go back, and and I know most of you have, you say, I'd like to know more about George Washington. Where did he get those ideas? Then you find, well, you've got to go back to the philosophers of the enlightenment. Well, you say, now we know this stuff originated with the philosophers of the enlightenment.
But when you go back and start reading them, you'll see that they pulled ideas out of somebody in the past. And so it goes on and on and on. Things just don't happen abruptly, at least in the intellectual world. What they do in the physical world in the order of physics, I'll leave that alone. But today we are celebrating the the contemporary worth, value, applicability, any words you want to use of Saint Vincent de Paul.
He didn't die a martyr. But when you compare his life as I say, he dies in 1660. When, for example, the little flower of Saint Teresa Of Lisieux, they are so different. I was just reading book a about a French nun, a Carmelite. She was in the convent only about five years.
She she went in at the age of 21 and died at the age of 26. And as far as anything she did, she didn't do anything. For the world to remember, she left behind a number of documents which have become very important for some people. Her writings, but who reads that? They just just recently become available in English.
Now when you compare a life like that to a man like Saint Vincent de Paul, what do you find in common? Here's Saint Vincent de Paul who we look upon him as a as a as a a path breaker. As a man who is acknowledged as being probably in the Western world at least, a the originator of our modern social work. He had a great deal to do with the advancement, the progress and development of nursing and of hospital work. He had a tremendous influence upon the formation of the clergy as we say.
Notice that word formation. Not education, formation. Because the salpicians came out of Saint Vincent de Paul, and the salpicians had the first seminary up in Montreal, and had the first seminary in The United States in in Baltimore, Saint Mary's, and then Saint Louis was the Vincentian seminary. And they all went back to Saint Vincent de Paul. And he goes back, as I say, goes back to other antecedents too.
You gotta stop someplace. We can't always go back to Adam and Eve, you know. Now here's a man who was alive to his dead to the needs of his day. Think of that in terms of Proverbs that you heard read this morning. It comes back to my basic fundamental principle that the service of God means to appreciate present tense and do your job.
Do your job. It's the work of the Lord. Don't look at the past and let that overwhelm you in one way or another, and for heaven's sakes don't live in the future. That's ridiculous and absurd. So what's left?
The only thing that's real is a present tense. And when we ask about doing God's will, in most instances it's pretty clear to say, what do I have to do now? Now. When you ask yourself, what do these saints having? You see, the variety of sainthood is so enormous that you say, well, you can be most anything and be a saint.
Oh, no. No, you can't. You definitely can. The works you do may be immensely buried, but who cares? If God wanted to eliminate poverty the world, do you think he couldn't do it?
If he wanted to fill us all with the with all the information a computer could hold, don't you think he could do it? If he wanted to eliminate illness and misery and tragedy from the world, don't you think he could do it? So what are we supposed to be doing? The answer is very simple. God's will.
God's will. And believe me, sometimes that is not my will. Believe me. Take a tour over in Holy Cross Hospital and ask some of the patients over there. Visit some of our parishioners in their homes who are suffering, some with terminal illness.
Ask them if they like God's will. Well, of course they don't like it. And let me tell you, Christ on the cross didn't like it. Christ in the Garden Of Gethsemane didn't like it. He prayed vehemently to be spared of God's will.
When C. S. Lewis came back from his famous trip to the zoo and fell on his knees, and said, I believe in God. He said, I was the most reluctant Christian in England. He didn't want to do God's will.
I mean, in the sense in which there were plenty of obstacles, and in a sense that he'd rather be freed of it. And that's our position position often. Often. And what's wrong with it? Christ was in the same boat.
So let's not be as scared. Don't We we can't all be these heroic souls as some of the saints are presented. For example, I'll the man I talk about a lot is is Maximilian Kolbe, the the Polish Franciscan who gave his life, volunteered to take the place of another man, and was starved to death down in the in a bunker. That isn't the way that isn't the way we're going to attain our salvation. We're going to attain it as much more in the way of a Little Flower or a Therese of Lisia or a Saint Francis de Salle.
Something more much more like that. Or a courier of ours. Much more like that. But we've got to realize our opportunities. That's the point.
When you read the the life of Saint Francis Saint Vincent de Paul, you don't get the picture of man sitting back and saying, here's a beautiful work to be done. I'm going to institute this and I'll see I seek it see how in the future the how we're going to have this social work going out and out and how the poor will be the will probably we will eliminate poverty. It will be in two hundred years, it will be a vast network of of welfare. Nonsense. He saw some people on his doorstep who were hungry.
He saw saw people who needed medical care. This is a story of Saint Mary Mary, the founder of the Christ Child Society. That's exactly how it started. Exactly. She saw some some children in the wintertime without shoes.
So she asked some of her friends to give her some money to buy some shoes. That's how it all started. I'm saying miss Mary Merrick, as you know, she she started in this area, the first settlement house, the first home for convalescent children, the first summer camp. Well, the story of sainthood is doing the will of God. I don't care what they what you do.
You remember in God's sight, it isn't so important. You think of the man, the old brother down in the basement of a of a monastery peeling potatoes and someone came along and said, look, if you were told you were gonna die in in thirty minutes, what would you do? He said, I'd keep on peeling potatoes. That's the spirit we've got to see that. And what we have to see is what we're doing is important.
It may not be I'm not just saying important in the eyes of the world. Who cares about the world? Christ said my kingdom is not of this world. Yet, we keep on keeping that standard. My kingdom is not of this world, Christ said.
And therefore, what matters is I'm doing the work in his kingdom. And that means I'm doing my job, the opus dei, present tense. And there is where I work out my salvation. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.