A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to the crowd, when you see a cloud rising in the West, you say at once that rain is coming, and so it does. When the wind blows from the south, you say it is going to be hot, and so it is. You hypocrites, if you can interpret the portents this, of course, is of our lord speaking to the scribes and the pharisees. He says, you hypocrites, if you can interpret the portents of earth and sky, why can you not interpret what you see all about you in the present time?
Tell me, why do you not judge for yourselves what is just? When are you going with your opponent, to appear before a magistrate? Try to settle with him as you're on the way, lest your opponent turn you over to the judge and the judge deliver you up to the jailer, and the jailer throw you into prison. I warn you, you will not be released from there until you have paid the last penny. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Well, here you have another text that you don't hear, see, I mean, that you don't see on your Easter cards or on your Christmas cards. Never on god's earth did our blessed lord ever tell us that following him was a lot of fun and games, all love and joy and hallelujahs. Never once did he ever say anything like that. Never once.
In many ways, our blessed lord presents us with a very grim program of life. I mean, grim. And there's punishment involved if you don't live up to it. Punishment. He he says it time and again.
We don't like to hear this, but our lord said it. So it's up to us. We do what we want. We can close our ears. We can walk away.
We can we can lose ourselves in all the great and good attractions of this life. Don't blame it on those things. Put the responsibility where it belongs in oneself. We are the ones who make the choices. I make the choice, not we, I.
I am responsible. I am autonomous. We like to pride ourselves on that, and yet we don't like it when we get in the crush. We like to say everybody is guilty. Everybody's responsible.
Well, if that's true, nobody is. Our blessed lord gave us a very solemn word that you pick up your cross and you follow him. And if you stop there, it is grim. It is repulsive. Let's face it.
Don't be afraid of it. When our blessed lord faced the cross in Gethsemane, he sweated blood. He begged his father to be excused. He begged his father. Now and his son of god.
So who are we to try to say, well, now it's not quite so bad? It is bad in many instances. Just yesterday, when we had the funeral of missus Dorothy Day, I I it didn't really get it gets through to me. Here in this pew right here, you had her husband, well up in years, a little bit older than she was. And with him, his two children, all grown and living apart.
And here all here last Sunday, here's a woman who was in really in the bloom of her life. And like that, she's gone. And he's left alone. I mean alone. Nobody can know it except the ones who's in that place, believe me.
And there's nothing going to come along that's going to wipe it out. Nothing. As C. S. Lewis says, An amputee is always an amputee.
The wound may heal, but you're still one legged. So let's face it, life has its grim moments. We can get into a superficial attitude about it, and then where are we? But one thing's sure, it will pass, and we'll come smack up to reality. Now one of the realities that we're smacked up against, whether we like it or not, as disagreeable and repulsive as it may be, we're talking about AIDS, A I D S, acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Did you read what our Surgeon General had to say on this subject? Have you listened and seen what we've been exposed to on TV? Here somebody gets up with all the authority of office and says, Sure, we have vaccine against AIDS. It's the rubber. In all of this talk, and there's been there's been volumes of it in the last few weeks, it's a political issue, of course, There has not been a single word that I have heard, there is nothing I have seen that suggests there's any moral element here at all, at all.
None at all. There's not been a suggestion that there should be some review of our of our code of morality and accept the fact that maybe there are certain certain modes of sexuality which are legitimate, good, and availing unto salvation, and that others are heinous crimes. Now I said heinous because active homosexuality objectively is a mortal sin, and it dams you to hell. I mean, is absolutely the basic Catholic doctrine. You may like it.
You may throw it out. I don't care. I'm telling you what the what has been the traditional teaching of the church. In the old testament, homosexuality actually was punished by death. There is not a word been said about the virtue of chastity.
Once, a young student from Virginia got up in one of these meetings that was on television, and he dared to say that he thought we ought to go back to the virtue of chastity, and I don't know why, but that was cut off immediately. Immediately, he disappeared. Now, I want to put these things together. There's one thing sure we all die. Death is a lot shorter than birth, believe me.
Ask the million and a half abortion victims. We have a certain span of life which you if you measure it against the Calvert Cliffs down there on the Chesapeake Bay, if you live to be a 100, it's pretty insignificant against eons of years, eons. And you can see some of it right down on the on the on the Chesapeake Bay, right on the Calvert Cliffs there, right on the you can see these the different levels of the ages of man and the of the earth. It's right down there. You can see it.
Right down near the atomic energy plant. Now, what happens in between there? What are we supposed to be doing with our lives? What? Are we living for eternity or are we living for time?
Is there a God or isn't there a God? Have I an obligation to serve him? Well, if there's no God, I don't have any obligations. So let's go out and eat and drink and get the rubbers. Why not?
And when it gets too tough, get yourself a very, peaceful, painless way of exit exiting, leaving this world. This makes sense. If you're gonna be a secularist, be one. It can be a lot of fun. And being a Christian in this world is not a lot of fun.
I think of a Colby or a Saint Teresa, not of Avila, but of Lisiev, where her life was absolutely unspectacular. But it was tough. It was a tough life. Carrying the cross of Jesus Christ is no picnic. It's not fun and games.
All this talk we have today and laughter about fun and love and all of this, you know, that isn't life at all. Might just as well get yourself a bit of cocaine or a bit of starch. It all has the same effect. Life's a serious business. And even a man like Plato in his republic puts this out when he said about his custodians of the city, no man is prepared to be a custodian unless he knows how to die.
And so something like missus Day, Dorothy Day's death, it does it hits you, it shocks you, as it should. It's one of the signs that our blessed lord says, look, don't be dumb, don't be blind, don't be hard of hearing, look around you, see what's happening, and then come to terms. Because in the last analysis, you make the judgment. Not your neighbor, not your fathers or your mothers, your grandmothers, your grandparents, or the society or community or all that malarkey. You stand before god as naked as the day you came into this world, and you make the choice.
And it's a choice fraught with eternity. And the concluding word is fraught with trust, with confidence, with certitude. That if there's anything you can trust in this life, and I mean this sincerely, if there's anything you can trust, it's the word of Jesus Christ who came into this world as a baby born of a woman and is the son of God. He is truly the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus Christ. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.