A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Zechariah, the father of John, that's John the Baptist, filled with the Holy Spirit, uttered this prophecy. Blessed be the lord, the god of Israel, because he has visited and ransomed his people. He has raised up a horn of saving strength for us in the house of David, his servant, as he promised through the mouths of his holy ones, the prophets of ancient times. Salvation from our enemies and from the hands of all our foes.
He has dealt mercifully with our fathers and remembered the holy covenant that he made, the oath he swore to Abraham, our father, he would grant us. That rid of fear and delivered from the enemy, we should serve him devoutly and through all our days be holy in his sight. And you, oh child, shall be called prophet of the most high. For you shall go before the lord to prepare straight paths for him, giving his people a knowledge of salvation and freedom from their sins. All this is the work of the kindness of our god.
He, the day spring, shall visit us in his mercy to shine on those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. To guide our feet into the way of peace. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen. Because in so many ways, we have lost a consciousness.
Notice, I said consciousness of sin. We have lost our appreciation of our redeemer. Obviously, if we're all a bunch of first rate saints, we never needed a redeemer. And consequently, these two ideas, the idea of sin as some kind of a broken relationship between me, god's creature, and god, my creator, the lack of consciousness of that that that's the essence of sin, not what it does to me, puts me in the hospital or gives me AIDS, but that in some way, it distorts or breaks or any words you want a relationship between god and me. Me.
The individual me, not society, which is a fit a fiction of the imagination, but me. Once I've lost that idea, then what happens to the concept of a of a redeemer? And if our if Christ our lord is not our redeemer, what is he? A good man like Socrates or Buddha or Ghani or Martin Luther King? You know, the these comparisons are made.
Christ is put in the same category with a few more, a couple rock singers. I like that. It shows your Catholicity. Small c. You see, I'm not exaggerating.
I'm talking about Catholic people, good Catholic people. We have lost this consciousness of sin. We've lost this consciousness of having a redeemer. And you know what that means? We have lost joy.
That's what we've done. We've lost joy. I can't use the word gay anymore. That's out of the English language. But that was a wonderful word.
A wonderful word. The feeling no matter how bad life is treating me, I have a redeemer. It's not the end of the world. It only seems to be the end of a tiny little bit of the world. But if I know my redeemer, Jesus Christ, then I have a a concept of the world which goes beyond the hospital, the sick bed, my illness, my lack of a job, my poverty, my riches, my successes, you name it.
But we have lost it. We've lost the idea of sin. We've lost the consciousness of the redeemer, and that means we have also lost that great Christian joy. You have never seen a sad saint. And that goes even for a courier of ours who was half off his rocker at times with his ideas of dieting and no food and all that.
He himself rejected that towards the end of his life as being really ridiculous. That isn't Christian. It's Christian to be joyful. It's Christian to say, god, I am a sinner. I'm a sinner.
And honest to god, sinner. I have sinned. Not society, not my parents, not my poor environment, not my poor education, not because my my chromosomes or my genes incline me to alcoholism. I sinned. I committed a gluttony or whatever.
But I look up and see my savior, Jesus Christ, and a smile comes on my face. I have a redeemer. All is not lost. All is saved. And if that's true, how can you not be joyful in the lord in the lord.
In the lord. You see, we have gotten away from god almighty, and it's in a sense not our fault. We we have been born into a world that is so secularistic, so materialistic that we cannot avoid its contamination. And yet, as Christians, we are called upon to be in this world, but not of it. And how do you do it?
You throw a baby into a barrel of pitch and say, look, kid, you're in the pitch. You've got it all around you, but remember, you're not of it. The baby looked up and said, are you crazy? Why'd you throw me in here? Well, God put me here.
I don't know why. I'll leave that up to your better wisdom. But here here I am. And God said, you're in the world, but don't you dare be of it. Because if you are, you ain't with me because you cannot serve two masters.
And notice what our lord said. He said, you you will love the one and despise the other, or you will despise one and love the other. That's very good Aristotelian logic. It's also the words of Jesus Christ, the son of God. I rate him a little bit higher than Aristotle, and that's high praise.
And so as we we're all surrounded here with all this panoply of Christmas, the Christmas that counts is what happens in your hearts and in your lives. This is beginning to sound like a retreat sermon or something. But the thing is we Christmas should mean a rebirth of the spirit. And what what are we dealing with? What are the basic truths?
Not a lot of froth and nonsense or as Lewis would say, moonshine. What is the basic fact? And the basic fact is in some way we sinned in our ancestors. We come into the world sinful, and we are saved from sin by Jesus Christ, a baby, a baby that developed in the uterus of a woman just like any other baby. And it is God Almighty, the son of god, and we bow our knee before that son of Mary.
In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen.