A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Our lord said to his disciples that your belts be fastened around your waist and your lamps burning, ready. Be like men awaiting their master's return from a wedding, So that when he arrives and knocks, you will open for him at once. It will go well with those servants whom the master finds wide awake when he returns. I tell you, he will put on an apron, seat them at table, and proceed to wait on them.
Should he happen to come at midnight or before sunrise and find them prepared for his arrival, it will go well with them. And this is the gospel of the Lord. Praise you, Lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I hardly expected that the stock market in New York would yesterday translate into action a commentary upon the text we read from Saint Luke, our Lord's own words about storing up treasures.
What a commentary. I often think of how contradictory we are. A very significant, a very reputable, reliable witness to the stock market made a statement last night on the news that the stock market of New York and other stock markets are ruled by two emotions, greed and fear. Greed and fear. Now if that's true, and he's a man who certainly has a reputation of knowing what he's talking about.
If that is true, that the dominant emotional thing and remember, when the chips are down it's the emotions that count. That the dominant emotions are only two, greed and fear. The lust for money and the fear you're going to lose it. Now secondly, if the stock market is as important to our economic life, which is extremely important to our lives, period, then we have to say that those two emotions are very dominant in our national life, greed and fear. Now, if you can imagine anything more contradictory to Christ and what his church stands for, it's to say that our lives are dominated by greed and fear.
If we take a moment to look into our lives, we may be a little bit astonished to find there's a lot of greed and a lot of fear. A lot of fear. It's over thirty years ago that a in those days, towards the end of the academic year, representatives from all the big industries, including the armed services, would come on campus at Catholic U and other colleges to try to to enlist the best of the crop. To try to get a hold of promising young men and young women, to invite them to join their organizations. And I never will forget, now these are graduates from high school, but about I mean, from college, about 21 years old.
Most of them haven't even gotten their feet wet in the workforce. I never will forget, a gentleman came into my office and he was really depressed, depressed. Why was the man depressed? Because he was finding the one question that so many of these boys and girls who have not had not yet actually graduated, they hadn't graduated yet, they had great expectations, was, What is your pension plan? Here they were starting out their lives with all the possibilities, all the potentialities, all the opportunities of a full life, and all they were interested in was the pension plan at the end of life.
He was really depressed. That was my first experience of this, my first contact. And that has not decreased. That is the fear. That's the one of security.
That's putting our wealth into the into the bins, into our barns to store up. Where of course the lightning can come, the floods can come, the thieves can come, the robbers can come, and Wall Street can drop over 500 points. Remember, a lot of lives crashed yesterday. I mean lives. They were saying it was supposed to be funny.
You can't jump out of the windows now because you can't open them, as you could in 1929. I didn't think that was funny at all. They call it the massacre. It's panic. Here you have in stark reality, stark reality, the difference between the city of God and the city of man.
You can't have it better placed. I talked yesterday morning about Sister Emmanuel, God with us, the nun who retired from teaching, a very well educated woman who took, after her retirement, took to the garbage heaps of the city of Cairo and what she has done over there. She was on a major part of sixty Minutes Sunday night. If anything could be in contrast between that woman's life and her perspective and Wall Street, where the two emotions are fear and greed, I'd like to know who can tell me in graphic terms what it is. They're contradictory.
And remember this, Jesus Christ is contradictory of this world. Never forget it. We we often forget this, you see. We often forget it. That to be a Christian means that you're out of step with the world.
And yet we have these very good schismatic Catholics coming along and telling the Pope, get with it, be contemporary, you don't know what's going on. Well, if there's anything that God's church should be, it should be not contemporary. Its message comes from Jesus Christ who was not contemporary. He was not a contemporary man at his day. He stood against the contemporary day.
Remember that to be a Catholic means to be different. And if you're not different, one of two things happened has happened. Either the world has become Christian or you have joined the world. And when you say you, I mean me. I'm talking to me.
You see, we forget this. Now I talked to you about Ignatius of Antioch. The good old Freudians hold him up as a as a minor maniac, a neurotic, if not worse. Why? Because he could not wait to be ground into wheat by the wild animals into the bread of Christ.
We think that's extreme. We talked about the North American martyrs, six priests and two laymen, who voluntarily, completely voluntarily suffered martyrdom for the truth of their religion, the Church of Jesus Christ. Not what some people today would like to make it out to be. What they have in common with the past is anybody's guess. But we are one with the past.
We are one with the Teresa of Lisia. We are one with the Teresa of Avila. We're one with the Catherine of Siena. We're one with the Thomas Aquinas and the Saint Thomas More and Ignatius of Antioch. They are the Catholic and they are the Christians which we should be tied to, not to some internationally known theologian who has money enough to buy a word processor.
You have your choice. And remember this, the tiny little baby that goes back to that beautiful pond gets baptized, or the adult who's baptized by it back there, what do we say? You're putting off the old man. You're putting on the new. What do we mean by that?
Is are they just words? You give the little baby a light or you give it to the sponsor, you say, carry this light, Lucifer. Put on this white garment and keep it immaculate till you die. We know it's not likely to be kept immaculate, but Christ came to give us new hope. Even when we soil that garment or that light gets dim and maybe goes out, we are not lost.
Not if we have Jesus Christ and we are faithful to him at least in perseverance. Christ doesn't ask perfection. And so I can't imagine it's an awful, awful commentary in terms of suffering that that crash caused yesterday. It's not over. I don't know what's going to happen today.
Nobody knows. The definition of Wall Street is that it's irrational. But that this I get come back. The two controlling emotions are greed and fear. And a true Christian heart with the light of Christ in it should try fight against greed and against fear.
Because their riches are not of this world, and their hope is in Jesus Christ who is God. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.