 I have to tell you, this is one of my favorite conferences to speak at, speak all over the country, speak a lot in Texas for whatever reason. Seems like we're always down in Texas, but it's always nice to be on my home turf, you know, have a home game. And I love, I love this Bible conference that I've been speaking here for about 10 years now and just always a wonderful chance to share with you. And today, I mean, this is a treat. We're gonna, we're gonna be looking at Philippians 4, 4 through 9. And this passage out of Philippians 4 is like my life verse. You know, people talk about having a life verse. It's just kind of thematic for your vocation. This is, this is my life verses. Okay, these are the verses that I have committed to memory and often recite to myself at night. I did many years of urban ministry in the African American community in West Michigan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And in the African American spiritual tradition, there's a term called the midnight hour. Okay. He will come to you in the midnight hour. Okay. And that's, that's profound, this concept of the midnight hour. What is the midnight hour? Okay. The midnight hour is those times at night where you wake up and you cannot sleep because you're filled with grief and anxiety. Okay. And of course, the suffering that, that the African American community has gone through in their history has led them to be very familiar with the midnight hour. Right. But all of us who follow Christ experience the midnight hour. And I do a lot, or the 2 a.m. hour. Okay. Or the 4 a.m. hour, frequently. And when the midnight hour comes on me, one of the things I do is recite Philippians 4, 4-3-9. And I meditate on that. And Christ consoles me through these words of Scripture. This is actually one of the first texts I ever preached on. It would have been back something like in 1993 when I was a young Protestant pastor. But whether Protestant or Catholic, many of the, the instructions that St. Paul gives us in this passage are equally applicable, but I would say as a Catholic, they're even richer as we understand them within the fullness of truth and within the sacramental ministry of the church. Amen. Amen. Okay. Let's begin in prayer in the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father, we ask that you pour down on us now that spirit of love, joy and peace, the Holy Spirit, which you have given to us through baptism, sealed in us through confirmation, which you renew in us at every Eucharist. Now enliven that spirit within us so that we may understand the words committed to writing by your apostle Paul. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. It's not unintentionally that Pope Francis entitled his first major exhortation, the joy of the gospel. It's not unintentional that he linked those two ideas, joy and gospel, because joyfulness is essential to evangelism. Years ago, when I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I had a neighbor who was a devout evangelical Protestant man, and he had a great concern for other people's souls. And next door to my neighbor, there lived an elderly widow who had led a rather wild life, and although she had been raised as a Christian, had drifted far from the faith. And so my neighbor, being the apostolic soul that he was, took it upon himself to reach out to this widow, and he did this in a beautiful way by acts of service. He would come and knock on the door and ask if she would like him to walk her dog, and he walked her dog regularly for her because she was a bit frail to get out, and she was not strong enough to do yard work, and so he volunteered to do those things, and he would invite her over for meals on holidays to make sure that she had somebody to spend those times with, and so in many concrete ways he tried to show her the love of Christ. Unfortunately, my neighbor never made much progress in bringing this widow back into the church because he was a sourpuss. It was one of these types that was always griping about, you know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you know, what do you heard on Rush Limbaugh, or you know something like this, and this kind of griping and complaining attitude as much as he was sincere in trying to follow Christ turned off this widow. She was like, well, if that's what these church people are into, you know, I don't want any part of it. And that's what Pope Francis warns us about again and again in Evangelii Gaudium in the joy of the gospel. He warns us not to have this defeatist, depressing attitude, and that applies for Catholics as well, especially for faithful Catholics. I mean, if all we as faithful Catholics are going to tell to our culture is, join us so that you too can bemoan the culture of death. Oh, that sounds exciting. I got to give up my partying right now. And join you folks over there. Yeah, that looks like a happy gathering. So is that the message of the faithful Catholic, come and join us to bemoan the culture of death? There has to be something more. We really have to recover the joy of knowing Christ in our lives. Nehemiah 8.10 says, the joy of the Lord is your strength. And that's a verse that's well worth all of us memorizing. Today, the joy of the Lord is your strength. And that's what we have to remember going forward. We can learn a lot from the Apostle Paul about having joy in the midst of difficulty, especially in this book of Philippians. Dr. Hahn has already mentioned this, that the terms for joy or rejoice occur 14 times in the four short chapters of Philippians. And this is arguably the highest concentration of joy terms in the New Testament. We'll come back to that in a few minutes and talk about some other places in the