A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to the crowds, I solemnly assure you, history has not known a man born of woman greater than John the baptizer. Yet, the least born into the kingdom of god is greater than he. From John the baptizer's time until now, the kingdom of god has suffered violence, and the violent have taken it by force. All the prophets, as well as the law, spoke prophetically until John.
If you are prepared to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who was certain to come. Heed carefully of what you hear, 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. Our blessed lord came with absolutely an authentic, proper, complete human nature.
And as I said, we can not in the slightest bit be guilty of anthropomorphism, that is in thinking of God in human terms, when we think of Jesus Christ because he is truly human. As human as any one of us is, with the exception of the absence of sin of all sorts. Now, if our blessed lord came to save us, if he is our savior, that causality, the power or whatever word you want to use of his salvation has to apply to me. It when I come into this world and during the time I'm in this world. If I'm going to be saved, then the salvation that Jesus Christ brought nearly two thousand years ago has to apply to me in 1984.
That's just plain common sense. How does it work? How does this operate? In various ways. But there's one way it operates that that we are not thinking enough of these days, and that is the sacraments.
Sacraments, not sacramentals. Sacraments. Now in the sixteenth century, one of the great disputes with the reformers and with the traditional church was, what is a sacrament and how many are there? There was no question about the efficacy of the sacraments. It was just a question of what they are.
And out of the confusion, turmoil came the results that we have come to know. But the point I wanna make is not about the number of the sacraments. It's what they do. We talk about, for example, the sacrament of the holy Eucharist. And today, there's so much emphasis upon how we do it.
They call it preparing the liturgy. We have to in we have to create liturgies as if everything that we get out of the sacrament of the Eucharist is what we put into it. Now, obviously obviously, there's a tremendous truth in the simple statement that we do get out of something, a consequence, results, effects, somewhat in proportion to the effort we put into them. That's for sure. You can go out and pick up the most repulsive stray dog or cat you ever saw, and bring that animal into your home, and wash it, and cut it, and care for it, and feed it, and see that it gets sleep, and and give it the proper diet so that the fur will get nice and shiny, and you can go on and on giving it your utmost attention.
And the next thing you know, you are going to love that animal profoundly. I don't care how repulsive it was or even how repulsive it remains. This is a plain human fact, and I'd be the last one on earth to to deny it. But here is where the tremendous difference comes between the the faith of a Christian in the efficacy of a sacrament and in what we call sacramentals, like holy water or blessing yourself or reading the bible or going through certain liturgical gestures and rites and putting on vestments and all of those things. The tremendous difference, the profound difference is this, that the effect that the sacrament is supposed to have, it will inevitably have if you have the right dispositions.
You can't miss it because you're not doing it. You can to to come back, well, let's take baptism. The essential thing of baptism and all the protestants agreed that baptism is a sacrament. There was no question about so let's let's talk about that. You take a bit a human being and you pour water on that human being, and you say, I baptize you in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. I may be a Mohammedan. I may be a Jew. I may be the world's most god fearing atheist, and that sacrament is valid. That person is baptized.
Now, you may wanna surround that that that little simple action with all kinds of ceremonies and singing and and music and and prayers and gestures and the coming and going and flowers and candles and incense and holy water. You can bring in all of these things, and they're good. They are good things. If if they stimulate, if they enhance, if they make this sacrament more meaningful for you, these things are all good. But the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend upon them at all.
At all. The efficacy depends upon, first, did we have a savior Jesus Christ? Did he institute the sacrament of baptism? Baptism? Is the person doing it a valid agent?
And you practically can't be an invalid agent as long as you wanna do what's right. It's all necessary. Now, this is being forgotten today. See, this was one of the great things of the sixteenth century reformation that they tried, and you see, so much of it was good. They wanted to make the religious services have more significance for people, That it wouldn't be just a sleight of hand thing.
That it wasn't a matter of saying a few words and getting certain results. They wanted it to be especially Calvin. They wanted who was a very intellectual renaissance man. They wanted religion to be truly an act of the person, offering a mind and heart and soul and spirit to God. Well, you can't you can't object to that, can you?
But the point is, when you come to the sacraments, you can overdo it. And in emphasizing all these good qualities, it's possible that we will minimize what God is doing. What God is doing. Doing. He operates.
They the sacraments are the main channels of grace. What do we mean by this word grace? We mean the power, the efficacy, the influence, the dynamism, the causality. I don't care what word you want to use. I am tied in 1984 by the reality of the sacraments to the reality of my savior Jesus Christ, the baby born of a virgin Jewish girl nearly two thousand years ago.
They that is the channel. The sacraments, all of them. That they operate of their own power, we say, not by my dispositions. If I go to holy communion in the state of mortal sin, I'd receive the body and blood soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. It doesn't depend upon my faith that that reality is there at all.
That was Luther's contribution. I mean, in saying that it did depend upon my faith. I my faith doesn't create the reality of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. My faith doesn't create the reality reality of the salvation coming from Jesus Christ through the water of baptism, or of desire, or of confirmation, and or or and let me how about matrimony? Do we ever think about that?
Oh, so you hear so much about all the difficulties of married life. Well, let us talk about the difficulties of life, period. Whether you're married or single or whatever, there's going to be problems. But there's a special channel of special graces coming in a special way to help people who are living the special kind of life called the holy state of matrimony, spent spelled h o l y. Do we think about that?
Do married people think about that? That they have received the sacrament if they were validly baptized? Do they think that they are the recipients of special graces? Not the one time that they stood up before an altar and went through the process the procedures of saying I do and all that. Do they realize that this is a constant input?
Forget that. I hate to use that word. That this is a constant reaction and action of God flowing right from his son, Jesus Christ, to help them in the job, in the problem they have here and now today today. Do they ever think of that? Or do they say, can I handle this problem?
That's the way we all think. It's human. See, the whole thing about Jesus Christ is he expects us to be superhuman. He expects us to be nothing less than his brothers and his sisters. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.