A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. A crowd of thousands had gathered so numerous that they were treading upon one another. Then Jesus began to speak first to his disciples. Be on your guard against the east of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known.
Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight. What you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the house tops. I say to you who are my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill only the body and can do no more. I will show you whom you ought to fear. Fear him who has power to cast into Gehenna after he has killed you.
Yes. I tell you, fear him. Are not five sparrows sold for a few pennies? Yet not one of those sparrows is neglected by god. In very truth, even the hairs of your head are counted.
Fear nothing. You are worth much more than a flock of sparrows. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
This is one of the most telling excerpts from our lord's life. Now remember, this is our lord speaking. This is no parable. He's telling us something here directly. He's trying to give us confidence in god.
Well, even as I said that, you'll say, well, for heaven's sake, what else could you put confidence in? What else is there? Well, the fact of the matter is, as we all know, we put our confidences, we put our trusts, we give our life, our honor, and the whole caboodle to a lot of things. It may be even a dog. Now I say that with respect for dogs.
Because just within almost hours, I've had two instances of where people have lost their pets of 15 and approaching twenty years, and it's been a very severe trial. I knew one man whose life was almost destroyed when he lost his dog. He tried to replace it, but there were he could not. He practically withdrew from life. Now and and this man in the beginning was a very normal person.
So the point of the fact of life is we do put our trust in all kinds of things. Notice I including human beings. We even trust one another sometimes to some extent when we feel comfortable with it or some such nonsense. If there's anything that's very disturbing today, and I see and in my own restricted experience, I see plenty of it. People are terribly anxious.
They're worried. They're not secure. How often you hear college age students say, I I I'm trying to find myself. What in the world do they mean to say trying to find myself? You can't be hunting for something unless you know what you wanna find.
You can't send somebody out in the barn even into a haystack and say, would you go out there and find it for me? You'll say, well, my friend, you're using a pronoun without an antecedent. Well, that is terribly bad, you know. But the point is, how can I go out in the barn into the haystack to find something unless you tell me what I'm looking for? Well, what am I looking for?
This nonsense of trying to find yourself, who's the self you're trying to find? Where do you find it? In a haystack? Well, some people do. Or the back seat of a car.
Our lord is plain and simple. Trust god. Now the point I wanna make, remember, god, he is in inexpressible, he's untouchable, he's intangible. We can't imagine him. God is simply beyond human beings, but not Jesus Christ, the son of God.
Christ became incarnate. God became man in the flesh, incarnate, incarnation. That we we don't think enough about that. We get all mixed up with so many things which have their importance, and I stress that. Everything has its importance.
If it's a thing, it's a something, and therefore, it has some importance. It's that simple. Res means re we get our word reality from it, means thing. So there's nothing wrong in our being involved and in placing some kind of trust in persons and things in this life. There's that's being human.
We have to do it. But the point is, is that all there is to it? Is that all there is to it? Why have you abandoned me, even you, my friends? We cannot trust absolutely any human being because they're as fragile and as frail as I am, and I know myself to that extent.
Remember, the first commandment is thou shalt love God. And as I've said many times, if you love God, you cannot fail to love his creation, including human beings and even your neighbor and even those who live under the same roof with you. Remember, there's no difficulty in loving the Eskimo unless you go up there and live with them, then you may have some problems. God asks us to trust him in something we can get hold of, in something we can see and touch and smell, and that was Jesus Christ, the son of god incarnate. And he is telling us something here today, words that should give us all kinds of courage.
Are not you worth more than a whole ton of sparrows? Do you remember the days when the heavens would almost be covered with sparrows? Since the the disappearance of the horse, we've the sparrows have disappeared to a great extent, but there used to be great flocks of them around. Something like the starlings are today in places and just as much of a nuisance. They were something commonplace, something cheap, something multitudinous, something you didn't care about.
And yet our lord said, are not you more valuable than they? God takes care of even the hair of your head. Do we believe that? Do we believe it? Now just as soon as I said that and about trusting god, and absolutely we must.
As I said, as as Peter said, remember, oh, good old Peter, he's speaking for all of us in all our fragility. When when all the disciples have left Christ, when, you know, when he talked about the holy Eucharist, when he said, drink my blood, eat my flesh, and if you don't do it, you won't be saved, and they walked no longer with him. They could not swallow that. Who could swallow that? Anyway, Christ turned finally to Peter and said, well, are you going to leave me too?
And good old Peter says, Lord, if we leave you, where am I going to go? Where? Read Thompson's Hound of Heaven. You can read it in three or four minutes. It's the summary of the life.
Read the first sentence of Saint Augustine's confessions. Lord, you've are you you've made this for yourself, and our hearts will not be at rest till they rest in you, in you. Now men have we try this. And as I say, being human, being involved in this world, having responsibilities in this world, we are bound to be involved in this world. But the trouble, the whole problem of being a Christian is that we be not of it.
Of it. That's the problem. Because if we're of it, then we're one with it. And what is that to put our trust in? I mean, the most basic and ultimate trusts.
The most basic, ultimate trusts. And there's got to be something like that. Otherwise, as my dear friend wrote in the guest book in Maria Locke, life's a bowl of cherries. What the hell is the use? The dear monks asked me to translate that into German.
I leave that to the Germans. But that's what he wanted me to translate that in the in the log of the monastery, and I just happen to know the priest who had written that. But you see, there's our choice. Do we take Christ seriously? Do we?
Remember, god does not harbor competitors. All he asks of us is everything. But if we give him everything, we will get everything. He promised that. He promised that.
Because what is everything? Salvation is what matters, and that that is what and now remember, when I say salvation, I don't mean waiting till after we die and going going up to where these angels are roaming around with their wings and their harps and all that nonsense. I mean salvation in this life. And one of the salvations is to be freed of anxiety. Remember, every mass we say, we pray God to free us of sin and anxiety.
The church and these are the these are the words the official words of the liturgy. The church puts anxiety in the same category as sin. That's a big deal. That's a that's a tremendous thing. And so let us take to heart what our lord says.
Take it to heart and live it. Live it. When things are rough and rough and rougher and roughest, just say, look. Wait a minute, friend. What does this amount to for eternity?
What does this amount to under God's destiny for me? What does this amount to in terms of my salvation? It may amount to a great deal because your salvation may depend upon how you handle it. And the way to handle it is to turn the anxiety over to God and say, here I am, Lord, to do your will, and then to do what you can about your problem. Our Lord talks about the birds of the air.
I never can go down on the bay and see these birds and the ducks and the geese. They spend almost their whole time trying to get some food. They just don't sit down on some piling and bask in the sun waiting for god to come and put a fish in their beak. They're out there trying to sponge food. They're doing what they can in their own nature, and god expects us to do the same.
He didn't put us in a hammock on a hot summer day under the shade of a tree with a cool drink in our hands. We have to do our part, but we won't do anything unless we're with God and his son, Jesus Christ. Without me, you can do nothing. But with Jesus Christ, you can do everything. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.