A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to the crowds, again, notice he's talking to the multitudes, No one, after lighting a lamp, covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed, but he puts it on a stand that those who enter the house may see the light. For nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light. Take heed then how you hear. For to him who has will more be given, and from him who has not, even what he thinks he has, that will be taken away from him.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There's one, in my opinion, not such a humble opinion either. But here is a sentence which we ought to take to heart.
Take heed how you hear, how you hear. And when I say hear, let's talk about how you see, how you hear, how you feel, how you taste, all the five senses. These are the windows of my knowing through which through which I am in contact with what we call the world out there. And our lord is talking to the crowd, the hoi polloi, that includes us for sure. Take heed how you hear, for to him who has will be given more, and what he has will be taken away from him.
Now there this is not universally agreed upon. We are here talking about theories of knowledge. How do you know? Where does your knowledge come from? You probably don't think about it.
But just ask yourself in some quiet moment, how do I know anything? What puts me in contact with that world out there? You say the roast is you say the roast is is smoking. It's been in the oven too long. How do you know that?
How do you know that that's only up here in your mind, an illusion or a dream? How do you know that in some way this is being given to you? And because it's being given to you up here, you see it out there. Now to go from a roast that's being overdone in your oven, let us go to such a thing as good and evil, justice. Where do you get those ideas?
Where do they come from? You have never seen justice. You have never seen the good. Never have you seen it. You can't get that through your five senses.
So where does it come from? There's no doubt you have it. You have some concept of justice or good or any word of these you you want to use, right and wrong and all the rest of them. Where do they come from? Well, here are some of the answers.
They're given to you. Plato thought that. Saint Augustine of Hippo thought that. They're called theories of illumination or something of that sort. But in general, you have all the way down the centuries, as far as the Western world is concerned, a point of view which says, I know these things because I am in enlightened.
Notice that word enlightened. A light shines on me from within, and therefore I know what's out there. That's one point of view and plenty of good men and I guess some women too have held it down the centuries. There were certainly one or two good women who held it. Now on the other hand, you have the contrary of that is a point of view which says that everything I know I get in some way from the outside world.
I discover it. And that point of view was mostly maintained by men like Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas down the ages, and down to the modern times, contemporary times by neoscholastics. But you have these different points of view. Our blessed lord was not a philosopher. Keep that in mind.
Now here you have this, that you should be careful what you hear. That that the more you have, the more you get. And the less you have, even what you have will be taken from you. Now if if we take the idea, as I surely do, that everything we know I'm speaking in the natural order. I'm speaking in the without bringing in God into this picture because, obviously, if god wants to give me knowledge, he can do it, and we pray daily to do it.
We say, oh god, may I see the truth? Give me understanding. We're doing it all the time. But I do not think I have to bring god in to tell tell me that I'm seeing 12 oranges on the dining room table. Now our blessed lord here is telling us that the more we have in hearing, the more we'll get from hearing.
Saint Thomas put it this way that whatever you know, you know according to the measure of the knower. Whatever you know to you those five senses that comes to you and you know it, you evaluate it, you esteem it, you are persuaded by it, you are convinced by it, you are moved to action by it according to the knower. According to the knower. To put it maybe in another way, with these five senses and they are our only contacts with that world, the world which is opposed to the ego. My five senses cut them off and I'm in a world absolutely in me.
And so everything I know in the speak in the natural order comes to me if you're following this theory of knowledge, and I can't see the other one at all. Because remember, whenever you talk about knowledge and truth, you have to think of error. And if you say, God gives me ideas of justice and the true and the good and the beautiful, then where does error come in? Is he causing me to make mistakes? See, this is just a little on Poisson aside.
So here is the terrifically important thing to remember, that everything you know, you bring something to that experience. And so when you talk about knowing god, when you talk about pursuing the good, when you say I'm trying to live a good life, you've got to know what these things are. And how do you know it? It has to come to you. And the more you have, the more understanding, the more experience of life, the greater the greater the greater the background upon which all this incoming data impinges.
The greater that background is, the greater will be your understanding. And the more you have of it, the more you will get. You take two people out on the Chesapeake Bay looking at a dark marker on the water. One's inexperienced and the other person knows something about bathing and the markers. And you say to the person who doesn't know anything about markers on the bay, you say, What's that?
He said, That's a black floating object. That's all he knows about it. It's a black floating object. You say, Oh, it's much more than that. He said, Well, what do you mean it's more than I say, That's a bay marker.
That tells you where you're supposed to be and if you're not there you're going to be in heap big trouble. That's what we call a bully. And I can tell you that I can tell you a lot about it. If it's black, I know it's an odd number and I know it's gonna be on the left side of the channel. Here's my point, the man who brings nothing to looking at that black object, he doesn't know beans about it.
But the more I know about it in the sense of the knowledge I already have when I see that black floating object, it means a lot more to me. Our Lord said, the more you have, the more you'll get. And the less you have, even that will be taken from you. That's mysterious to me. The first part I can understand, but this second part is that unless we say that in not using the little we have, it will shrink, it will wither up, it will die, it will disappear, we won't have it.
And you take this as a matter of conscience. When you have an idea, a fairly not a complete when you have a fairly idea that something is wrong and you go ahead and do it, sooner or later, it becomes right. So the little you had is withered up and gone. And so these words of our lord today, and they strike me as ally important. Open your eyes.
Open your ears. Open all your senses. They are the windows through which you know this world that god made, and let that world come in. But the more you have to receive it, the more you will get out of it. And the less you have, our Lord says, it will be taken from you.
In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.