A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Of course, this is a continuation of the gospel that we've been reading day after day. Jesus said to his disciples, I am the true vine, and my father is the vine grower. He prunes away every barren branch, but the fruitful branches, he trims clean, so to increase their yield. You are clean already.
Thanks to the word that I've spoken to you. Live on in me as I do in you. No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself apart from the vine, can you bear fruit apart from me? I am the vine. You are the branches.
He who lives in me and I in him will produce abundantly, for apart from me, you can do nothing, meaning no thing. A man who does not live in me is like a withered, rejected branch, picked up to be thrown into the fire and burnt. If you live in me and my words stay part of you, you may ask what you will, and it will be done for you. My father has been glorified in your bearing much fruit and becoming my disciples. This is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. If our blessed lord was in the son of god, what do you make of this text this morning? That is really the world's greatest tribute to egotism, isn't it, if he is not god? Don't forget what c s Lewis said.
There are many things you can say about Christ, but there's one thing you cannot say is that he was only a good man. Now today is May 1, in case you've missed the calendar. And it's notable for a number of things. May you know, May Day, May 1, was made a great deal of in Russia as the triumph of Marxism in the person of the working man. See, the great communist revolution was supposed to be the elevation of the working man.
You see where it got him. It is and in and one thing I keep this in mind. US labor, United States labor, never fell under that banner. It made its own Labor Day, which is not May 1. That's very significant.
Although some labor unions were pretty much infiltrated with communism, labor in The United States never got under the Marxist flag, never, as a as a group. Never. It's worth thinking about. Why didn't they? Now as a sort of a counter irritant, the church created a speech of Saint Joseph the worker to be celebrated on May 1.
And let us not forget that May 1 used to be a day when people put little statues up in their in in some corner of the their house with a statue of the Blessed Mother, the best they could get. And for the month of May, there were there was a candle or maybe candles with flowers before her. Well, plenty of Catholic homes now, you can't even find a crucifix. Anyway, do not forget that this is May, the month dedicated to Our Lady, and this is the May 1. So do not neglect to bring her into clearer focus in your life.
Because let's face it, she's lost she has lost caste for some reason or other, and you can't blame Vatican II for it. So let us keep that in mind that May is the month of Our Lady, and it should be a month for our renewing our own personal devotion. And one thing I suggest, and I'm not saying it because you're going to find it lovely and comfortable and happy making and joyous and all that malarkey, because we should. That's her rosary. That's her rosary.
Not so long ago I went to a wake, a funeral wake. You know, they don't say the rosary now anymore, generally as far as I can make up. And yet that was the great prayer of the illiterate, and the literate, and the saint. But in the whole and it was it was a big funeral, they overflowed the house. By far, well, it's only a small minority had a rosary, even had the rosary.
So, anyway, that's one thing. Now but I wanna bring out the contrast. See, we're living now when it's when it's the popular thing to downgrade communism and Marxism. But that's not the way it has always been, and don't you ever think it's dead. It's not dead.
But empirically, experientially, it has been disproved. Anybody with a third of a brain cell working has to admit that. It has never succeeded any place. Because what it did was to elevate this thing we call man. Now remember, that doesn't that has no existence.
Just remember this. No abstraction has any existence except in somebody's brain. So it elevates the working man. There's no such thing as the working man. Keep that in mind, always, when you talk about abstractions.
So it elevated the working man, whoever that is, and it's not a thing at all, to the place of God. It made it made the life of man centered upon man with a great expectation and promise of an earthly utopia, just as long as you mow down enough human beings. Because the human individual counted for nothing. See, that's the horror of this thing. One of the horrors, that it completely forgets that an abstraction has no reality except as an idea.
And the reality is Tom Jones Smith, married with two children, working in a factory and a mine on the street because when communism came into into existence, 1917, it existed long before that as an idea. Why, remember, you could still open your paper and see it for laboring for for laborers, day laborers. You don't even see the advertisement now. Now, on the other hand, the Feast of Saint Joseph, here you have Marx's, which stands for for for man as the center of the universe, which stands for this existence as the only existence, which stands for man's prospects of having a paradise on earth if only we will work at it and expend enough human lives for it. Because remember, human lives are completely expendable in a Marxist system.
Don't ever forget it's a horrible system. And the way you look at it, repulsive, and it's been disproved. Now on the other hand, we have the feast of Saint Joseph. Who's Saint Joseph? Well, you say he was the husband of Mary.
Who was Mary? The mother of God. Saint Joseph, the foster father of God. How about that? And what does that tell us?
It tell us tells us that we came from God and we have to go back to God. Man's not the center of the universe. Our fulfillment in this life is not our our aim in spite of the the last statement of the Vatican Council, which says we are on this earth to be fulfilled. How that ever got in there, I'll never know. Where's the evidence of our Lord ever telling us that we are going to be fulfilled in this life?
Would you mind telling me that? That's his whole business of liberation theology. I mean, one of the things of it. Where do you find that in the New Testament? Where did Christ ever say, live in this life so that you will be fulfilled in this life?
Where did he ever say it? On the contrary, time and again, he says, look, folks. You're here. You're a wanderer. You're a traveler.
You're here on a time of purgation. You here, you are astray. You are an alien in a strange land. Live so as to live for eternity. Gather in the goods and the riches that will last forever.
Is he talking about having a big bank account? And so this feast of Saint Joseph the worker, in a sense, incorporates the whole of of our Christian faith and belief. And we need to we need to reaffirm this time because almost everything around us is against us. Even some of the stuff we read is official documents of the church. It's a horrible situation.
And yet that's what we're in, folks. That's what we're in. You've heard of this new age religion, Father Fox was a Dominican, other people involved in it. Well, where are we going? Well, don't be confused.
I said there's no reason to be confused about this. You may regret it, you may be sorry, you may wish it were different, you may have to put up a resistance to it, but don't be confused. A little old ship anchored safely in a storm is going to be tossed around like a feather, but it it it's it's not confused as long as the anchor holds. And so that's the world we're living in. It's a world we're going that we have to fight our way.
We are soldiers. It's a warfare. Our Lord said it. And this feast of Saint Joseph workers here, notice Saint Joseph, the father of Mary, the mother of God, Saint Joseph, the foster father, and the worker. It notice how that exalts work.
Labor. We're talking about labor. Now we're talking and all other things that go into the definition of work. So this is a really a great feast. If you think about it, it it brings together a jumble of things.
But not to your confusion, to your clarity, to your hope, to your faith, to your confidence as long as you keep on course. And the course is Jesus Christ, not man. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.