A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. Our lord summoned the 12 and began to send them out two by two, giving them authority over unclean spirits. Jesus instructed them to take nothing on the journey but a walking stick. No food, no traveling bag, not a coin in the purses in their belts. They were, however, to wear sandals.
Do not bring a second tunic, Jesus said. And then he added, whatever house you find yourself in, stay there until you leave the locality. Any place will not receive you or hear you, shake its dust from your feet in testimony against them as you leave it. With that, the 12 went off, preaching the need of repentance. They expelled many demons, anointed the sick with oil, and worked many cures.
And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. In the Washington Post, a few days ago, this last end of last week, there was an article, I think it was in the first section, announcing a very ambitious program that was going to that was being prepared for a year long operation. It was sponsored by the Binaig Barif and by Channel nine. And the the the thrust of the purpose of it was to try to do something about prejudice.
And the theme of the project is that we should regard with favor and admire differences. Now if you wanna see a potpourri of confused thinking, you have it here. First of all, let me let's look at it from a logical point of view. They never define prejudice. But any meaning that I know that prejudice has, it's negative.
It's the negative thing. It's the absence of something. It's the absence of something that ought to be there. It's a primitive term. In other words, you're fighting nothing.
It's a negative. That carpet, these candles, this altar, this book, they have no prejudices. See, we are so filled up with prejudices, I mean, with these negative concepts, and we don't know it. We erect these negatives into something as real as a camel. It's nuts.
Because all this good effort and good intentions and and all the work and the sweat and the tears, you're pouring it, in a sense, down the drain. Our lord didn't give us a first commandment, thou shalt not love sin. He said, I and this is the Old Testament. When our lord quotes this, he's quoting Isaiah, I am the lord your god. You've got to love me with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your mind, with all that you have.
Show me one negative there. And if you tell me I have to love all kinds of differences, and of course they're dead against hate, as if there was something wrong about hate. You see this in our in our Catholic papers in schools, you see it. People are so crazy in their thinking. When you fight hate, what are you fighting?
Is every kind of hate wrong? Well, you have the slightest sense of logic, you'll know if you love a a a love something, you have to hate, in quotation marks, it's contrary and it's contradictory. You have no choice. Our blessed Lord said, if you if you try to serve two managers, you will you've gotta hate one and love the other or love one and hate the other. You can't avoid this if you have a brain cell working.
Of course, most people have no sense of logic in these things. And I'm not saying that logic gives you the truth, but I mean we shouldn't ignore it, because behind this, there is reality. And not once in this in this article do they tell you, why must I not hate my neighbor? Why must I not hate it? I enjoy it.
It's very popular. Let's take a consensus. Let's take a poll. You see, you can reduce this to absurdity because and and and you see, we as a nation, this is what we're floating on. You've gotta tell me why I should and what what do we mean by hate?
You mean to tell me that I should treat and this remember, this is part of this day constructionism. You mean to tell me that I that there's there's no such thing as vice and there's no such thing as virtue? And if there's such a thing as virtue, is there such a thing in the same sense of re of reality as vice and that I must have the same regard for both of them? Is that what you're telling me? Well, there's a difference between, vice and virtue.
Must I must I say there's no difference? And that's you see, that's what at is at the bottom of a lot of this. Just look at the changes they're trying to make in the curriculum of the District Of Columbia right as of yesterday. You see, we're living in a very mixed up world, and the word for it is absurd. Absurd.
Absurd means that you're trying to put contradictories together. And if you try to do it, you've lost the fight before you've begun because if you win, you lost. Because things have identity. There's such a thing as goodness, but there's no such thing as evil except in the sense that you have missing something that ought to be there. And that is evil, whether it's in the physical order, in the intellectual order, in the artistic order, or in the moral order.
And so, you see and remember, if you're trying to fight a negative, what are you fighting? What have you got to go against? And you see how worlds apart this kind of stuff is from Christianity, and from the Old Testament, and from the Old Testament. Remember, the majority of of Jews are not Orthodox Jews in a sense in which they accept the old testament, god, and all that. They are a small minority.
The general drift as far as I can make is kind of a Unitarianism, which means almost anything you want it to mean. And Christ says you see, it's so simple. It really if we make it difficult. Here's a guy comes along and says to Christ, what is the greatest commandment? Now that was a very sensible question.
Unless I know what the greatest one is, how am going to judge the others? And Christ says, what do you read? He was talking to a Jew. So he said, what do you read in the old testament as I I say? And the fellow says, the first said, I shall love the lord thy god with all thy heart, with all thy mind, so forth, and thy neighbor as thyself.
And our lord said, you have spoken wisely. Do this, and you will live. But now you notice there's not a single negative in those commandments. And there are three commandments there, not two. I have to love god, and I have to love my neighbor as I love myself.
So it's god, then it then I come in, and then my neighbor comes. It's a triangle. And the standard of loving neighbor is loving myself, and I have to love God completely. Completely. Not halfway, not three fourths, 99 not 99 to 99100% pure.
If we did that, we'd be ivory soap. You see you see how absolutely positive our lord's command is. I know that a lot of the commandments are negative. I know that. But not the first commandment and not the commandment about obeying your parents.
That was the virtue of piety. And so let's keep our heads on our shoulders, and let us know what we're talking about. Nobody defines terms anymore. Here's a whole article about prejudice. What is a prejudice?
If I say I love I love a man and a woman living in the holy state of matrimony, chaste, loving each other, enjoying each other in every way, including sex, of course. And therefore, I hate adultery, I hate fornication. Am I supposed to treat these things with the same same respect and love both of them? Is it wrong for me to hate adultery? Of course, there you'll hear peep you will hear people say, oh, you are judgmental.
You see the insidiousness of this? If there's anything in this world that you love, and if there's anything in this world which is against it against what you love, then automatically you have to be against the thing which is against the thing you love, and that's called hate. Hate is the contrary term of love. Love attracts me to something. Hate repels me from something.
There was a whole conference on hate. Well, it's over six months ago now. Over in, I think it was Norway. A whole conference. As if hate was there's something wrong about hating.
There's nothing wrong about it. It's what you hate that makes it wrong. You have to hate sin. You have to hate vice. You have to hate illness.
These are things that deserve hate. In in other words, they deserve to be recoiled from. Just as surely as their positive terms and the things they represent need to attract us, the true, the good, the beautiful. We should recoil from the ugly, and we ought to be afraid to say that building is ugly and I hate it. And you must and you say, oh, well, now, no.
That's divisive. That's showing prejudice. After all, some people like it and some people don't. And after all, that's the way the world is. Some like beer and some like, Coca Cola.
Every man to his taste. I've heard this less than, well, just over the weekend. It's what you believe something, I believe something. And our beliefs are equal, and we we treat each other with the same respect. This is what we're dealing with today.
Kids are being taught this in schools and in some Catholic schools, and I'm not theorizing. What's the use of trying to talk about truth if people begin by saying there's no such thing as truth? And that's where we are, folks. We are a confused nation, believe me. We're a lot more confused than the Middle East people, a lot more confused.
This is serious business. I'm not making mountains out of memorable because unless you think straight, you cannot, in the long run, act straight. You can't do it. If there's a God, then there's a certain course of action which is obligate to us. And we don't about we don't talk about value systems.
We talk about law. We talk about God's law. And then we hate what's against God's law. You'll notice I never said a word about persons. We love the sinner as surely as we hate the sin.
That concludes me. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.