A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. As Jesus entered Capernaum, that's the city on the lake up on the Northwest corner of the Lake Of Galilee where they are still excavating with a very important, well, city in our lord's time. At the opposite end from Jerusalem, which of course is in the South. Now as Jesus Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion, a Roman centurion approached him with this request. Sir, my serving boy is at home in bed paralyzed, suffering painfully.
Jesus said to the Roman, I will come and cure him. Sir, the centurion said in reply, I am not worthy to have you under my roof. Just give an order, and my boy will get better. I am myself a man under authority, and I have troops assigned to me. If I give one man the order dismissed, off he goes.
If I say to another, come here, the man comes. If I tell my slave, do this, he does it. At this, Jesus showed amazement and remarked to his followers, I assure you, I have never found this much faith in Israel. Mark what I say. Many will come from the East and the West and will find a place at the banquet in the kingdom of god with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, no longer an assembly of the chosen people.
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. This is the feast of Saint Francis Xavier, one of the first followers, disciples of Saint Ignatius, Loyola. And, I guess I should say something about him.
But I wanna answer a a suggestion, if you might call it that, that came from one of our congregations some days ago. This person said, well, you you speak in generalities, but you don't tell us how to do anything or words to that effect. And this was in regard, you know, to following Christ and being a good Christian. Well, that may be true. I I I don't doubt it because in many ways, you you do deal in generalities.
For example, most of us are against sin. We're in favor of mother's love, you know, things like that. So if you ask me, in this season of Advent, when we're supposed to try to draw closer to Christ, what does this mean? Actually, what does it mean to grow does it mean to feel closer to Christ? I'm speaking for myself, and I say forget it.
Forget it. I'm speaking again for myself. I have absolute nothing but distrust for feelings, for emotions, for sentiments. I know how they can change. Why, if it makes the change in the weather look like the rock of Gibraltar impermanence, depending on how you what kind of a breakfast you had or whether someone said good morning to you, whether your digestion's good or bad, or whether you've gotten a good business deal, or your child has done successfully, or has flunked out, or been kicked out of school.
Are you going to run your life on feeling? It's commitment that counts and what you do. And I have nothing new to offer. Our blessed lord's given us the answer to how you should live your lives. I mean, down to the nitty gritty daily living.
First point, he said, come follow me. Well, here's where you get into trouble. Because some some people, and I'm speaking as from historical fact, have taken that literally and had abandoned their families, have given up their children, and wandered off into the desert up especially in the Nile Valley. This was done in the time of Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine of Hippo. The place was filled with thousands of men and women who had fled from different parts of Southern Europe because they said, Jesus said, come follow me.
So they said, we'll be hermits. We find ourselves as far as I am concerned. My concept of following Christ is first of all, fidelity to duty. Now you'll say that sounds like Kantianism. That's just too big.
Kant wasn't wrong in everything he said, you know. If a person is married, they have responsibilities as married folk. If you're not married, you have responsibilities as non married folk. If you're a kid going to school, you have responsibility as a kid in school. If you're teaching a class, or I don't care what we're doing.
It's the actuality of the moment. That's the only reality of your life. The only reality is the actual moment. So if you're going to serve God, if you're going to follow Christ, it's got to be now. It certainly can't be yesterday.
And tomorrow, manana never comes. So how do you follow Christ? The first thing is commitment to Christ. And here you need a guide. Here you need a guide where people aren't going to confession anymore.
We call it now we call it the sacrament of reconciliation. Some we go about once a year if we think of it. But you see, you can read any man or woman. I'm I say this without any hesitation, who has tried to live close to God through his son Jesus Christ, who has done it without a spiritual director. It's almost a forgotten When did you hear that word last?
And yet, it's absolutely essential. And I can speaking of the greatest of saint like Saint Teresa of Avila, she had a whole stable full, a whole crowd, you might say, of spiritual directors trying to tell her what to do because she had problems. And her greatest problem was to know for sure whether these experiences of hers that we call religious experiences, whether they were authentic or not. And she had the utmost distrust for them, and I'm in her league, completely in her league. So the the how do you follow Christ?
In fact, today, first of all, you need guidance from his church. We cannot do it alone. We will get all mixed up. Remember, you can be the worst kind of a heretic by taking one truth and belaboring it and beating it to death. You can be one of the most vicious kinds of persons if you take one virtue and say, I'll practice that.
The difficulty of following Christ is to do it in the totality of knowing his will. And that is not a great what is what is God's will for me? God's will is what he wants me to do today. This mass is being offered for a lady who has recently been diagnosed as having probably incurable cancer. What it is how much she feel?
What does her family feel? What do her dear friends feel? Now, this is not a deadly diagnosis because they Remember, the sign of death is hanging over all our head. It's just a matter of more or less time that we have. Keep that in mind.
But to have this horrendous news come, it's hard to take. Very hard to take. And yet, she said, here's my whole life now going down the drain. Is it? And right away, as soon as I said that, the name came to my mind, Maximilian Colbey.
Did his life go down the drain when he when he said, I'll take that guy's place. Put me I'll take his place. I'll starve be starved to death. So he goes down. They strip him of every piece of clothes he has on and they shove him into a cell and slam the door for him to starve to death.
That's the end of a life. What you what good are you in a dungeon? What good can you do down there? In the Reader's Digest for this month, there's a long excerpt from a book about a little girl who was very quickly diagnosed as having an incurable disease that would carry her off. No one knew for sure.
She dies at the age of six or so. That story is heroic. Was her life in vain because it was cut short at six? I don't know what her religion was if any, But the point I'm making is that that we who say we're following Christ, our lives should be religious lives. And religion means to bind.
Religio is simply a a Latin noun for binding, for holding together, for chaining things together, for gluing them together. Religio. And so the first thing of of of getting close to Christ is doing his will, committing your yourself to him, living your life for him, and not in the abstract following said, if only I had more time, I could do more good. Forget that kind of nonsense. What do what you can now in your own home, in you among your own family, among your own working people, among the people you associate with.
They're the ones who need you and you need them. They're the ones you have to be kind to and loving and for and forgiving and generous and understanding, and this is the tough part. This is the tough part. The people we live in day in and day out. Don't underestimate it.
And so, it's the one thing that first has to come is commitment. And how do you carry out this commitment? The old thing. Prayer, good works, and the sacraments. Prayer, good work, and the sacraments.
That's all I can say this morning, but that's a pretty big program. I wish you well for Advent. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.