A reading of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke. The angel Gabriel was sent from god to a town of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin, betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. Upon arriving, the angel said to Mary, rejoice, oh highly favored daughter. The lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women. At these words, Mary was deeply troubled and wondered what the angel's greeting might mean. But the angel went on to say, do not fear, Mary. You have found favor with god. You shall conceive and bear a son and you will call him Jesus.
Great will be his dignity and he will be called son of the most high. The lord god will give him the throne of David, his father. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever and his reign will be without end. Then Mary said to the angel, how can of all this happen? Since I do not know man.
The angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Hence, the holy offspring to be born of you will be called son of god. Know that Elizabeth, your kinswoman, has conceived a son in her old age. She who was thought to be sterile is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with god. Mary said, I am the maidservant of the lord.
Let it be done to me as you say. And with those words, the angel left Mary. And this is the gospel, indeed the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Today is indeed the feast of the immaculate conception of our blessed lady.
And it is a day that I trust will never be forgotten in The United States Of America. Let us all this morning remember Pearl Harbor and what happened on that Sunday morning at 07:30. And, also, remember, in thinking of those who died and were wounded and many of them for life, think of those who were left behind. They suffered too and maybe more. The doctrine of the immaculate conception was proclaimed officially by Pius the ninth in 1854.
But in 1850, the great English poet Wordsworth, in what he called an ecclesiastical sonnet, had these very well known words in regard to our blessed mother and her sinlessness. He called her our our tainted nature's solitary boast, our tainted nature, not rotten nature, not depraved nature, but our tainted nature's solitary boast, and that was a protestant speaking. Four years before the official declaration well, of course, the doc the idea of the immaculate conception was not born in 1854 with the with that encyclical letter of Pius the ninth in a fabulous deus. Now the curious thing is that we today, speaking generally, are living in a sinless age, sinless, not because we don't sin, but because we deny that any such thing as sin exists. I'm speaking in general.
Because first of all, by and large, people don't believe in god anymore. So there's no question of any kind of a relationship between a human being and god. And, of course, there's no question at all about immortality. That's gone by the board. Dostoevsky practically wrote the re requiem of that in the nineteenth in the nineteenth century.
And furthermore, in many instances, many of our contemporaries will tell you that man can't commit evil. That if he does, he's either ignorant or he's a sick man or woman. So the two great answers to evil, whatever it is, is education and a doctor, an MD of some sort. Now I'm not exaggerating this in the least, and some of this is coming from the pulpits of the holy Catholic Roman church. Mary stands sinless.
That's her prerupt because she never, from the first moment of her conception, had anything like the taint of original sin attached to her. Not even the taint. Of course, Wordsworth was a little bit wrong because remember, Christ had a complete human nature. And therefore, in a certain sense, Mary is not our human nature's solitary boast. Christ was human with his human nature.
But as far as being totally and exclusively and only a human being, Mary is our painted nature's solitary boast. She alone knew not sin of any sort. Now today, as I say, we are a sinless people because we deny sins that there's no such thing as sin. Oh, yes. There's antisocial conduct.
There is conduct which wounds my neighbor. It it it it destroys the community. It's an enemy of society. Well, you know all of this garbage. That's what it is.
I use that. It's worse than that because garbage is valuable if you use it right. But when when you bring in that tiny little word sin, you are bringing in god, human beings who are not perfect, Rousseau to the contrary, notwithstanding, that we not only can sin, but we do sin, we are sinners, and we need redemption. The world has nothing to do. That's a lot of baloney, says your secularist.
The only thing that matters is the world you live in. Do the best you can in it. And if greed is your god, so be it because money will make it very comfortable. We've had a beautiful example of that in the past week, magnificent example, mister Johnson and and Greed. Now the point of sin is not that it hurts me, not that it hurts my neighbor, not that it is or or or not that it destroys community or society or all that.
The point of sin is that it does something to break my relationship with god almighty and endangers my eternity, which can be either hell or heaven. The Catholic church still teaches there's a hell just as it teaches there's a heaven. You mustn't let the hell get above you even though you prefer Dante's because, you know, that's the the most popular book of his trilogy. Sin is a reality. We can commit sin because if we can't commit sin, I mean, the word can't, cannot, then we are then we are determined creatures.
And if there's one thing god gave us that separates us from all other creatures below angels is free will. Free will. I can say I will serve. I can say I will not serve. Serve.
That's within my power, and I stand responsible for it. Now we know there are plenty of things that can interfere with responsibility. There are plenty of things that can take away guilt, but the fact that that is a fact does not take away the fact that I can, under certain circumstances, act freely. If I can't do that, what good are all your contracts? The very fact that I say thank you is my recognition of your free will.
That little simple thing, thank you. Of course, some people don't know that phrase, but it is a it's pretty good English. Thank you. And so today, the church is holding up the immaculate conception, the mother of god. Notice, we're hearing an awful lot about the mother of the lord, the mother of Christ, the mother of Jesus Christ, the mother of the Messiah.
Notice, all of those phrases can be legitimately held without at all without at all claiming Christ to be god. It was the council of Ephesus which said Mary is the mother of god because Jesus had two natures and only one person, and Mary is the mother of that person. And she is our sinless, stainless, immaculate mother in a world that knows sin, can sin, is a sinner, and needs a savior. And thank god and hallelujah, we have a savior, Jesus Christ born on the first Christmas day. The name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.