A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. John, that, of course, is John the baptizer. In prison heard about the works of Christ that Christ performed and sent a message to his disciples to ask Jesus, are you he who is to come, or should we look for another? In reply, our lord said to John's messengers, go back and tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their recover their sight.
Cripples walk, lepers are cured or very clean. The deaf hear, the dead and dead men are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them. Blessed and notice this, blessed is the man who finds no stumbling block in me, who is not scandalized in me. That's what our lord is saying. Now as the messengers of John set off to return south, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John.
What did you go out to the wasteland to see? A reed swaying in the wind? Tell me, what did you go out to see? Someone luxuriously dressed? Remember, those who dressed luxuriously are to be found in royal palaces.
Why then did you go out to see a prophet? A prophet indeed And something much more. It is about this man that scripture says, I send my messenger ahead of me to prepare your way before you. Now this is our lord speaking in his own person. I solemnly assure you, history has not known a man born of woman greater than John the Baptist.
Yet the least born into the kingdom of god is greater than he. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Rejoice in the lord ever and always. Again, I say to you, rejoice for the lord is near. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
His are not only near, he has come. And because of that great fact, notice I it's fact, not truth, but fact, something that happened in history. Because we have a savior, today we are rejoicing. We are crying out to God with our hallelujahs. The church commands us to be merry and to be and to shout with joy because we have a savior, because we're redeemed, because we're saved, because the way to heaven has been opened up to us, and the the necessary whatever we find necessary to get there has been provided.
Notice, has been provided. But we have to make contact. You know, I often think about this. With one tiny little finger on the brightest summer day, you can blot out the sun. Just hold it right in the right place and you can blot out the sun.
That doesn't mean the sun isn't up there. It doesn't mean that it's lost its heat. It doesn't mean that the sun has changed one iota bit. But you cannot see the sun unless you look and have a faculty of seeing, namely your sight. But if you're blind and you have no other contact with the sun, it's not there for you.
And so there's a very real truth here that we we must make a new preparation. We must look back upon our lives. What are we doing with them? We're in the world. Are we of it?
Our lord said, don't you dare be of it because he said, my kingdom's not of the world. But we're in the world. We're in we're absolutely immersed in the world from morning till night, to night, to morning. And yet we're not supposed to be of it. We're not supposed to be in its clutches.
We're not supposed to be its slaves. We're not supposed to be secularists. Been how been hammering on this, you know, since feast of Christ the king. So we we have a terrific problem of of separating ourselves from this world with with its hands out to clutch us and to pull us down to make us one of its own. And we have to rise above it.
And the answer to the problem is, I can't do it alone. I have a savior. Jesus Christ, the son of god, came to save me because I needed saving. Now before I forget it, it's alright to talk about these things, but we are we have to do something about it. We have to bring this great truth into we into our daily lives.
We have to make contact with Jesus Christ. We do it through his living church, his mystical body. And you'll have an opportunity of doing that tomorrow evening with a penitential service because that's the least we can do to prepare for Christmas is to set ourselves straight with god through a good confession. And so this is a day of absolute rejoicing. It's a day of being absolutely absolutely happy because nothing else is gonna work.
Let me tell you, you could try it. Read Thompson's Hound of Heaven. It's the finest thing that I've ever read about it. We we can pursue all kinds of other gods, and they'll all leave us stranded aground going no place. Now there's I want to say something straight about this text.
It's these are Paul's words. Rejoice. Rejoice in the lord. Again, I say to you, rejoice because the lord is near. Now Paul spoke those words, and we use them for the opening antiphon, for the mass, the what we call the entrance song.
Paul spoke those words to the Philippians. Now he know, I've been accused many times of turning the pulpit into a teacher's desk. I make no apologize for that at all. I think it's great because god is truth. God is truth.
Now the Philip Philippi was up at the northern reaches of the Aegean. It's about three or 400 miles from the Bosphorus, that narrow straight of water which separates the Western world from the Eastern world, Occident from Orient. Now this was the first city that Paul evangelized in Europe, was Philippi. And it was an old Roman city occupied mostly by ex Roman soldiers. It was a Roman city.
The citizens were the citizens were citizens of Rome. Today, it's in Macedonia. Now his congregation was mostly Jews who had become Christians. And the thrust of Paul's remarks he he wasn't talking about Latari Sunday, I assure you. The thrust of his remarks was, don't look back.
Don't look back upon those days of yours with the legalism of the old law, But look to the glory of Christ. Look to his glory to be with him in his glory. That was the gist of Paul's remarks. But the church uses this as the very opening. It's a in the it's the first word in the Latin of the of the right.
