A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, when the son of man comes in his glory, escorted by all the angels of heaven, he will sit upon his royal throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. Then he will separate them into two groups as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The sheep he will place on his right hand, the goats on his left. The king will then say to those on his right, to the sheep, come.
You have my father's blessing. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me.
I was ill and you comforted me and in prison, you came to visit me. But when he had said this, then the just will ask him, Lord, when did we see you hungry or feed you or see you thirsty and give you drink? When did we welcome you away from home or clothe you in your nakedness? When did we visit you when you were ill or in prison? The king will then answer, I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.
And then our lord continues. The king will say to those on his left, to the goats, out of my sight, you condemned into that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was away from home alone and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing at all.
I was ill and in prison, and you did not come to comfort me. Then they, in their turn, will ask, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or away from home or naked or ill or in prison and not attend to you in your needs? And he will the king will then answer, I assure you, as often as you neglected to do it for one of these least ones, you neglected to do it to me. These will go off to eternal punishment and the just to eternal life. The gospel, the good news of the lord.
This text is taken from the Romans, and it may strike you as being familiar. I hope so. No one lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, we live for the lord, and if we die, we die for the lord. So then whether we live or die, we are the lord.
Now you should recognize that this is about the third or the fourth time I've used that text because I have found no text that more fittingly fits the situation that we are faced with. Today, it's the feast of Christ the king. And what could be more fitting than that as our statement from Saint Paul speaking to the Romans to say that that we are the lords. Now the first thing about this feast is that we have to identify Christ the king as god. And, you know, sometimes I wonder if we get this home into our dull brains that this baby born of a virgin girl two thousand years ago more or less was the incarnation taken into the flesh of god almighty.
The inexpressible, the unimaginative. We can't form an image of god. We can't form a concept of god. We cannot make a single proposition about god that is ultimately and absolutely true. Because even if I say god is, the only kind of isness that I know are the things of this world.
And they are all contingent. They all have come to be, they live or they exist, and then they die, they rust up, they perish. I have no cons I I can't even say god is and have a proposition which straights which is a straightforward and complete statement of a truth because god has been from all his timeless. There's no there's no future. There's no past to god almighty.
There's no space relationships. There's nothing sensible. There's nothing tangible. There's nothing imaginative that I can imagine. That's God.
And we say that that almighty, all knowing, all loving, all just, all of these these negative things we say or these terms which we put make infinite, that all of that came to be in a baby born of a virgin girl named Mary. That's what we're talking about. That that baby is god. We can say that that that god was born of a virgin. Why?
Now here is the pivotal point. Why? Because this person of Jesus Christ is one person, one. That person has two natures, divine and human, complete in both. But there's only one person and that person of Jesus Christ is god, divine.
That's why Luther in his very magnificent sermon for one Christmas where he says how we can say, God walked down the streets of Nazareth, God nursed at the breast of the Mary bird the virgin, God wept, God worked at a bit at a carpenter's bench, God walked and sweated, and God died on the cross. Not that God died. The divine nature didn't, but this person did. And that person is divine, Jesus Christ, and it's only one person, but two natures. Now when Pius the eleventh in 1925 made this created this feast of Christ the king.
Let me quote just a line or two from that encyclical. It was called Quamus Primus. It was on 12/11/1925. He says, Christ, that's this baby born of the Jewish virgin girl. Christ is to be adored by angels and men not only as god but that angels and men must obey and be subject to his sovereignty as man.
We can't separate the two because there's only one person. Now don't ask me to explain that. This is a mystery. I'm only giving you the the the words which constitute the formula which makes sense. But that angels and men must obey notice, obey.
Ye gods, are we supposed to obey somebody and be subject to his sovereignty? Are we subject to survive? We democratic peoples, are we going to be subject to him? Are we to obey? This is getting worse.
That by sole virtue of the hypostatic union, that's the fancy Greek word for it, Christ has power over all creatures. Can you imagine anything more repulsive to our age and I mean this November 1993 when we just heard the speech from our president in Memphis. And it was a good speech when congress, I think the house of representative, just passed what they call the anti crime bill. Did the word god come up in it? Did the word Jesus Christ come up in it?
