A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The scribes and Pharisees together said to Jesus, John that's John the Baptist. John's disciples fast frequently and offer prayers. The disciples of the Pharisees do likewise. On the contrary, yours, eat and drink freely.
Our lord answered them, can you make guests of the groom fast while the groom is still with him? But when the days come that the groom is removed from their midst, they will surely fast in those days. Jesus then proposed to them this figure. Remember, it's a metaphor. No one tears a piece from an a new coat to patch up an old one.
If he does, he will only tear the new coat, and the piece taken out of it will not match the old. Moreover, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does it, the new wine will burst the old skins, and the wine will spill out and be lost, and so will the old skins. New wine should be poured into fresh new skins. No one after drinking old wine once knew.
He says, I find the old wine better, and this is the gospel of the lord. And I find it confusing. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. I've thought about it a lot, and I I don't get the the drift of the whole thing.
You can make out of it what you wish. But there's one thing comes through pretty clearly here, and that is I can't help but bring this in. It's gonna sound like a little bit off color, I guess. But I remember in the days of prohibition when every good Marylander made his own beer. Of course, Maryland had no prohibition law.
It was a federal offense in the district. I mean, in Maryland, we kept our common sense. Anyway, in the beginning, homemade beer had all kinds of adventures. And it became soon it soon became clear that you couldn't use the old tops, you know, the ones you bang down and pinch over the the bog. Because if you did, you would be woke up during the night with some blast coming from your cellar when these when the beer would start fermenting and blow the tops.
They were the good old days. I know what our lord's talking about. Everybody who tried to make homebrew knew knows what he's talking about. You better have good new bottles and brand new tops. Otherwise, you're gonna be woke up at night, and you don't know what's coming off.
Anyway, see, what our word is saying here this much is perfect that what I what I I can't see the drift to the whole business, but this first part of it's very clear. And right away, I thought of Saint Luke chapter 12. That's that chapter you know that people don't talk about much, and you'll never see it on a Christmas card or an Easter card or anything. They love to forget it. And it and for the most part, it is forgotten.
For the most part, it is ignored because it's very unacceptable doctrine to the Catholic Christians of today with their peace and justice and their tranquility and all that and love and all this fraud. It's where our lord says very seriously, I have come to set the earth on fire. Do you know what that think of the think of what's happened down in South Florida. That's just a little tiny bit of the world. Think of the whole world being on fire.
And our lord said, I have come to set the earth on fire, and you can't get out of the text. It's a perfectly clear, easy translatable text. And then he go and notice, he then he goes on for a whole about three or four verses to explain what he means, and it's awesome. It's revolting. Remember, Christ in many ways is revolting.
Look at the cross. Isn't that revolting? When he says, come follow me. Where our lord says, I have come to set the world on fire, to put revolution anarchy in every household. Now he's talking to Jews whose prime whose family, whose household was the tightest knit unit you could think of and is still the way that is today in many instances.
He says, I have come to bring revolution against in every home. Then he doesn't stop. He keeps on going. He says, I'm I've come to set son against imagine a son standing up against his father, a Jewish boy. It was unthinkable.
And our lord says, I have come to set son against father, father against son, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. I'm that is a direct exact quotation of a translation. That's you see, to be a Christian is we have lost sight of what it means to be a follower of Christ. A great deal what has happened in the last forty or fifty years where we've turned to good works. I'm not against good works.
For Pete's sake, don't get me wrong. But remember, not so long ago, I had a very, very significant dialogue, isn't that an awful word, with a young college person. When I pointed out that you can do all of these good works, feed the hungry, bury the dead, bring justice, bring fair wages, good housing, you name it, and you you can be the rankest atheist on God's earth. These things are not in themselves acts of religion. What is religion?
It's a well, people have all kinds of ideas of it. But there's one thing sure, unless you turn words upside down and inside out, the focus of religion is God. Not me, not my neighbor, God. And let me tell you, a lot of what we call pagans had a better concept of it than we have because they were very conscious of it. And our world, for the most part, is in total ignorance.
Ignorance. Or they ignore it. There are different things. We have got to think in terms of god more. The people, especially young people, are having trouble with the Catholic church.
That isn't their problem at all. Their problem is an awareness of God Almighty. Just talking last night to the father of a young college boy, I knew it all along. It comes from a good family, good Catholic family. They come from a good Catholic family, and they come from a good Catholic.
Three generations that I know. This young man is having trouble with God, so he ignores it. Brought up in all Catholic schools. His problem isn't you see, his problem isn't with his education exactly, although he ought to go back and sue the schools. His problem is is his total unawareness of god almighty running the show.
Every good pagan had an idea that of his dependence upon god. Any of you who've been to Rome and taken one of the one of those, you know, rubberneck tours, I've done it several and and, of course, as as you're winding your way through the old city of Rome, the guys said, look right. There's a statue of Venus. Look left. There's a statue of Juno.
Look up. There's a statue of Atrus. And they have a whole book full of gods and gods. You practically are never out of sight of one of their statues. That's how much they were aware of divinity.
I'm not defending their conception of divinity, but they had a notion that they were not running the show. They were dependent on the gods and the goddesses. That was the big argument against Saint Augustine and why he wrote the city of God. Because the good, see, by the time of Augustine, paganism was pretty much, not entirely by no means, on the way out. And the good God fearing Romans said, we are being punished by the gods because we have deserted the gods.
So don't you ever identify paganism with lack of a conception of divinity or a Hindu today or a Muslim. But as a nation, oh, we say in god we trust on our money. But I was gonna say that's becoming almost as useless and valueless as the money itself. Who cares about in god we trust anymore? I have heard criticism, especially at the Republican convention, because the word god was used.
You've read it too. You read the same stuff. That's our world. Don't you ever forget it. And if you sit in these pews this morning and say, I believe in god.
I have come here to worship god. You are separating your cells with an impassable chasm. I said impassable because no one's going to do it on their own by merely human means. It's what we call the grace of god almighty. Without me, Christ said, you can do nothing, and Christ is god.
Or so we believe and so we try to live. And so this gosh. Whatever whatever this whole thing means, I don't know. But that point is this. Very that Christ said, I have come to set the world on fire.
You can't put new, vigorous, fresh to be a Christian is about as far removed from being lethargic as you can imagine anything to be. You can be a doorman and a sleeping Christian. Of course, you can. The best football player in the world can go to sleep, but he's not a very good football player while he's sleeping, you know. To be a Christian need to follow Christ, and Christ is something new.
He came to put to set fire to the earth. What does it mean? It means that we should be I'm not talking about emotion. You cannot trust your emotions or your set of feelings. I do not appeal to them at all.
When they're good, fine. Hallelujah. But don't don't tie your life and important decisions to how you feel. They are the most untrustworthy things you can imagine. What what we do, we have to know Christ.
We have to understand that he was something brand new, and then we have to resolve the following. And remember, we're the follower is no better than the leader, and Christ our lord is our leader. He's out front. Yes. His back is turned to us because a good leader is out front leading his troops.
He's not behind as we doubt when we turn the offer around. And so this gospel does have meaning. I mean, for me, if you take it with Luke 12, I think because I think our lord is telling us the same thing. I have I brought you something new, something that is going to be vigorous, inflammatory, inflammatory. And unless we are part of that flame, we are missing the boat.
May that not happen. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.