8th Sunday after Pentecost

Tomorrow is the 8th Sunday after Pentecost. We will hear about being a good and faithful steward of our assets. I always think about the poor widow, who gave a small pittance, but it was a lot of what she owned. And, Jesus commented that this woman was richer than all the others who pitched into the alms box. We WILL be held accountable for what we do with what we have.

I'm going to let our beloved Abbot explain it. He does a far better job at than I do. He's commenting on the readings from St. Paul to the Romans, which we have been hearing the last few weeks:

'...man, unaided by grace, is incapable of producing perfect justice and absolute good. Experience has proved it, the fathers will, later on, unanimously assert it, and the Church, in her Councils, will define it. True, by the mere powers of his fallen nature, man may come to the knowledge of some truths, and to the practice of some virtues; but, without grace, he can never know, and still less observe, the precepts of even the natural law, it they are taken as a whole.

From Jesus and Jesus alone, comes all justice. Not only is supernatural grace in the sinner's soul, wholly from Him; but even that natural justice, of which men are so proud, and which they say is quite enough without anything else, soon leaves one who does not cling to Christ by Faith and love. Our modern world has a pompous phrase about 'the independence of the human mind'; let those who pretend to acknowledge no other but that, go one with their boasting of being moral and honest men; but, as to us Christians, we believe what our mother the Church teaches us; and, agreeably to such teaching, we believe that 'a moral and honest man,' that is to say, a man who lives up to all the duties which nature puts upon him, can only be such here below by a special aid of our Redeemer and Saviour Christ Jesus. With St. Paul, therefore, let us be proud of the Gospel; for, as he calls it, it is the power of God, not only to justify the ungodly, but also to enrich souls, that thirst after what is right, with an active and perfect justice. 'The just man liveth by faith' says St. Paul; and according to the growth of his faith, so is his growth in justice. Without faith if Christ, the pretension to reach perfection in good, by one's own power and works, produces nothing but the stagnation of pride and the wrath of God.'



Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.

- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity