A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Our lord was led into the desert by the spirit to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days, forty nights, and afterwards was hungry. The tempter approached Jesus and said to him, if you are the son of god, command these stones to turn into bread. Our lord replied, scripture has it, not on bread alone is man to live, but on every utterance that comes from the mouth of god.
Then the devil took him to the holy city, set him on the parapet of the temple and said to him, if you are the son of god, throw yourself down because scripture has it, he will bid his angels take care of you with their hands. They will support you that you may never stumble even on a stone. Jesus replied, scripture also has it, you shall not put the lord your god to the test to tempt him. The devil then took Jesus to a lofty mountain and displayed before him all the kingdom of the world in all its magnificence. Promising, all of this will I bestow on you if you prostrate yourself before me in homage.
At that, Jesus said to him, away with you, Satan. For scripture says, you shall do homage to the lord your god, and him alone shall you adore. At that, the devil left Jesus, and angels came and waited on him. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Adore only the lord your god and worship him alone.
Now these are the words that our lord used at the conclusion of the three temptations, but they're taken from Deuteronomy chapter the sixth. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, while you won't possibly be able to avoid or to miss Easter, Ash Wednesday may have passed without too much notice because it doesn't get the attention that Christmas and Easter does, and you can guess the reason. However, Lent began with Ash Wednesday, and Ash Wednesday gave us the keynote of what we're supposed to do about it.
Because Lent is a time of action. And as I said before we began or when we began Advent, let's not think of ourselves as the worst possible sinners on our way back to conversion. You wouldn't be sitting in these pews if that was the state of your souls. But we are call coming and are we are being called by the church to Lent. And what is the point of Lent?
What is it what are we supposed to do about it? The church is going to help, but we have to do it. The three readings on Ash Wednesday have to do first with the book of Joel, the prophet. And that's all about that we are called we are called to come before god and to tell god we're sinners and despair. Now there's the point.
We don't come with despair. We come completely filled with hope. All that god asks us is to turn back to him, and that we have to do even if we're not the worst world the world's worst sinners. This is gonna strike you as odd, but the fir one of the first things I saw Friday morning when I came over to say mass were these beautifully repolished handles on the door, the church door back there or in the front or wherever it is. And the thought struck me.
Those handles, with time, don't cease to be good brass, they don't cease to be good handles, but they get tarnished, they get dark, they get ugly, but they're still good handles. And I thought, by golly, that's the way it is with lint. It we're still good handles. We're still good brass. We have been baptized.
We're the sons and daughters of Jesus Christ, the son of god, but we need to be polished up. The world is all around us. The world is ready to swallow us. And we from time to time, Advent and Lent, the church says, look, you good people. And if you're not so good, get good.
But you've got to get better in the sense you have to know better what life is all about. Get out of your confusion and live what you profess because God reads your heart. And that was the point of the the third reading, the gospel reading on Ash Wednesday. Our lord is saying, look. Don't go by appearances.
It's what's in your heart, and true religion is between you and god. Now I'm paraphrasing it, but I'm not doing much in the way of paraphrasing. Because our blessed Lord takes it point by point by good deeds, charity, prayer, and all of it is this, be authentic, be real, be absolutely sincere with God almighty. Because in the last analysis, we stand before God alone. Now, somehow, lent has has an atmosphere of gloom about it.
It shouldn't have that at all because it's an opportunity of realizing, coming to grips with, having a new appreciation of, not merely the resurrection of Christ, but what it means for me and what it what responsibility it imposes upon me to do something about it, not to live as if there were no god. In the very first reading from the prophet Joel on Wednesday, the prophet says at the end of calling the people to repentance, he says, don't let them ask where is your god because our god can get a little bit, you know, tarnished because the world is all around us. The world is magnificent. God made it. But remember, he made it for us.
He made it as a tool, as an instrument for something better, but it's so easy to turn it around. Now, this is not my own idea about Lent being a joyous season. The very first preface of Lent says, we thank God for giving us this joyous season. That's what the that's what the preface says. It is a time of joy because it's a time of opportunity.
It's a time to grasp what is within our grasping, to get a hold of our lives once again and to reorient, to see what are the real basic things that really matter. It isn't that other things don't matter. They do matter. That's the difficulty of following Christ. It's not a matter of either or.
It's a matter of both and. That's what makes the conflict. And you can be prepared for that conflict after about two hours after you're dead. Now, going over my precious notes, I got a story from 1954 from Loretta Young, who was at that time top of her career. Fine woman.
And she was asked to write a or contribute, to a syndicated column, which at that time was the Washington Post Herald. It's where I got it. And, it's a story about a fellow named Dick Williams. Now, she recounted this story for the daily newspaper in this syndicated column called Lenten Guideposts. I want you to notice that word guidepost because that's the key to my well chosen remarks.
And it's a story of Ted Williams. That's not gonna ring many bells. But Ted Williams was a fairly successful actor according to the story, but she hadn't seen him for some time, and then he appeared on this on a set. So she said, where have you been? And how are you?
Haven't seen you. He says, well, I'm fine now, But I died last year, and I can prove it. So this is a story of Ted Williams who died last year. As I say, he was successful actor and had two obsessions, alcohol who and hatred of black black people. This is 1954, remember?
All that's gone now. We don't have any of that. So, you can guess what happened. He went downhill pretty fast. He lost his wife, he lost his home, he lost his job, he lost his money.
