A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus called the 12 together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. And he sent them out to preach the kingdom of god and to heal. And he said to the 12, take nothing for your journey. No staff, nor bag, nor bread, not even money, and do not have two tunics.
And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there, depart. And wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them. As the the 12 departed and went through the villages preaching the gospel and healing everywhere. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. Putting together this morning an idea from the first reading from the book of Proverbs that god is our refuge, that god is our shield, Then taking this account this morning from Saint Luke of our lord sending out his 12, not the whole mob, not disciples, but the 12. He's sending them out of two fine men and women who need them, who are possessed with devils, or are ill, and they are the two things emphasized emphasized here. Let's not mince words about it or try to soften it. Christ sent them out, he didn't go out and to heal those who were ill and diseased and to handle the problem of the demons and the devils and those possessed.
That was their commission. Now the thought strikes me that how seldom how seldom in the New Testament do we have a picture from our blessed lord in fact or in what he tells us of man going to meet god? How seldom we have a a dramatic picture in any way comparable, for example, to the parable of the good shepherd, to the parable of the prodigal son which should be called the prodigal father. We have nothing like that to give us a picture of man seeking God, nothing like it. It's always a picture of God seeking man.
After all, God sent his son to be our savior. He sent his son to be our savior. And when Francis Thompson gave that which was a scandalizing title. Many many people were scandalized when Thompson published that poem, The Hound of Heaven. As you know, not once in the poem is God or Our Lord referred to as the hound of heaven.
Doesn't occur in the poem, not once. But that's the title of it, the hound of heaven. That Thompson and he wrote this from his life experience. This was not somebody sitting down in a plush library and Ryan giving off the effusions of his thinking. This was written out a out of bitter experience, bitter.
He was picked out of the gutter, a dying consumptive by a prostitute, and then he was picked up by the manels. And one of the most tender things and one of the most as you know, I'm I'm no poet, but one of the most tender things I've ever read are a few lines that Thompson wrote in regard prostitute whose kid disappeared completely from the scene after she knew he was safe with the Maynels. And those lines occur in what Thompson calls sister songs, and that is poetry which he wrote for the children of the Maynells. So when Thompson wrote the hound of heaven, he was fleeing from god. He wasn't running after god.
It was god who was running after him. And Saint John tells us, it is not that you love God first, it is that God loved you first. Now folks, for some reason that I have no explanation of or for, we keep this thing reversed. We think that we have to pursue god. Well, in a certain sense we do, of course, but the point is he first loves us.
He is the hound of heaven. We are the pursued. If we could only get that into our heads, that God truly loves me. This is one of the great themes of Cai Staple Lewis in his, I think one of his best books on love. And and as Lewis points out, we don't realize that God truly loves me.
Because you see, if we had that firm conviction that God, honest to God, loves me, You see, then we would interpret life. We would interpret everything that happens to us in the light of his love because you can't love God almighty nor his son Jesus Christ without at the same time admitting that God's running the show. You see, these things go together. And a man like Tolstoy in writing War and Peace and remember, the the theme of war and peace is to work out the problem of god's providence and free will. That's what that huge book is about.
And in some editions, you will have at the end of the book the essay that Tolstoy wrote. It's about 40 or 50 pages. And so but the only thing Tolstoy could see was this great and it is a problem. Don't for one minute think you're not minimizing it, that how do you reconcile God's governance of the world? And let's get this right down.
What we mean by God's governance is that not a single thing happens without god's consent. You know how Jesus Christ put this, that not a hair falls from your head. Now that's coming down of something pretty small, that every time you comb your hair, every one of those hairs is is known by the almighty God. Think about this, but Christ said it. And it's perfectly good philosophy too, let me tell you.
That everything that happens in the universe there is no such thing as absolute chance, there is nothing absolute about coincidence, that everything that happens happens because in some way of God Almighty. Almighty. Now you say, how do you reconcile this with free will? I'm not tackling that problem. I only admit that the problem is there because I want to insist just as surely on man's participation as I do in god's omnipotence.
In other words, while I say that everything that happens happens under the knowledge and the will and the power of god, at the same time, I want to say man has a part to play. Man, in some respects, sometimes is autonomous. We have responsibility and accountability. We can never get completely out of the driver's seat. And so let us take this thought that god loves me.
He is my refuge. He is my shield. Get that into our hearts and minds and souls, not just an intellectual concept or proposition, and have our daily lives lived in that great truth which means we will interpret, we will try to understand. Sometimes we'll I'm not saying you will understand and see. I'm only saying that we accept.
Cardinal Newman is the man who wrote, I do not ask to see the distant shores. And so let us let us relax, really let us relax in the great truth that God for sure loves me. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.