A reading of the holy gospel according to saint Matthew. Our lord said to his disciples, none of those who cry out, lord, lord, will enter the kingdom of god. But only the one who does the will of my father in heaven. Anyone who hears my words and puts them into daily practice is like the wise man who built his house on solid rock. When the rainy season came and the torrents came and the winds blew and buffeted his house, it did not collapse.
It had been solidly built on rock. Anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like the foolish man who built his house on sand. The rains fell and the torrents came and the winds blew and lashed against the house. It collapsed under the storm and was completely ruined. This is the gospel of the lord.
Praise be to the spirit. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Since Tuesday morning, I have been talking about our trying to become more conscious, not experientially conscious. We're not trying to have a religious experience. That's for the birds.
And yet that's what a lot of people strive for in religion, to have what we what James called a religious experience. Some people have it, some people don't. It's not the test of anything. You can get a lot of spiritual help out of a fifth of scotch, and that's not I mean that literally. We're talking about solid conviction based upon creeds, upon truth.
It's not a matter whether I like it or dislike it or whether it makes me comfortable or uncomfortable, whether it fulfills me or doesn't fulfill me, those things are irrelevant to the issue, which there which is simply, is there a god? Did god create me? What are my obligations to god? Did he become in become one in flesh with us, incarnate? Did he or didn't he?
Did he bring a message of hope to the world or he didn't? Did he say that without me, you can do nothing, and yet The United States at least is doing his best to show that that's false? These are the facts of life. It's not a matter of my feeling about it. When we recite the creed, it's about the most unemotional and boring thing you can imagine, isn't it?
It's like reading the constitution of The United States. It's like reading the declaration of independence. Well, let leave that alone. That's a pretty strong document. But the thing is, the fact that we don't get all enthusiastic and head up and psyched up about it, what does that prove?
What amounts is are we prepared to lay down our lives for the truth? That's an abstract thing. And as Newman says, when you have a confrontation between something that is immediate, direct, that appeals to all our senses, and have against that something which is abstract that you can't get a hold of, you can't feel it, you can't imagine it, you know which one's going to win out unless unless we are cooperative with the grace of god. This is you see, this is the fact of what what what I'm trying to say is and I'm talking to myself. We we have got to try to realize what god means in my life.
And the one of the first things that we ought to try to do is to make it very definite, explicit, reminding ourselves during the day that we are living in the presence of god, that the grace of his son, Jesus Christ, who is our savior, is there for me now. Now, n o w. That has other meanings today which we can skip. Now what you see, when I was growing up, the first thing I can remember of being introduced to the spiritual now the point I wanna make is I was introduced to the spiritual life even in the first grade. We prayed a lot.
We began every class with a prayer. Every class. Not the first class in the morning, but every class. We ended every class with a prayer. And in the middle of the class, the class monitor rang a bell and said, let us recall the presence of god.
And then he read a little quotation from the book, put it aside, and we continued our class. He was called a monitor. Another thing is from my earliest remembrance is is the apostolated prayer where we began the day with the morning offering. Before we we were we were taught to before we put our feet on the floor getting out of bed was to say the morning offering. See, all you don't hear anything about this kind of business today in many, many pulpits of the Catholic church.
You hear a lot about going out and enjoying music and enjoying the winds and the trees, and the we're talking about going out and so for justice and peace, and nobody knows what they are, really. As if as if you know we can we can substitute man's objective, making this world a fine humanistic place to live in, good jobs, good houses, good cars, kids we can be proud of, and all that, careers. Now these things are all good. It's only a jackass who who says there's something wrong in pursuing these things. It's the jackass, though, who thinks they're god.
And it's so easy to make this transition. As I say, the test is what governs your decisions, what governs my decisions, and when the chips are down. There's a test. It's very simple. The presence of god in his back and you see, you'll say, well, see, Newman was right, completely right.
But the point is that between me and the god of an oriental, don't you ever downgrade oriental mysticism. But between those two things, we have something that appeals to every sense, which appeals to every emotion, which completely enthralls me, and that's the incarnate god, the god who took on our flesh and became his son born of a virgin. Grew up, suffered, had fun, went to parties, went to weddings, dined with the best of the land. Notice it's not it's not recorded once that he ever went and and ate with a poor man. Not once.
So that we and we don't have a Christian doesn't have this vague. Nobody can even divine God. But with Jesus Christ, which is God incarnate, God in the flesh, there's one of us, one of us. Christ wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He had emotions.
At least on one or two occasions, we're told he got angry, whatever that may mean, because that's another peculiar word. And so let us not live in a world where we're trying to reach out for something that we'll never get a hold of. Or if we do, it's very suspicious. Thirdly, it's not necessary. This religious experience business, which means feeling good about yourself.
Well, the most important thing is to feel good about god. The first commandment is not to love yourself. That's the second one. The first one is to love God. And it's it's almost impossible to love something that we can't see or touch or hear, but it's utterly possible to love God in the flesh.
In the flesh, corporeal. The Christ, the Messiah, who came and was one of us. And as Luther has a wonderful sermon on this, wonderful sermon, where he talks about Christ as a little boy and how you as Christ walked down the streets of Nazareth, you could say, there walked god. But there was a little boy. You could hear him hollering.
You could hear him walking. You could hear him crying. You can hear him hollering for his mother maybe. God. God.
Do you do we think about that? So it's not in in in trying to realize god's place in my life, we don't have to try to do the impossible and to imagine God. That is awful. You can't imagine God. Don't try to.
If you do, you're making God like man. That's called anthropomorphism. But we do have Jesus Christ, and you cannot be anthropomorphic about Jesus Christ unless you deny his divinity. And then instead of having a man, you have something much less, a liar and a hypocrite or maybe a maniac. Because if Christ is not God, then he's one of those three things.
In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.