New Testament that talk about joy. But that's kind of remarkable, especially considering the circumstances that St. Paul was in when he writes this letter. I mean, it would be one thing if Paul was joyful in the good times. Maybe when he was seeing great apostolic success and was able to travel freely through Asia Minor or something like this. But that was not the situation when Paul was writing to the Philippians. Let's just recall to mind some of the verses of Philippians 1. And then we'll talk about some of the circumstances that Paul was in that are reflected in some of these verses. Just to call to mind again Paul and Timothy. It says in the beginning, servants of Christ Jesus to all the saints in Christ Jesus, who are at Philippi with the bishops and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy. See, already we see those terms cropping up. Thankful for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I'm sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel thus about you all because I hold you in my heart for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment, referring to as circumstances, and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. Yes, and I shall rejoice a little later in the chapter he says, for I know that through your prayers in the help of the spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not at all be ashamed. Dr. Petrie referred to that shame thing, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. You see, and we'll come back to this, but this is what's at stake. He's facing a life and death situation. For to me to live as Christ and to die as gain, if it is to be life in the flesh that means fruitful labor for me, yet which I shall choose I cannot tell, I am hard-pressed between the two. And then into chapter two he says, even if I am to be poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. So he's referring to his imminent death there. If I am condemned to death and if I die, I'm going to be as it were poured out like a libation upon the offering of your faith. Likewise, you should be glad and rejoice with me. So in these opening chapters of Philippians, St. Paul is referring to his circumstances and we can also reconstruct his circumstances with the help of archaeology, history and what we know from his other letters and the book of Acts. And I would be among those who would place the book of Philippians as being written around 61 to 62 AD while Paul is under house arrest in Rome as is reflected at the end of Acts in Acts 28. And that was not an easy time for St. Paul. So first of all, let's list what's going on. He's under house arrest. He's under house arrest. Now when I was doing urban ministry, I knew a number of people are placed under house arrest and the way we did it back in the 90s was what they called the tether. If you committed some kind of crime and they didn't want to put you in jail or if you were transitioning from prison back into society, they might confine you to your home and they do that by putting an electronic sender collar on your ankle and then a sending unit in your home and if you went too far from your house, like more than 100 feet or something like that, it would go off, notify the police, they'd come pick you up, put you back in jail. So that's what we called the tether. Now, technology wasn't so good back in the first century. So instead of that, what they did with St. Paul was they chained him to a soldier 24 hours a day or at least that's probably what they did, reconstructing, you know, that was the general practice and so we assumed that that was the practice also with St. Paul. He was chained to a soldier and he refers to his chains in this letter. And usually soldiers worked a six-hour shift so he was chained to four different soldiers through the day, six hours with one, then change, and six hours with another. Being chained to another person cramps your style. Okay? It kind of limits what you can do. Okay? Limits the, you know, the postures you can assume and you know, you try to take a nap and the guy's moving around and tugging on your leg, rattle, rattle, rattle, and you try to nap, you know, and you can never get any privacy. People come over, you want to have an intense, you know, you want to do spiritual direction and here you've got the Centurion over here. Ignore the Centurion. Just open up. Open up with me. Ignore him. He's just going to spread it all through the guardhouse. Makes it hard to do spiritual direction. So that is, and then you can't work. Okay? You can't, it makes it very difficult to hold down a job and yet the Roman government wasn't going to provide a living for St. Paul. So he's forcibly unemployed and yet he still has to pay for his house. He still has to pay for his food, etc. And so where's that money going to come from? Well, donations. Okay? People have to support him. And in fact, as you, as you noticed, reading through Philippians, one of the reasons why he's writing this letter is because he's so grateful to the Philippians because they sent him some support. They sent him some monetary support through a pathroditus so that he had the means to continue to maintain himself. So he's under house arrest and running out of money and then he has appealed to Caesar. So he's on trial facing a crazy judge. Okay? He's on trial facing a crazy judge. Okay? Because we know from the book of Acts that he was stuck in Caesarea Philippi in Israel. His court case is going nowhere there so he tried a legal maneuver as a Roman citizen of appealing directly to Caesar who was the equivalent of the Supreme Court for the whole empire. And so he was granted. Okay? Off to Caesar you go. So he's waiting in Rome to be heard by