Gaudete. Gaudete is the imperative, and it's so strong. English rejoice. It's wishy washy. But Gaudete, that's got power and force behind it.
And that's what the church is telling us today. It's using this text of Paul to the Philippians. And they weren't a bunch of saints. They were they were backsliding. That's why Paul wrote his letter, to bring them up, to tell them, look, you people.
Look who you are, what you're supposed to be doing. And so he tells them to rejoice not in the things that remember, Philippi was where the East meets the West. It was a very commercial place, not far from the sea. There were plenty of worldlings there. They may not have known it, but they were secularists right up to there, just as so many of us are and all of us more or less.
And so he's telling them to rejoice. But where? With the lord Jesus Christ. That's what he's telling. And remember, when you talk about Jesus Christ, you are not talking about the natural law only.
You cannot be a secularist and accept Jesus Christ as your lord. All you can do is accept him for what the world accepts him, a peasant Jew of the Mediterranean world at best. Now we today are celebrating the feast this feast of of joy, and that's the main thing. But the world the world is look look at those wonderful gifts over there. There's a lot of time, generosity, labor, money, all of it.
Look at those gifts for the poor. And don't so that when people some of them downgrade Christmas, just I don't care what it is. There's a lot of good at this time by Christians and non Christians and everybody else. So let's not downgrade that. Let us not forget it.
On the other hand, let us not forget Christ in Christmas. Now last Sunday's time, London New York Times had had an editorial on the two faces of Christmas. First face in this editorial was the happy face, merriment, being Crosby Crosby, and the white Christmas. Remembrance of Christmas past, the joy, the youth, and all, you know, all all this fine stuff about Christmas, which is is all good. Of course, it had nothing to do with Jesus Christ.
The second thing, according to that editorial, that it has said that Christmas is to the psyche like a stick is to a muddy pool. Do you get it? Like a stick is to a muddy pool. If any if any of you have ever experienced of having a nice clear little pool and taking a stick and stirring the bottom and see that nice clear water begin to churn and they get muddy and repulsive. That's the two faces of Christmas.
Nothing else said. Is Christmas for many people these things? One or the other or a mixture of both? It certainly is. Is it for many people nothing more than this?
It certainly is. But you see, the face of Christmas is only one face, and that's the face of Jesus Christ. That's the only face Christmas has. His name is Christ. It's the mass of Christ.
What do you mean by the mass? You mean the sacrifice of the mass. So it's Christ's mass. That's the face of Christmas. Everything else is simply the little wavelets that go out from the center of where you've thrown the stone.
So let us realize that. It isn't that we're going to reject all the good things about Christmas. The generosity that moves so many people to to give and to give generously. Remember, it's a big deal. And you say, oh, it's merely commercialized.
Don't underrate it. That's putting bread on a lot of people's tables. There's nothing wrong with that. What's so frightfully wrong is when we have only those two faces. The faces of a of a of a song, a white Christmas, or the horrors of staring up a muddy pool.
That's where your suicides come from. And neither one of them is the face of Christmas. The face of Christmas is Jesus Christ, our lord, who has come to bring us salvation. This is a terribly important point. But remember, there's no use trying to to to to negotiate this.
There's no use trying to to translate this into purely secularistic worldly terms. Christ said most clearly, I am not, n o t, of this world. Everything about our lord is supernatural, and that's what the secularist absolutely denies, that there's any such thing as the supernatural. And so we have men like Boltmann, as I said last Sunday, who's a great scripture scholar. How we have Catholic scripture scholars now telling us that we separate the historical Jesus from the Jesus of faith.
We call it the third way. Bishops in in Germany written up in the Wander last week tell you all about it. That's there's the Jesus that they tell us that's of history. But that is that's the Jesus that you can that you can come to by a very critical examination of the written word, the four gospels. But that, of course, they'll tell you is not the Christ of faith.
The Christ of faith is a creation of the faithful. That's right. Makes no difference whether Christ physically rose from the dead. It's what he does as an as an idea to rise to raise us up from our own grubby selves. That's the world talking to you and is talking to you through through to many some of our most advanced Catholic scripture scholars.
They begin by rejecting the supernatural and yet the gospels of Jesus Christ begin with the supernatural. They begin with an annunciation that a virgin girl is going to be a mother. Furthermore, that her child is going to be a masculine child. That's absolutely another miracle miracle because as you know, it's it's the male that contributes that gene that makes a a male baby. And then we're told that down south, down near Jerusalem, Mary's relative, been sterile in her whole life, is pregnant and has going to have a baby boy.
They didn't have any x rays in those days. This is this is not natural. It is all supernatural. And the whole the whole gist of our lord's good news or the gospel, same thing. That's that's egalion in Greek.