Not in any of it. Not in any of it. Yet it did when our president was inaugurated. We all had all kinds of prayers and god blesses you and so forth. But we that's for that.
Our money says in god we trust. All the cash I had on hand, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, that was the end of that. They all had, In God we trust. I looked at the paper money, In God we trust. That's on all our money, so called money.
Yet, you can't have a second of silence in a public school. You can't have any kind of a prayer in public school, even remotely. Now you put these things together, it makes sense. And you're better than I am, McGee. But that is a that's a terrible symbol of the state our nation is in.
How absolutely disintegrated we are. Disintegrated. We think we're gonna stop crime by stopping people getting guns as if the gun could ever be guilty of a crime. Now the curious thing is this, for the last eight weeks, this is the eighth the fourth the eighth Sunday, I have from this pulpit been speaking on nothing but Christ the king. That now that's a fact.
First of all, for four Sundays I preached your pardon to use that word. I, gave you the benefit of a homily. That sounds so much better, you know. On the great encyclical, I use that word great, not easy reading but a great magnificent, splendid, encyclical of our holy father on the splendor of truth. I gave four Sundays to that.
And the whole point of that encyclical has three chapters. The first chapter is on the basis, the foundation of morality which is absolutely necessary and it is based on absolutes. It is based on God himself. That's the first chapter. The second chapter is a litany of systems.
All of this in the Catholic church remember, of of systems of morality which are not which are abhorrent to God's law and to God's will as it as explained in the first chapter. The third chapter has to do with the individual's need and society's need for what? For the splendor of truth, for god's truth. And today, we deny there is is any such thing as truth. I mean, we as a nation.
All we have are statistic our statistical normalities. I gave four Sundays to that. And the main part of that, it's sick as far as I'm concerned, is not the second or third chapter, it's that first chapter where our holy father, as it has never been done so succinctly, is very Thomistic but he doesn't rest on Aquinas. It's very scriptural. But he our holy father, first of all begins with God, with God's law, and with God's law as it applies to to individual human beings who have the ability to say yes and no and to make bad choices.
And those principles will never change. They are of god. We call it the natural moral law. And the natural moral law is useless if it doesn't have a contemporary interpreter and the holy father slams that home good and solid. It is his church speaking authoritatively.
We call it the magisterium which means Rome. It doesn't mean some self made theologian even if he's a moral theologian. It means the church of Rome. It means the rock of Peter speaking to a contemporary world. That's chapter one and it is a honey.
It's hard reading but so are most wills and so is the constitution of The United States. So is every important document. If you want easy reading, read fiction. Now then I dealt with the idea of the mystical body of Christ or we call the church. And I'm not concerned with the exact wording you use but we have here a conception which is backed up by the the new universal catechism or the catechism for the catholic church which states very clearly that the church, the body of Christ is in pilgrimage.
We used to say militant. It is also being purified. We used to say suffering. And it is also praising God in full contemplation. We used to say triumphant.
I don't care which terminology you use. We are one in Christ. One in Christ the king. Wrex. Whether we're on earth struggling hard to be decent Catholics, Christians, whether we are being purified in a secondary second state after death, or whether we have made it fully and are in complete contemplation of God which we call heaven.
Heaven. But you see it is all bound up with the kingship of Christ, his running to show his God. His God. God. And we in this life are part of him.
We have a we have an element of divinity in us. There is where you get your solid basis for the absolute regard and esteem for your neighbor even if he's a drunk rolling in the gutter full of filth. He is still in some way manifesting the image of God. That's a powerful first chapter. And that idea then that I tried to develop that we are all part of this church or all part of God's people or all part of the mystical body of Christ, that's still very acceptable terminology.
Vatican two uses it. And so let us think about these things. And now at the end of the liturgical year, we want us end it all in a great anthem of triumph. King of kings, lord of lords. King of kings, lord of lords, Jesus Christ.
Hallelujah. And Handel made a marvelous chorus out of it that simply raises you from your chair or your seat or wherever and you can't help but being uplifted, inspirited by that gorgeous gorgeous piece of music. King of kings, Lord of lords and we hail Christ that today. And I've been doing it for the last eight weeks. But today but today we settle on it to bring it out.