Caesar. Now, Caesar at the time was a guy by the name of Nero. Okay? Now, have any of you named any of your children Nero? What? No one? Really? Okay? All joking aside, that's not surprising. There's a reason why people tend not to name their children Nero, Adolf, and Attila. Okay? Those names are reserved for Doberman pinchers. Okay? Why doesn't anybody name their kid after Nero? Okay? Well, because he was one of the most monstrous of all the Roman emperors. For the sake of the more delicate among us, I'm not even going to mention everything that he did, but Nero was a man who had his first wife killed, had her assassinated. He killed his second wife with his own hands. He had his mother murdered, according to the accounts by having her locked in a sauna. He suspected of murdering his step-brother. He told his tutor and mentor, Seneca. You ever heard of Seneca? He's a famous Roman philosopher and orator, a great noble man. He was a flower of Roman culture. Well, Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself. And Seneca did that. Allah Socrates. Okay? Because that's the nobility that Seneca did, that he possessed. Nero ironically gives us one, perhaps the only example of same-sex marriage in antiquity. That was definitely not practiced. Same-sex relationships were very common, like in the time of Socrates and Plato. But nobody ever thought of marrying another man, because what would be the point? The point of marriage was to raise a family. And so we have these statements by various Greek philosophers, and they talk about, we've got courtesans for pleasure, and we've got concubines for every day, and then we've got legitimate wives to raise children and govern the home. So this is how they thought about it. And then they also had younger men that they spent time with. And that was very common, and it was not considered wrong back in that time. And in fact, in Plato's day, you ever heard the phrase, platonic love? Okay, yeah. Everybody thinks that means like a chased relationship between a man and a woman. That's not what Plato meant. When he was talking about the ideal love, he meant a chased relationship between two men, because he regarded sexual passion as an irrational disorder. And he thought that sexual passion had no place in a relationship between two men, that they should learn to have love on an intellectual level, that they should share a passion for truth, beauty, and goodness. And that sexuality was for procreation, and so that's where we get platonic love from. But nonetheless, the Greeks did not practice same-sex marriage, because as I said, marriage was for raising a family. But Nero is perhaps the only instance that I know of from antiquity where this happened. He had a male lover who resembled his first wife, and later in the years, he regretted having killed her, and so he made his younger male lover grow his hair long, and had him made up like his wife, and married him, and then paraded around Rome in a bridal litter. And you know what? This is only about a third. I'll mention one more thing about Nero. He's the guy famous for having Christians crucified at his dinner parties, having them put up on poles, and then he would ignite the bodies after dark to make torches at his dinner parties. Okay, so that's the head of the Supreme Court. That's your Chief Justice. That's your Chief Justice whom you've appealed to. Now, you know, call to mind. I'm not making any comparisons with our own Chief Justice. No, seriously. Justice Roberts, you should read what he said on this recent decision. It was very sane, and he opposed it. But yeah, you know, the Supreme Court was the emperor, and so he was a Supreme Court of one man. So here's St. Paul waiting to have his case heard by Nero. You know, some people think that Nero suffered from lead poisoning, and that's what caused him to deteriorate mentally through his years. And it was a capital offense that he was waiting to be heard for. Okay, so he could be condemned to death, right? Third thing, he's facing a death sentence. And just as in modern America, he had no assurance going into this court that his case would be decided according to law. Okay? It might be just decided according to the whim of the judge. Okay? Maybe the judge didn't like him. Maybe the judge took a disliking to this new sect of the Christians. One of the accusations that the early Romans had against the Christians was basically that they were haters. Okay? They were hatred of man. They were misanthropes. Okay? So this accusation of hatred was already going on. So he might, you know, St. Paul might just be sentenced to death on a whim of this crazy judge. And then while St. Paul is waiting for his trial to be heard, he mentions in Philippians 1 that there are people going around preaching Christ out of envy of him. Essentially, we have other evangelists, other Christian evangelists, active in Rome, who are taking advantage of Paul's confinement to steal his sheep. Okay? So he's trying to pray on his flock and steal people away from those that he had discipled and converted and et cetera, and to enhance their own ministries at the expense of Paul's. So look at what he's done. You know, he's under house arrest, running out of money, waiting for a crazy judge to possibly give him a death sentence while rival preachers are destroying his ministry. And this is the time when St. Paul writes the epistle of joy. Okay? Ironic, huh? He's not sad at all. In fact, like I said, words relating to joy, 14 times in this epistle. Let me talk about that for just a minute, these concentrations of joy terms. There's two authors in the New Testament who use joy terms more than anyone else. Paul uses them the most than St. John. And there are