A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Incidentally, this is the first Sunday of the liturgical year. And this year, we will be reading the gospel according to Saint Matthew, piecemeal, shattered, broken up. I urge you, take off about a half an hour out of your very busy day and read the gospel according to Saint Matthew from beginning to end. Read it as you would any other written narrative.
But remember, it's the word of god you're actually reading. Breaking it up for fifty two Sundays, even the constitution of The United States wouldn't bear up under that, you know. So, anyway, here we go. Our lord said to his disciples, the coming of the son of man will repeat what happened in Noah's time. In the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and being married right up to the very day that Noah went into the ark.
They were totally unconcerned, otherwise complacent, until the floods came and destroyed them. So will it be at the coming of the son of man. Two men will be out in the field. One will be taken. One will be left.
Two women will be grinding meal. One of them will be taken. One will be left. I tell you, stay awake, therefore. You cannot know the day that your lord is coming.
But be sure this, if the owner of the house knew when the thief was going to come to break in, he would keep a watchful eye and not allow not let his house be broken into. So you must be prepared in the same way. The son of man is coming at the time that you least expect, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. The short text that I want to use as the target this morning is from the office of the first Sunday of Advent from Prime.
This is the good news that the prophet foretold the savior will be born of the virgin Mary, and that's what's all about, that god became man in the womb of a virgin girl named Mary and never ceased for a second to be god almighty. Think about it for four weeks. Now the church after Vatican two, which, of course, you know, everybody says who have who has not read the documents, and most people have not, how Vatican two changed everything. Well, it did not. It it's been changed, but don't blame it on Vatican two, all of it.
But, anyway, after Vatican two, we had a revision of the liturgy and all kinds of changes. Among them was a lot of changes having to do with Advent and Lent. We are told in that official statement that Advent has two purposes, a double purpose. It's to remind us of the first coming of our law of God in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnation. Incarnation.
We call it Christmas. And the second is to remind us to recall his second coming, Christ's second coming. So that's the official statement. But what seems to me to be much more important than either of the other two is to remind ourselves first of all and to think about it, to make it part of our daily lives that god almighty became man incarnate. He took on flesh incarnate.
And that that incarnation is present tense. That's my point. Present tense. It's alright to get all and you can't escape it. Even the fire engine houses now are already decorated for Christmas.
But the point is this, we are not married we are not commemorating an event which happened perfect past tense in the past. The incarnation meant that god became man at a very definite moment in history. It's a fact. It's an actuality. But that presence of Christ is a permanent thing in time, in his living church.
Of course, I know that this is contradictory of so much that's going on around us which we call religion, where people are looking inside their feelings, how they emote, how they react, how they're being fulfilled, what am I comfortable with, am I inspired? Notice how the pronoun is I, I, I, I. When the thing that we should be seeking is Jesus Christ, God, Jesus Christ, son of Mary, Jesus Christ, man and god, as an objective fact, something that has happened, perfect past tense. That's the point I wanna make, that we are dealing with a live, living, articulate Jesus Christ in the present tense. And where do you find that living voice?
In his living church, in his body. That's what I have to say. Everything else I say is just to back it up a bit, to bring it try in my efforts to bring it home again. I've thought a lot about how do I say something that's so important that will stimulate me. After all, we all have to be we have to be shattered out of our complacency.
We we live so in a in a on a certain plateau. And you know how it is. If any of you have been out in the West when you even if you're riding a horse, you have to struggle and work and sweat and be half scared to death to get up on the on the top of the plateau. Once you're up there, you can forget you're up there. It's easy to forget you're a mile high in Mexico City or in Denver once you're up there.
Now we've got to be shook out of our complacency because we're human and we it's normal for us to get into it. We get into what we call a rut. And as I've said many times, if you're in a good rut, if you're if the rut is going where you want to go, why change it? But the point is when you're dealing with with something very different from going from Baltimore to Washington or from going to Rome up to Milan when you could put your chariot in the ruts and they'd take you up there like railroad tracks. It's very different when you're trying to bring home to yourselves in your daily living.