And finally, he lost his health. He was picked up by friends who took him into their home, mind you of Francis Thompson, took him into their home and one morning they found him cold on the floor. The doctor was called. The doctor pronounced him dead. They took the corpse to the mortuary to give him a pauper's funeral.
And while when the undertaker started to work on the on the body, he noted a flicker in Dick's eyes. Well, that's what's kind of unusual. So, he immediately called the doctor and a physician came. They rushed Dick to the hospital. They gave him the once over there and declared him hopeless and put him in a room to die.
He didn't die. Then the doctors got working on him and some very sophisticated medications and treatments were given, but the key to the treatment was nursing. He had to have doctors, I mean nurses, around the clock. The hospital couldn't find anything. So the Motion Pictures Association Relief Association came up with three nurses.
And for fifty hours, they gave him nothing but their attention and saved him. And as he said, They gave me back my life. And all three nurses were black. At the end of his treatment, he got so attached to them this is his own words that he couldn't bear to be out of sight or call on one of them. Now, here's the point: he was very grateful, but what he did when he left the hospital was this: He went out and got the first job he could get and bought each one of the nurses a gold watch.
Gratitude and action. He not only felt gratitude, he did something about it. He went into action. Now that story, which Loretta Young the the the moral she pulled out of it was about love for neighbor and all of that. My point is this: when he got out of that hospital, he showed his gratitude by doing something about it.
But he also had gratitude. You'll say everybody has gratitude. Let me tell you, it's not true. It's one of the it's one of the scarcest virtues in the world, gratitude. And if the virtue, in theory, is scarce, believe me, the the going into action and doing something about it is even scarcer.
And that goes all the way back to William James, the Harvard psychologist. Now, what I wanted he talked about life given or having his life renewed. You see, what we don't realize, what baptism does. We don't realize and and it's it's it's impossible for us to realize we are creatures of this world. We have bodies and minds, imagination, and all of that, and we have the intellect and the will.
Of course, we do. But as Newman points out, time and again, he's the great psychologist long before Freud came on the scene. As as Newman points out, when these come into conflict without choice, the world generally wins out except for the grace of god. Now that's the battle we're in. The the the cards are stacked against us.
But when every I I don't do many baptisms. Maybe two or three a year. Listen, when I stand at that fountain back there and pour water on a little baby's head or try to and everybody's silent and respectful and all that, nothing happens. Whereas, I I saw a baby born once, and let me tell you something happened then. Everything was happening.
Then we calmly sit back and say that what happened at that baptismal farm in that in in giving life to that newborn baby or young baby is far superior, infinitely superior to natural birth. But we can't realize that. I mean, we can't. Nothing happens. The baby is baptized.
You you put a little garment on it, and then you have a candle, and then everybody's happy. They leave the church, and there's a reception or something. But but it's you see, there's nothing there that appeals to our all our senses as the birth of a baby, the mother bringing home her new child. But let me tell you, if you're a Christian and with the eyes of faith, not with your feelings, not with your emotion, not with your imagination, because as Flannery O'Connor time and time again said, your emotions, you forget them when it comes to truth. You have here not just the renewal of life, you have a transformation of life.
You have a new life given to that baby, to you. You were there once. It's a new life. It's a completely different life with a new destiny, with a new mode of being, a new sustenance, which is the grace of God to support you, a church which you are being introduced to, which is going to bury you up through your life. It's a whole new, as we would say, ballgame.
Not just an old ballgame made new, but a completely new one. That's what we have to get into our heads, and that's just the beginning of the Christian life, which is not of this world. It is not of the senses. It is not of the emotion. Nobody gets all excited about reciting the creed.
And yet, it's people who have stood up to be shot, to be hanged and quartered, to be burned, to be thrown to the animals because of that very creed. So what I what I want to leave with you good people this morning is what I wanna leave with myself. We are in this world to serve god almighty, to live for him. That's the that we all why did god make you? He made made us for himself.
But but it's easy to forget that. It's easy to think he made us to be good fathers, good husbands, good unmarried people. It's not easy these lot were days, never was. That he made us to for to get a good education, to give our kids a good education, to do good to our fellow man. God didn't make us for any of those things.
He made us for himself. That's the hard thing to get into my head. Adore God alone and worship him only. But it's so easy to have so many other gods around us. I'm not talking about being an alcoholic as as Willie Dick was.
I'm not talking about being eaten up by prejudice as Dick was. I'm simply talking about getting tarnished like the like the the handles on the door. They no more reflect the light. They're dull. They're good handles, but they're not as they're not shiny handles.
They are not reflecting the holiness of God. And in the second reading of Ash Wednesday, Saint Paul says, be you holy because you have been called to have the holiness of God. That's what we're called to. But the this story of Williams brings home the great thought about how we should deal with Lent. Don't let Lent go by as something ordinary.
It's not. It's extraordinary. You're asked to bring god into your life again. Now I don't know how much god came into Dick's life. All he said was that after he got well, he scarcely ever passed a church, any church, night or day, that he didn't drop in and say a prayer or just sit in the peacefulness of the church.
I'm saying we can learn something from this man's experience, that we have been reborn. We have been set on the way. God's god created us for himself, but we have to do something about it ourselves. The church is there to help us. I'll develop this during that.
But in the last analysis, we go back to Deuteronomy, adore the lord your god and him alone serve. Gratitude, action. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.