two places of major concentration of joy terms in the New Testament. St. Paul's largest concentration is in the Book of Philippians. Outside of Paul, St. John uses joy the most, and St. John's largest concentration of joy terms is in John 14 through 17. Do you remember what John 14 through 17 is? It's the Last Supper Discourse. It's the words of Jesus before he goes to his death. So let's think about this. Two of the largest concentrations of joy terms in the book. One, during Jesus speaking before he faces his death, the other in Philippians by St. Paul before he faces his death. So that tells us something. That tells us we need to buy the Verben software so that we could do these words. That tells us that joy is not incompatible with suffering, and joy is not even incompatible with death. And let's say something about Nero and the Neuronian persecution. The persecution under Nero in the 60s for Christians was, of course, extremely bad. He was crucifying Christians, feeding them to lions in the Colosseum, etc., using them as torches, etc. But you know what? This was also one of the church's finest hours. And it was one of the periods of the quickest growth of the church. And it was during the period where the church was actually quietly converting the empire. And you know why? Because when those Christians were hauled off to the Colosseum, they didn't line up in chains and file into the Colosseum singing the Volga boatman. They didn't line up in chains and file into the Colosseum singing the Volga boatman. Woe is us. We're gonna be eaten. Okay? They didn't do that. Instead, as they were facing death, they were singing hymns. Ala, Paul, and Silas in prison in Acts 16. Okay? They were singing hymns of joy as they went to their death. And all these people in the Colosseum who were lined up to see this gory spectacle, yeah, let's see some Christians die. And then they're watching these Christians tied up to stakes, and these Christians are singing hymns as the lions are chewing off their limbs. And they're like, you know, this isn't funny. And they left the Colosseum in silence, pondering what they had just seen. Let's take a lesson from this, faithful Catholics. Okay? Don't get on your social media. Just bemoaning the culture of death. Okay? Get on there talking about the joy of Jesus. If you're fine for something, if some human rights commission comes after you, praise God. Start tweeting. I'm so happy. I'm being sued. Praise God. I'm going to jail. Thank the Lord. I am being counted worthy to lose my job for the sake of Christ. Amen! Amen! Amen! And people are going to wonder, what's the matter with those people? It makes me think of a Farsight cartoon. You remember the Farsight by Gary Larson? He's got this one cartoon that's set in hell, right? So there's a subterranean tunnel in hell. And one of the citizens of the hell goes by and he's got a wheelbarrow full of rock. He goes by the tunnel. He's just sweating. He's miserable, pushing this wheelbarrow through. And another person who's been sent to hell goes by and a wheelbarrow. He's got a bunch of rocks and he's miserable too. And there's these two devils with pitchforks and they're standing by and they're watching everybody go by with their wheelbarrows with the rocks. And then comes by a guy at a wheelbarrow. He's like, who-hoo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. He's singing a tune. He's whistling, you know? And the two devils are watching this and look at each other like, you know what? We're not getting through to that guy. Jesus talks about Satan as the prince of this world. There's a lot of influence that the devil and the demons have in this world. And they are able, at times in history, to bring hell up and manifest hell on earth. Okay? That's what World War II was. Nazism was the manifestation of hell on earth. Okay? The concentration camps are the closest thing to the vision of hell that we've seen. And then it was imitated, you know, Stalin and Mao did their best as well, bringing hell to earth. Okay? Don't let them get through to you. Okay? Sing. Give praise to God. Give praise to God. Okay? All right. We'll come back to this. We'll come back to this. So these were the circumstances St. Paul was in. And despite all these circumstances, he just writes with joy for a number of different reasons. Let me just give you one. Because St. Paul was embracing his suffering and had not given into sadness, he was actually seeing that his circumstances were being turned to the good. Because, remember I said he was chained up to a soldier 24-7? Guess what he did with those soldiers? That's right. You ever heard about Jesus? How long is your shift? He was converting these soldiers. These were part of the Praetorian Guard. Okay? Philippians 1.13. He says, It has become known throughout the whole Praetorian Guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. See, there's a great irony in this. Because he had appealed to Caesar, he was an imperial prisoner. And the imperial prisoners were guarded by the secret service. That is the emperor's own bodyguard, which was called the Praetorian Guard. So these were highly trained men. These were high-ranking law enforcement officers who were being detailed. Okay? It was like the FBI, the CIA, the secret service, whatever, being detailed to be chained to Paul. And then Paul had a captive audience. Who's chained to whom? Who's the one that can't get away? And so Paul is having the opportunity to do something that he never would have had the opportunity to do if he had not been arrested. Which is actually evangelize the royal court. He's making it straight to the top. Okay? Through the men that are standing beside Nero all the time. Watching him