I mean your daily living and all that's in it, and I mean all, no exceptions, the good, the bad, the evil, the fine wonderful things, and the devastating things like being a widow or a widower. As mister Howard's wife can can tell you today. Now this is the point of Advent. It's a time of suppressed joy because we know we have a savior. But what are we, what am I doing about it in my daily life, in my daily decisions?
That's what counts. I said, that's easy, but you've gotta think about it. You've got to be you've gotta get out of the Montgomery Mall and get close to god who's out there. By that, I mean, we discover him and his law, and we confront his son, Jesus Christ. I'm not a victim or a product of my own introspection, which is the great name of religion today.
It inspires me. It makes me feel good. It helps me get through the week. That's all very good, but that's not religion. The Romans, the pagan Greeks knew that, but we don't.
Now we had a funeral here day before Thanksgiving, Walter Howard's funeral. We had a the new ritual. Senior Gato had the mass, the funeral mass. I emphasize that, funeral mass. Now it it I this is the first time I'd seen it.
Most of you have not seen it, I guess. But they bring the coffin down placed right here, and then on that, they place a very beautiful copy of the four gospels. That's placed on top of the coffin. And then a a a good sized crucifix was put on the coffin too. First, it was held up aloft, and a short prayer was saying about how Walter Howard accepted this in his life, and that was put on the coffin.
Now to me, this this was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving this past week. That was terribly significant. What what I saw there, that the corpse of Buddy Howard and the book of gospels of that moronan I mean, the four gospels, and then that crucifix put on the coffin, there you have an illustration of the Christ like life and death and hopes and fears and triumph. Triumph. Because here you have, first of all, the book.
Now remember, the church doesn't rest upon a book. Those four gospels are not the sum and substance of god's revelation. Christ didn't give us a book. Christ said, going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them, and teach them everything I have taught you. He didn't give them an armful of Xerox copies of his speech.
We don't have the four gospels and the epistles and all that as an entity until the end of the century. But we had a church. We had Christ's living voice. I am with you, he said. I am with you.
Did he mean it? So those four gospels, they don't represent the the whole good news. The whole good news rests upon, first of all, our blessed lord's life. It rests upon what he taught, and it rests upon what was handed down, which means tradition. And remember, the the written word came after the tradition, but we hold to both of them.
But what is speaking? What was the force? What was the dynamics of Walter Howard's corpse lying here in the coffin underneath the four gospels and the crucifix? The church. Monsignor Gado was out in in in about fifteen minutes after he did that, he stood at the altar and bent over some translucent bread and said, this is my body.
And he took some wine and said, this is my blood, and he was speaking in the name of Jesus Christ. There you've got it. And this is how Catholicism differs from every other religious sect in the world today, that Christ is living among us. He is present and articulate and articulate. I mean, he speaks with words that we can understand if we listen, if we hear.
But you've got to listen, and you've got to hear. Now just by coincidence, this always happens towards the end of the week, I ran across some verses from TS Eliot. It's about secularism. Now everything that the church stands for, everything that the living Christ lives for, everything that our blessed lord in his mystical body speaks to the world is denied, absolutely contradicted by what we call, as we said last Sunday, secularism. Now don't be the word secularism simply means worldly.
Just a it's just a Latin word. It means worldliness. And that's the absolute contradictory of everything that that cross on on Buddy's coffin, everything that that book of gospels represented on Buddy's coffin. Secularism is the enemy of all that we claim to hold most most precious. Well, anyway, I ran across these verses from TS Eliot.
You know, the American born British poet. Now he's not a great favorite of mine. Very few poets are. But these lines are so very absolutely pertinent. And the and the very curious thing is, remember, Pius the eleventh declared initiated the feast of Christ the king in 1925 with his letter, And this poem was written, certainly, as far as I could find out, before 1936 and very likely around between 1925 and '36 by Pius the I mean, by TS Eliot.