And if there's any word or any two words which are absolutely antagonistic to a liberal of today are king. And then to make it worse, absolute. These are absolutely abhorrent to people today. Plenty of people who are sitting in our pews in Catholic churches Sunday after Sunday don't like this talk. They are for a democratic church.
Whatever in the world that you know what demos comes. I mean, democratic is based upon the Greek demos and it means the crowd, the the vulgar hoi polloi. And remember, was Plato who said it was the lowest possible form of government, the lowest, the worst. We think there's nothing else but, that everything has to be democratic. You have to run your family as a democracy.
You have to run your classroom as a democracy. You have to run your university as a democracy. You have run your factory, your office, anything, or even your baseball team. That's the world we're living in. A world that is completely in revolt against any authority.
When a good friend of mine, about ten years ago, I guess now, got to made a survey, personal survey of all the Catholic schools of this area trying to get a hold of what their sense of morality was. And then at at the end of the of the they had personal interviews with a good percentage, personal, one to one. And one young high school boy from a Catholic high school boy spoke up to his sister and said, who is god to tell me what to do? Now this actually happened. Here's a high school going to Catholic high school saying, Who is God to tell me what to do?
And he's all of 16 or 17 years old. So I hope God was taking the time out to ask him what he wanted God to do. Now that's the world we're living in. That's what was the what is the great resentment against this encyclical of of our holy father? And please don't you forget there isn't.
It's because he said it down with in absolutely unambiguous terms that there is a God and God has told me what to do and I have no choice but to do it. As mother Teresa says, it is my duty to obey obey God. How often do you hear this? How often does God come into any discussion of public policy? Not at all.
You can't use the word. And yet every bit of our cash and pay and and paper money has in God we trust. And I'll conclude these well chosen remarks by quoting George Washington to that same effect. But that's the world we're living in, that you can't have a moment of silence in a public school, not even of silence because we got to keep God out of the public school. And you see what we're reaping, we we are facing a situation where crime is out of control and all we can say is put a 100,000 more men on the streets, build so many more jails, get more jobs.
Not any of those things will stop crime because crime by definition can only be committed by a by a rational being, a human being. No gun, no dope, no drug, no vegetable ever committed a crime. You can't commit a crime unless you're a moral being. You don't shoot dogs because they are guilty of murder. And yet, that's what we are where we are today in this country.
It's awful. I'm off. I've got I have some more good stuff but I don't have time. Let us jump to the conclusion. You're lucky.
George Washington did not make Thanksgiving a national holiday. Lincoln did that I think in 1864 or so. That is a national holiday. But what George Washington did, he he made the first Thanksgiving proclamation. And here is what our the father of our country said in that that first proclamation of thanksgiving.
Now just listen to these words. This is the man who more than any other, I suppose we can say, or at least he was certainly among the handful of the best, United States Of America as we know it. It is the duty, Washington said, of all nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty god. The providence, That means he's running the show. Now Washington could speak English.
He knew what words he was using. Let me repeat. It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence, and he wrote that with a capital p, the providence of almighty god. To obey his will. How do you know his will?
But Washington said, you you're you're obliged to acknowledge it. You are obliged to obey his will. And thirdly, you are obliged to be grateful grateful for his benefits and humbly to implore his protection and favor. Where have you heard that of recent date with all this talk about crime being our greatest, greatest, greatest destroyer? And when I heard last night some of the statistics, they are unbelievable.
I'm talking about crimes of murder. They are unbelievable compared to any other what we call industrialized nation. Unbelievable. And yet we think we're going to attack that problem by you just simply eliminating it if they ever could, of course they can. But if you could, guns or that you're gonna take care of it by what they call education or jobs, as if jobs itself can change you, as if poverty itself was the cause of crime.
At least from the very beginning of Christianity, Christianity, we have had a concept of the the truest godly life was a life of poverty. Put that in his pipe and smoke. But this is what Washington said. I repeat, it's worth repeating. It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of god.
That means it's kingship of god. To obey his will and to be grateful for his benefits and humbly to implore his protection and favor. Remember our blessed lord, king of kings, lord of lords said this, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Now if he is god and he meant what he said, how can we possibly think we're going the right path if we ignore him? Christ the king, lord of lords.
In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.