and guarding his life. Okay? And so it's getting all through the White House. Okay? All, you know, the guards there, the security detail. Even if they aren't converting, they're learning about Christ and so on. And so the gospel is spreading. And at the end of the epistle, in verse 22, look at this. All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar's household. He's just like throwing that in there. Oh yeah. By the way, I've won a bunch of converts in the White House. Irony. Okay? So this shows us, what was Paul saying? He's not giving into sadness. Okay? St. Josiah Escrivah. He says, don't give into sadness. It is an ally of the enemy. Please write that down. Okay? Don't give into sadness. It's an ally of the enemy. Don't do it. The joy of the Lord is your strength. Okay? And because he didn't get, he didn't sit there in a, he didn't go into a shell and sit there moping under house arrest. But he looked around at what opportunities he had. The only opportunity he had is this guy that's chained to him. Okay. There we go. Every time I think about this, I had this vision of the future and persecution breaks out against the Catholic church. And the FBI gets sent to Steubenville and they arrest Dr. Hahn. And these FBI agents have to watch Dr. Hahn 24-7. It's like, you ever heard of Abraham? It's a payback, Scott. But my text is actually a Philippians 4. So let's turn over the page. Let's turn to page 2. And I'm just going to concentrate on six verses here. Philippians 4, 4-9. As he nears the end of his letter, St. Paul gives what we call perinacis or exhortation in the faith. And he gives them practical instruction for living. And he says, Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice always. Let your forbearance or patience be known to all men. See, the Philippians themselves are being persecuted in various ways. He says, be patient. Don't strike back. Don't retaliate. Let it be evident that you're not... This word translated forbearance is one who does not strike back quickly. You know, but is patient with others. He says, let that be known to everyone. The Lord is near. We talk about that for a long time. Lord is near not only the sense that he's present with you when he's suffering, but also he's coming again soon. And he's near in the sacraments. But moving on. Have no anxiety about anything. How much anxiety should we have about things? None. About how much things? Everything, that's right. No anxiety about anything. But in everything. By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep... I like the stronger translation will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, literally it's as to the rest, brethren. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, that word could also be translated perhaps pious, whatever is pious. Semna from which you get like Sebastian, so on. Whatever is just, whatever is pure, has the connotation of holy there. Whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything excellent, if there's anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do. And the God of peace will be with you. So this is St. Paul's three ways to joy and peace. And so let's break it down. First of all, right praying. Right praying. St. Paul says up here, have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. So I have in italics there are three terms, prayer, supplication, and thanksgiving in the RSV text. And these are three elements of prayer that we need to make sure to include in our own prayer life so that we have a well-balanced diet of prayer. Okay, first term is prosuche, which is the most general term for prayer. And it includes elements of worship. The element of prostrating yourself before God and showing God honor. And so I just want to concentrate on that aspect of prosuche, this aspect of adoring. And St. Paul leads with that. And that calls to mind the Lord's prayer, which begins with adoration. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. May your name be acclaimed as holy. Okay, so as it were praising, blessing the name of God at the beginning of the Lord's prayer. And that's instructive for us that prayer should start with worship, start with adoration. Many of you have probably heard the ax acronym for prayer, right, four movements of prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. I often use that for my own mental prayer, and I recommend it to you as well. In fact, you can use the beads of the rosary sometimes. Like, for example, if you're driving somewhere, you've got a half hour, an hour on the road, and you want to pray, you want to get some prayer in during that day. What I find very helpful is to take the beads of the rosary, I do 10 acts of adoration as I go through the beads. Like, Lord, I adore you for the beauty of the sky. Lord, I adore you for the turning of the leaves. Say it's a fall, you know, fall, and I'm driving through the countryside, you know? Lord, I adore you for the gift of yourself and the Eucharist. You know, I just think of 10 things to praise God for on those 10 beads. Then I go to the next set, and I make 10 acts of confession, confess 10 different sins, and then 10 acts of thanksgiving, and then on the final two decades, make 20 supplications, usually intercessions for people. And I find that that helps me. You know, it's hard to focus sometimes in prayer, and that can be a method that helps. But our point is it's best to start with worship. It's best to start with adoration in our prayer. And why is that? It's because the act of worship creates perspective in our relationship. It's kind of like this. When I was courting my wife in West Michigan, we used to love to go out on summer evenings out to Lake Michigan and watch the sunset