Listen what it says about secularists. Men have left god, not for other gods, they say, but for no god. And this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first reason and then money and power and what call life or race or dialectic, read Marxism. In an age which advances progressively backwards when the church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten all gods except usury, lust, and power.
What do you think of that? That was written by T. S. Eliot, who was a high church Episcopalian, roughly around the same time that Pius XI declared the feast of Christ the king, which was initiated to confront secularism. Now we're in this world.
We are secularists. You can't escape being the secular ist. But what our lord says, you've got to keep clear of the world. You cannot be you are in it, he says, but you cannot be of it. It's going to do its best to claim you.
Just see what's going on all around the nation today right after they could they couldn't even wait for Thanksgiving to be over to start up all the commercial apparatus. Now I'm not there's a wonderful spirit about this. I'm not downgrading it, but let's not miss the real thing. That Christmas means Christ's mass. That's what Christmas means, mass of Christ.
Let's keep it that way. Where do you find Christ's mass? Where do you find Christ? It's not all that hard to find. It's right with you.
All we have to do is to look. And, of course, we have to stop a bit. And above all, we have to listen. We have to do that. And so today, let us realize the world in which we are living.
And and remember, this is no condemn remember, the world as god made it is fine. It's what man makes of good things. Just because some lunatic takes a sterling silver knife and uses a screwdriver doesn't condemn the sterling silver knife. It just makes out what a dunce he is. And so because we have something of Christ's mass today which has been denigrated, of course, that does not at all mean that we have to denigrate Christ.
It doesn't mean that we have to be lost in the world of Christ, but we must be found in the world that Christ recognizes. The cry that world that came from his heavenly father, the world that we have to recognize as god's own, if only we will go out and be part of that world. This much I will say for the new age religions. People are not close enough to nature today to know what it's all about. How many people see a good decent sunrise?
To be very personal, yesterday as I drove into Galesville, I heard a terrific noise. I couldn't figure I knew what it was, of course, but I couldn't see it it was geese, but I couldn't imagine where they were. It was overwhelming as I drove in, and then then they started to come in from the horizon. A huge v and then little v's. I don't know how many hundreds of them.
That is god's world. We've gotta be out there and part of it, but we're we're so encapsulated in the world that is not god's but man's. You see how egocentric we are? We go to church to be fulfilled. We'd be to be inspired.
I think the Eucharist is fine, a la Carl Jung, because it stimulates us to be more human. That is rubbish. Because not that it's rubbish in itself, but because we are forgetting the reality behind it. I have used Carl Jung's own words from this pulpit for the blessed sacrament, for the real presence, and Jung was an atheist. He could have cared less about the Eucharist, but he had to recognize what that belief, what they call religion, how good it is for me.
And it is good. It is mighty good to partake of the body and blood of God. But if all you can say for it is that it keeps me human, that it inspires me to be a better kind of person, a la world, forget it. It's a myth. But, of course, Jung, you know, makes a great deal of this, but Christ is no myth.
He was born. Christ is no myth. He had a mother. Christ is no myth. He had a history.
Everybody admits that. Even Meyer in his latest book on Christ admits it. Even Wilson admits it. The two latest books we have. And so today, as we are assembled here in Garrett Park, which wasn't exactly on the minds of any of the apostles, that god knew about Garrett Park in 1992.
God knew about you today, each one of you individually. Not a hair falls from your head without your heavenly father's consent. Let us look upon Advent with joy, but don't look upon it as something future. Don't look upon it as something past like George Washington's birthday. Look upon it as something with you.
Christ incarnate, Christ in the flesh, God almighty in man, human being. He is a living presence. And where do you find it? You find it where Buddy Howard found it. You found you find it in the he was a convert to Catholicism.
You find it in Jesus Christ living church. And it's a church dominated not by self fulfillment, not by being comfortable, but by taking up Christ's cross and following him. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.