A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. This is the conclusion, of course, of the gospel, the good news as Saint Luke reported it. Our lord said to the 11 Judas, of course, was not there. He was elsewhere. Thus, it is written that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.
In his name, penance for the remission of sins is to be preached to all nations beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of all of this. Look. I send down upon you the promise of my heavenly father. Remain here in this city, that is Jerusalem, until you are clothed with power from on high.
Jesus then led the 11 out to a little hill near Bethany, right near Jerusalem. And with his hands upraised, Jesus blessed As he blessed them, he left them and was taken up to heaven. They fell down to do him reverence, and then they returned to Jerusalem filled with joy. And there they were to be found in the temple, notice, in the temple, constantly speaking the praises of God. 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. We've been hearing a lot in the last ten or fifteen days about returning to traditional values, the family, patriotism, honor, respect, and it's very laudable. And believe it or not, it's has received in addition to a lot of thumping and berating, it has received quite an impressive support from the public in general. It seems that there are still some Americans who think we ought to return to virtue. That's nice.
I like that. But it's a lot of fluff, a lot of nonsense. It's moonshine unless you bring in what they haven't brought in, and that's God. Don't talk to me about virtue without God, not if you're a Christian. It's it's because you see, if any of you have read very much in the way of philosophy or ethics, you will know that every effort that the human mind in its ingenuity can imagine to replace God and God's law has been tried to keep human beings civilized.
And they have failed. The latest one being the great threat of Marxism. Notice I did not say communist, Marxism, dialectical materialism. This morning, just to make sure that my remarks would be well founded, I got out some cash. All the so called silver.
Of course, we call it silver. So that's well, looking at the copper and the nickel, what do I find on it? Out of many, one. That's great. In god we trust in English.
Then I thought, well, maybe it's not on our paper money. So I looked at some of the paper bills. And, of course, on one side, you know, you have a Masonic emblem, that pyramid. On the other, in god we trust, and you don't need a magnifying glass to read it. Go back to to '19 to 1776 when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
And what did he say in the very fur the second sentence of that? That we, all men, have been endowed by their creator, written with a capital c. Now I know he didn't use the word god. He used the word creator, and I'm not going to go into what Jefferson did or didn't think about god. But the point is he says that men and women have been been endowed with certain rights by their creator, not by society, not by our by our absolute desperation to create a god if we didn't have one.
That's on every bit, as far as I can see it, on all our money. In god we trust. What a joke. We talk about virtue, but we don't say in god we trust. We don't even mention the word god.
Memorial Day, we had a number of speeches. You couldn't avoid them. Everybody was talking about, you know, we've gotta do something about the the situation. The the the nation has lost its contact with virtue. Of course, they don't use the virtue.
They call it about a system of value or a value system. Well, please notice the word value is a completely relative term. It's relative. It's value for what? And unless you can answer that question, well, then let's go bowling or go and have a drink or go do something sensible.
And I'm saying that in utter seriousness. There's no use talking saying no to drugs. You've gotta give me a darn good reason that I should say no to drugs. If you say I've gotta say no to abortion, you've gotta give me a good reason for it because there's a lot to be said for it. Let's not be as scared of it.
Nobody chooses evil as evil. We only choose what we so it appears to be as the good. Vatican two, to the contrary, notwithstanding, some of those gentlemen had not apparently read Saint Thomas Aquinas. So the point I'm making is this, very briefly. Look at your money.
Anything, your your copper penny, your nickel, your quarter, that's that's as high as that went. I didn't have any $2 bills, so I don't know what's on them. But look at their money. Here it says, in god we trust, and yet you dares to mention the word in public. What do you think of that?
Aren't we crazy? We are nuts as a nation. We are the laughing stock of sensible thinking people, including a good, god fearing Marxist. What sense can you make out of that? That here we put on our money and god we trust, but we can't even have a moment of silence in our public schools.
We cannot have an an a prayer before or after a graduation service. No. Pardon me. Commencement exercise. I love that word exercise.
Remind me of gymnasium. But this is see, we are we are to put a to say we are a confused nation is to put it absolutely mildly. Our lord rose from the dead. And Saint Paul's word is this, seek the things that are above. And whoever had the doing of making our those those mottos on our money, they even told us how to do it, that in god, we trust.
So if you're gonna talk about virtue and a Christian said, don't talk about anything unless you begin with god and unless you end with god. Seek ye therefore the things that are above. That's the whole message of the ascension of our lord. Rise with him. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.