from the Michigan dunes. And those of you who've ever had the privilege of doing that, you know it's a beautiful place of the country. Okay, to watch the sunset over the lake from the shores of Michigan. And we would do that, and then we'd watch the stars come out, et cetera. And when we would drive home from having, you know, spent a couple of hours and watch the sunset at the beach, I was always filled with peace. And I pondered, why is this that whole experience was so peaceful? And I think the answer is perspective, you know? You see the slowly setting sun, you see the stars come out, they're so far away, the whole panorama is so large, and you get a sense of the divine majesty. You get a sense of how great God is, how slow time is from his perspective, you know, a day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day, et cetera. You get a sense of your own smallness within the grander scheme of things and your own life, your own problems are just put in perspective within the divine plan. And I think that's what gazing on nature does for us. But, you know, adoration is like that as well. When we adore God, adoring God is like gazing on His greatness, gazing on His majesty, which is reflected in nature, but nature is even pale in comparison to the reality of God. So we begin prayer by worshiping the majesty of God, pondering His omnipotence, His omniscience, all of His attributes, and then we're ready, okay? Then we're ready to go into other acts of prayer, like, for example, what's next on the list, which is the acist or supplication, asking for things, okay? We have to do that. Our Lord welcomes us to ask the Father. He says, ask the Father anything in my name and it will be granted to you. So supplication is an essential part of prayer, but it should follow adoration once we've placed ourselves in proper relationship to God. And then let's not forget this third aspect, which is thanksgiving. St. Paul says, with thanksgiving, which strikingly in the Greek is eucharistias, okay? Expressions of gratitude. And we often forget to include in our prayer time opportunity for thanking God. And a good part of our time in prayer should be occupied in acts of gratitude and, as it were, counting our blessings. But it's something that we tend to neglect because we're usually stressed, and so we want to quickly get through other elements of prayer and start telling the Lord what we need, right? Like, okay, quick. Oh, door a little bit. Confess a little bit. Thank a little bit. Okay, now. Lord, okay. This is what we need. I need all of this, you know? And then if that plan doesn't work, I got some other plans that you might like too, you know? Give the Lord a whole dossier full of proposals for divine action and then negotiate. And St. Paul says, hold on! Don't forget thanksgiving. With thanksgiving, with eucharistias. You know? So he's counseling us on how to have joy and how to have peace. And, you know, thanksgiving is this essential part, okay? Why is this? It's because the recollection of things for which we are to be grateful builds our faith, okay? Gratitude builds our faith because when we look back into the past and we see how God has been faithful to us in the past, answered prayer again and again provided for us again and again, we're like, you know what? I'm seeing a pattern here. And if I see this pattern in the past, you know, that gives me courage to turn around now and make my request known in the future. So, gratitude, thanksgiving, should be an essential part of our prayer and it's an essential part of prayer in the scriptures, okay? The pattern of thanksgiving is written into scriptures in the liturgy. After all, you ask any good theologian, what's the greatest prayer of the church? The mass is the greatest prayer of the church. Well, what is the mass? It's the Eucharist. What does Eucharist mean? Thanksgiving. And what are its roots? Well, its roots are in the Todah sacrifice, the thanksgiving sacrifice from the Psalms, those great Todah or thanksgiving Psalms like Psalm 118 and so on. If you look through the Psalms, what you notice is a lot of the Psalms are recitations of God's saving acts in the past like in Psalms 105 and 106. And other Psalms are recitations of God's saving acts for the individual worshiper like Psalms 116 and 118 that were sung at the Passover and are also sung in our liturgy and they're also good for personal devotion. But in Psalms 116 and 118 David or the Psalmist goes back and rehearses what God has done for me. I will praise the Lord because he has been good to me. Okay? He saved me from the pit. He set my feet on solid ground. You know? These kind of things. And the Psalms teach us to pray by rehearsing the saving acts of God. And in the prayer of ancient Israel, God taught the Israelites in Exodus 12 and 13 when you celebrate the Passover you have to recite the saving acts to your children. When your children says, why do we eat this lamb on this night or why do we eat these bitter herbs on this night? You have to tell them, you know? Because God saved me out of Egypt and you have to recite the story. You have to remember and be grateful. And again in Deuteronomy 26 when the Israelites had to make the yearly pilgrimage to bring their first fruits. When they showed up with their first fruits they had to set it down by the altar and then they had to recite. My father was a wandering Arab man and then he went down to Egypt and blah, blah, blah. They're talking about Abraham of course and they had to recite the history with the saving acts of God and they had to be grateful. It's very interesting. I learned something from a Jewish man who studied to become a rabbi then left and became a doctor. He became a