The is that we are destined for an a life, for an existence above the natural. Above the natural. Not that that natural is rejected, it's incorporated. But we're not destined for this world. We are not worldlings.
Now I mean, we're not big by god's destiny. We can easily we can easily be worldlings. We all know that. It's so easy to succumb as we say to the world. But remember, it's not just succumbing.
The world's out there to get its clutches on you, believe me, in every way it can. So the whole point of our lord's life is death. What he said in the way of founding a church that would endure forever, these things are not simply of the natural order. And there's no use trying to deal with them on the merely natural order. That doesn't mean they're they're erroneous or that they're false or anything.
Far from it. Not if there's a god in his heaven. Not if god spoke to men in the old testament with his prophecies. Not if god almighty sent his own son to be that baby in a virgin womb. Not at all.
We are destined for the supernatural. That is our real home. But it's an effort and we have to get into it and we do it by baptism or the equivalent and then we try to live it as you good people are trying to do it in that in those as you're here this morning in those pews. It's a tough battle. And that's why the church is so so appreciative, so sensitive of our human needs.
The church never forgets we're dealing with human beings. The church has never forgotten that Jesus Christ was a was a true man in every way except sin. Of course, some of these new scholars, Catholics even Catholics are they'll tell us that Christ probably was guilty of sin too. That's the kind of stuff they're putting out. And so we are we are in that supernatural world.
That's what we're called to be. That's where we're that's where we're supposed to have our truest joy even in this world. The lord is nigh. The lord Jesus Christ is near. But we we have to reach out.
We have to do our part. We have to move. We have to be dynamic. This idea that Christianity is so horrific is a drug. That is the most absurd thing that ever could be said about about anything.
And above all, that's going more going to to the son of Mary. And Born into this world as the if you just give yourself time, he was conceived in a womb. He developed like a fetus. He grew there and this is God. God almighty.
It's absolutely staggering. But when we don't give ourselves a chance to think, just to reflect a bit. I've often said, what does this making the sign of the cross mean to you when you make it on over yourself? Think about it. You may never get it you you may never get through a single sign of the cross.
And so this is a day of rejoicing. This is the day that the lord in a sense has made for us in a in a period of notice. Advent is supposed to be a period of penance to prepare not as if god, Jesus Christ, had not come, but with the security that he has come, but that we must do our part. We must reach out. We must be dynamic.
We cannot be asleep at the switch. And so let us take this day, this to be the church commands us, God Dete, rejoice, be happy, spread your wings and fly because you have every reason to do it. Now I've said many times, I'll say it again, They say one way to put people asleep is to quote. That may be true. But as regards the point I'm trying to make this morning, I haven't seen anything to match this text I'm going to read to you from Saint Augustine.
It's a it's from a discourse of his on the Psalms. And it's he says what I'm trying to say so nobly, so simply, so truly. But there's another reason I read from Saint Augustine. This man died in April. He died over in Hippo, Northern Africa.
He died when the Gauls were battering at the gates of his own city. That's that's literally, literally. When he was dying, he could hear them banging and and the battles going on. It looked like the end of the world. Remember, this is over in Africa.
They'd swept down through Spain and crossed over the Straits Of Gibraltar, and they come around the Northern rim of Africa. So this man was separated from us all those years, culture, time, and yet he's the greatest doctor of the church. That's another reason I wanna read to him. I want accustomed to speak to you way back from the fifth century. He is one of us.
Let us try to be one with him. Now here's what he says on this topic. He wasn't talking about nativity exactly. He says, god has promised us, and now I'm quoting, eternal salvation, everlasting happiness, an immortal inheritance, endless glory, the joyful vision of his face. His holy dwelling in heaven and no further fear of dying.
No further fear of dying. It's a cloud over all of our lives. He has promised men divinity. I repeat that. Listen.
He has promised men divinity. He has promised mortals immortality. He has promised sinners justification. The poor are raising to glory. But because god's promises seemed impossible to man, to the secularist, god established a mediator of his own good faith.
Not a prince, not an angel, not an archangel, but his only son. That's what god has promised you. That is your destiny, and that is what's guaranteed to you by that little baby whose anniversary the the the memorial of his birth, we are going to soon celebrate. This helpless baby born of a virgin woman, born because of god's the holy spirit's intervention, born to bring into our lives, each of our god comes to us individually. He doesn't come to us as a mob, as a great society, or a little he comes to us individually individually by calling us by our name.
I have a savior, and that's why I bend my knee before that crib or whatever and recognize in that helpless, absolutely helpless baby, Jesus Christ, lord, and king. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.