Reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town in Galilee called 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 his greeting might mean. But the angel went on to say to her, do not fear, Mary. You have found favor with god. You shall conceive and bear a son, and you will give him the name 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. Mary then said to the angel, how can all of this take place since I do not know man? The angel replied, 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 then said, I am the maidservant of the lord. Let it be done to me as you say.
And with that, the angel left Mary. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. This is a tremendously important feast day.
We we call it the feast of the immaculate conception. And in those words, we have a whole background of the old law going all the way back to creation and taking us all the way up to Calvary and to the broken tomb and to the rest and to the lord of the resurrection and ascension and to that lord living today in his visible speaking church, a concrete entity. It's all summed up. I'm not exaggerating this. In that word, immaculate conception.
Now if there's one thing you can't avoid about the immaculate conception is that it deals with sin. And about the only place you can find that word today is in your dictionary, and I believe it's under the term obsolete and anachronism. I'm not exaggerating. I was just last night on Dan Rathers' show about West Point and all the nonsense goes on up there, and it is. And the constant question of the people who were visiting West Point was, What do you make of all this foolishness?
Memorizing menus, doing right angle turns, you know, first class nonsense. And they said it teaches responsibility in little things, so you'll be responsible in big ones. That came from the cadets. And today, of course, nobody's responsible for anything because we are all responsible for everything. Now I'm not exaggerating this picture at all.
The fact that you're sitting sitting in those pews this morning is a terrific confession of faith if you know what you're doing. Ask yourself why in the world on this cold morning in December, the day after the seventh in Pearl Harbor Of Forty One, what are you doing in those cubes? Why are you there? Answer that question. And if you follow it through, you'd go all the way back to Adam and Eve, you go back to the fall.
What do you mean by the fall? Well, we know something happened. That's for sure. Even old man Ovid, the the Greek the the the Latin poet, the first century BC, He said it, I see the good, I approve it, and I do the opposite. Where do you get such a crazy attitude?
Saint Paul comes along about fifty years later and says, the good that I would, I do not. But the good that I would, I do not do. But how do we get this way? That I see the good, I approve it, and I do the opposite. The good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.
Where do we get it? The answer is sin. Sin. Sin. S I n.
It's not a four letter word. It's even worse. We don't even use it. Just think of this. In all the talk today about about contraception, all the talk about abortion, how often do you get the word sin or virtue or for either one?
Take your pick because there's no use talking about sin unless you have virtue. Because sin is a negative. It's a nothing. It has meaning only in terms of the virtue. You practically never hear the word sin anymore.
And yet the great Wordsworth, William William Wordsworth, Wordsworth, eighteenth century but notice a first class protestant. It's he who said, referring to the immaculate conception, our tainted nature's solitary boast boast. And, of course, he was wrong. Mary is not our tainted nature's solitary boast. There is her son, Jesus Christ, who was absolutely, completely human.
He was a man. He had a complete human nature. Old man words have sort of forgot that. But leaving Christ on one side, but we we can't afford to do that. Because the Immaculate Conception has meaning only in in terms of our our having a redeemer.
It is true that Mary is indeed our tainted nature's solitary boast. She is the patroness of our nation. The sixth Baltimore count council, 1854 I mean, '46. But it wasn't until 1854 that Pius IX officially proclaimed the feast of the Immaculate Conception. But let me tell you, just just this week, I ran across a great saint called Saint Ephraim from Edessa, fourth century AD.
His life was about ending when Saint Augustine of Hippo was in his twenties over there in Northern Africa. And this man, Saint Ephraim of Edessa, whose writings we have in Latin, Greek, Armenian, and Syriac, he has completely the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception just as he has the doctrine of the real presence. That's the fourth century AD. And then we have our our great saint, Maximilian Colgate. It was long before anybody ever knew him.
He had a tremendous devotion to the blessed mother, the immaculate conception. Now if we talk about sin, don't let us stay there. We're not anchored to sin. We're anchored to Jesus Christ. We're anchored to virtue.
We're anchored to what is noble and good and good and just. The Christian isn't just escaping sin. That's ridiculous. Those candles never committed a sin of adultery or anything else. It's the pursuit of virtue that is important, and it's the pursuit of Jesus Christ who really you can't help.
You don't let us talk about pursuing Jesus. Francis Thompson hit the nail on the head in the hound of today, let us renew our faith, our hope, our love in Jesus Christ, our savior. We are born into a world of sin because of Adam and Eve, but we have before us the our immaculate conception, the one sinless human being who's totally like ourselves. And as surely as sin exists in the sense of the absence of due virtue, the main thing is to remember that we are committed not to avoiding sin. We are committed to being soldiers of Jesus Christ.
The pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of the cross let me correct that. The acceptance of the cross of Jesus Christ, which you will see has been moved closer to you. See it up there? In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit, amen.