specialist in pediatric headache and one of my sons has a headache condition and so he went to the Cleveland Clinic to see the headache expert there and here's a man with a rabbinical education and two of his sons are rabbis. So he always had a great time because he found out I was an Old Testament scholar. Oh, he says. About 20% of the time I was talking about headache and 80% of the time I was talking about theology and the land of Israel. And one of the things he taught me was that in the Jewish tradition the reason for the loss of the temple was ingratitude. On the ninth of Av, on their calendar, they observed the destruction of the temple and the main reason they attributed is because of the ingratitude of the Jewish people at that time. So this doctor was telling me one day, I was at the synagogue the other day and I heard this guy griping behind me and I had to fight myself so hard to get around to him and give him a piece of my mind because what I was thinking was that kind of griping is what caused us to lose the temple. Okay. So let's not do that. Let's be grateful and let's include that gratitude in our prayer. So we've got a well-balanced diet of prayer including aspects of worship, of supplication and gratitude. Right praying. Secondly, right thinking or mental hygiene. St. Paul says whatever is true, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there's anything excellence, if there's anything worthy of praise. Think about these things. We have to control our thoughts. We have to control what we meditate on and there's a lot of dangers to our thought life these days. Okay. And a lot of it comes through electronic media. Okay. And I want to address a biggie that I don't want to be so naive for any of us here and that's pornography. That is rampant. I saw a recent study this week that 54% even of practicing Christian men report looking at pornography once a month. Okay. It is a great danger because it's so seductive and it's various stuff is splashed on your screen against your will. You're just in the weather and something salacious pops up and then it's so easy to click it and it just leads down and gets worse and worse. Okay. And that is the opposite of everything that's true, honorable, just and pure. Okay. So if you have a struggle with that or if you know someone who has a struggle with that, there's a website called PurityIsPossible. Write it down. PurityIsPossible has a whole bunch of wonderful advice for how to break out of that. But that is such a major problem. That's by the way a website that we recommend to students here on campus who are struggling with this issue. That's a major issue. Another issue is just inundation with news. Okay. I saw statistically this week among journalists only 7% of journalists identify as social conservatives. Ninety 93% of journalists. Okay. Do not identify with social conservatives. Do you think that has an effect on how the news is reported? I don't think just might. Okay. So the way things are presented, what you get to hear about and what you don't get to hear about is controlled by somebody who does not share your values. And you have to limit your exposure to this. We can get inundated because of electronic gadgets and laptops and so on. We can just, we can become news junkies and especially conservative Catholics can become addicted to news sites that report on all the evil that's going on in the church. We know the sites. This bishop did this terrible thing is happening in Rome. We should be worried about this, that and the other thing. It's a delicate matter because there is a place for exposing what's evil so it can be addressed. But if you diet on that kind of material you can sink into a hole and become so depressed that you cannot fulfill what we call your duties of state which are the obligations that you have to the people around you to your vocation etc. This is a problem for me that I had to break out of. I had to unsubscribe from a whole bunch of news sources and so on strictly limit how much time I spent on the internet and so on because I was becoming pulled back into a shell when I have to deal with hundreds of students 8 children my wife etc. How can I be a servant to them if I'm worrying about problems that I can't control? I can't get to all these places. I can't address all these problems. The problem of the modern age is it's much easier to find out about problems than it is to do anything about them. Back in the day you only found out about the problems in your own city and you might be able to do something about those but now we find out problems everywhere that we think about. Instead of checking news sites for the morning you want to check your newspaper your newspaper should be the gospel reading for the day. Let me check the news. The good news that is. I'm going to check the good news. This is today's gospel reading. I'm going to start my day with that. A cup of coffee and my news book. My good news book. Amen. Start your day with the gospel reading. Control control the movies. Not everything you can get. Everything can be streamed now and all those kind of stuff. Control what you watch. Control what your children watch. Not everything has to be seen. These things can get us down. We have to concentrate on what's true, honorable, just, pure, lovely. We have to make an effort to ponder and meditate on these things just like Mary who kept all these things pondering them in her heart. And the church helps us by having the days of the saints, the feast days of the saints. You ever ponder why the church doesn't have feast days of apostates? Hey, it's the feast day of Julian. It's the optional memorial of Nestorius today. It's the commemoration of Arius. We don't do that. Why don't we commemorate the great sinners? Why do we not remember Alfred Wazi? Why don't we call these guys to mind? Because it's unhealthy to meditate on them. You got to touch evil and get off it. Because if you spend too much time talking about evil, it pulls you in like a black hole. So you just touch it and get off of it and then go on to what's pure, what's lovely and so on. So we meditate on the saints. Don't forget about the evil. Except when absolutely necessary. Okay, so right thinking. Meditate on what is good and right. In everything that you watch on a screen should be like this. Unless there's a really grave reason why not. Okay? Right acting is the last thing. What you have learned and received and heard from me and seen in me, do. Okay, pretty simple. Do it. And the God of peace will be with you. Okay, I want to talk much about this because at last night's Ted talk, Ted Shree that is, Dr. Shree. Dr. Shree was talking about discipleship and and so we've talked about this a little bit and this line in Philippians 4-9 is very similar to something that St. Paul said in Romans 3 about imitating him. Learned, received and heard and seen in me, do. He's calling them to be his disciples to mimic his behavior. Okay? And we need to implement that discipleship in the Catholic life and let me give you two quick ways that you can do it. First of all, please try to find a spiritual director. Okay? Try to find somebody or at least an older Christian who will meet with you and kind of informally give some kind of direction. Okay? I've had one all through my life and it led me into the Catholic church. My youth pastor discipled me, gave me spiritual direction when I was a Protestant in high school. I went to my college. I searched out another one that chaplain of the college became my spiritual director all through college and my Discipler went to Notre Dame, could not find a Discipler or a director at my Protestant parish, kept looking around, found an Opus Dei priest who was willing to do it even though I was a Protestant. Okay? And that was one of the integral things that led me into the Catholic church. Please find somebody. Find an older Christian who if it's not possible to get formal direction at least an older Christian who can talk with you on a regular basis, who can counsel you and you can imitate their virtues and learn from them. And secondly, find a saint to imitate. A life saint. That you just grasp onto this one saint and you just get to know this one saint's spirituality really, really well. One of the problems we have is Catholic is sometimes saint hopping, right? You know, we dab a little bit in Teresa LeSue, we dab a little bit in Teresa Avalon, John of the Cross and they're, you know, that's true, we should be aware of the great writings of a wide variety of saints that were life, but we should kind of hone in and choose somebody to really follow consistently. Somebody whose vocation is appropriate to our vocation. And get to know that saint really well, try to imitate them in all that you do and like, this is really this is the person who I follow and put it into practice because the danger is by hopping around we don't consistently follow any one of them. And so we know a lot of interesting things about this saint, a lot of interesting things about that saint but we never put it down to the rubber hitting the road and putting one of their lives into practice in our own. So spiritual direction and in a life saint I'd recommend for you for right acting learning to do it. Okay, let me, I just want to close with one thing we got to have joy because it leads to evangelization it's necessary for evangelization we see saint Paul evangelizing even though he's in chains you know this happened recently within recent memory there's a man very much like saint Paul Cardinal Francis Xavier Wynn Van Thuong from Vietnam. Six days before Saigon fell he was appointed co-agitor bishop of Saigon. How do you like that for a job description? Okay. You're just made co-agitor. So six days after his installment as co-agitor you know the stories, you can watch it on PBS now PBS American Experience is showing you know the last days of Vietnam and you can recall this, my dad was in Vietnam for four years off and on and you remember those events so he was immediately rounded up arrested and spent 13 years nine of them in solitary confinement by the communists but you know what he didn't give in to sadness he was guarded 24-7 and guess what he did he befriended his guards he found out that his guards were just poor Vietnamese that had no education he was from the upper class and he had a fantastic education so he would teach his guards French and Latin his guards would leave guard duty, go off duty and they'd be singing you know ah, gloriosi he would teach them Latin chants he would teach them about Christ so many of his guards were getting converted that the communists authorities became scared and they could not leave a guard too long with him so they would rotate them in and out but then that was worse because it gave him a bigger audience so who's in prison who's scared of whom here ok he wrote powerful greatly encouraged you to get on the internet or go to a bookstore get some of his writings wrote fantastic spiritual writings from prison on little scraps of paper that were smuggled into him by his sympathetic guards and he continued to shepherd his flock from solitary confinement using little notes that the guards would smuggle out and let me tell you something the catholic church in vietnam is stronger today than most western european countries where there has not been outright persecution the joy of the lord is your strength let's remember that amen