Everything in life has a context. We are celebrating the Eucharist on a long weekend. Once Memorial Day could be on a Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. It was always on the 30th. But then something happened. It's important to understand what happened. It manifests a basic shift in the cultural context in the age in which we live.

There has arisen at the end of the twentieth century a new kind of Man. The new Man has become what has been called the technological Man. This is the Man who believes in technology, in science. He looks to technology for all the answers for his life. It is a man who in some sense has emancipated himself from religion. No longer looking outside to God for what he wants, but who looks to his own strengths. He is the who has accepted the view that this life is the totality of his life. Yesterday he wasn't, today he is, and tomorrow he will not be. When you die, it's all over. There is no God, no heaven, no hell. He takes this as a given. In this context he looks for meaning and where does he find it? He finds it in his work. Therefore if you don't have a good job, you don't have a life. He finds it in money which is what you work for. And what is a good job? One with money. If it doesn't pay a lot of money then it isn't a good job.

What does he do with the money? You get the nice car, the nice summer place so he can escape from the polluted cities. To come out where there is a nice little green pasture in Calvert County or in other places. Why? To get relief from the job that I have that is killing me. So we have invented this American thing called 'The Weekend'. Do you know that in other languages they don't have such a word? They just had to borrow it from us. We are the inventors of the weekend. You live for Friday. Thank goodness it's Friday. It means that I've got two whole days to escape!

There's a law into my own little world to try and find happiness. And what happens? More people decide to follow me down here. And they become an enemy to my happiness. Building, building, building. It's crowded again. The city is going to get me. What has happened? You have a little disturbance of the ecology. What's the problem? People become the problem, so they say. We have too many people, that's the problem. Therefore we have to keep the numbers down, so they won't come out and take what's mine. So that I can have my nice little weekend. This is what happens when things become the measure of things. To think like this is to have the mentality of the population control people, Planned Parenthood, etc.. It's this secular mentality that has given us its greatest invention, the Long Weekend. Now you can have not just two days, but three days, and come July 4th - joy of joys - you'll have four days! Intervening days can even make a five day weekend!

The culture that had produced the phenomenon of the "weekend" is not totally bad. There is a redeeming feature in all of this. God has a finger in it. He has a way of putting a stick of dynamite into everything to blow it up so as to create something better for us. That is what God always does. He takes the messes in our lives to turn them to our good - if we let Him. The developments in the culture, which has given us the technological man, have lead to this benefit at least. Man is more and more emancipating himself from natural religiosity.

Natural religiosity is, ultimately, the enemy of Christianity. And what is natural religiosity, you ask? Natural religion is recognizing that life is bigger than I am. Therefore I need somebody on my side, someone with a big thumb who can put it on the scales to balance things out for me so that bad things don't happen to me. And who has a bigger thumb than "the Man upstairs?" Nobody, of course! The problem is how to get Him on my side. To do that we try doing "business" with God. "I'll do anything You want, but just be sure that nobody rains on my parade, that my life is nice and comfortable so I can enjoy my weekend."

This is natural religiosity, and it is the enemy of Christianity. What happens when we try to turn Christianity into a natural religion is very sad. We do not hear the gospel! Strange, but true. Very often it is the natural, secular man who is better able to hear the gospel in its clarity than we with all our baggage of natural religiosity. The man who is not looking for God to manipulate God, to use Him, is better able to hear the gospel. Remember! "The first shall be last and the last shall be first". Therefore, do not think badly of them. Many are better able to listen to the gospel.

What is the gospel? The gospel is very simple. It is a fact, a historical fact that God has intervened in human history, to destroy the things that destroy us. He sent His Son into this world. Jesus Christ came to take upon Himself the sins of the others. He allowed wicked Men to destroy Him on the cross. On the third day the Father raised him from death. Jesus Christ rose from death to announce the forgiveness of sins. He has returned love for hate, love to the enemy. Death is overcome, because Jesus Christ has not only been raised from death but seated at the right hand of the Father, to give us a new Spirit able to do what He has done, to love our enemy.

How is the world to know that? The world is to know that only if they can see signs that announce it. And the reason why at the end of the 20th Century we have arrived at the predicament that we have is because the signs of faith are not being clearly given. What are the signs of faith? The first reading was Stephen. Did you see Stephen before your eyes? He was announcing the gospel of Jesus, the beginning of a new age, and what did people think? He's a blasphemer; he deserves death. And what did they do? They do what we do to the sinner - you kill him, you get rid of him, you stone him to death, not able to give forgiveness to the sinner. What does Stephen do, even as he's being stoned? He prayed for the enemy, the one who is killing him. He died asking forgiveness for the enemy. This is the sign of faith, letting the world see someone who can love in this dimension, the dimension of the cross. The sign of faith is to lose your life for one who doesn't deserve it.

And then there is the second sign, it is the sign that Jesus speaks about in the gospel, Chapter 17. Having prayed for the disciples, he now prays for those who believe in the power of their word - namely us. What is Jesus asking God for us? "Father, that they be one, as you and I are one". That is the unity he wants to see among us is the unity that exists between the father and the son. Total communion with one another. Total surrender to the interests of the other. Total yes to the other.

And why? So that the world may believe that you sent me. Because where in this world can you find that kind of unity? Only among those who are pre-selected, maybe certain little groups where we are all alike. So what Jesus Christ does is very simple. Look around. The most diverse group. Check the smells, because you see the Lord always drags in the great unwashed. Sinners are very important in the church. Some have personalities that grate on you, and they are very important. Look, anyone can love you when you're good, when you are deodorized. What the Lord does is to bring in people that, humanly speaking, you would have nothing to do with. The world can produce a unity among likes; similarities, a mother's group here, bowlers over here. But, when the Lord puts together an apostolic team, he puts together all the misfits, all the people who never fit, the ones the world has no time for. Why? Because only in that way can the sign become outstanding. "Look how they love one another, that bunch. They would drive me crazy. Yet look at the communion among them! Look how they are able to love one another in a new dimension!" And what is that dimension? It is the dimension of the cross. This is the sign the world has to see, if it is ever to come to faith.

Why are we here? We are not here for the reasons we would like to give, but because we are the unwashed. You are a sinner, we are all sinners. We are filled with rough spots that rub everybody the wrong way. That is why we are here. We are here so that the Lord can construct a very strong sign in the midst of this technical age. You see, the problem is that the world has no problem with you being a nice little Christian, if by that you mean somebody who cleans up after he has eaten at McDonald's. Because then the next person coming behind you doesn't have all that catsup on the table. They are not going to want to be bothered by you. That's what the world wants, someone who doesn't bother my weekend. What the Lord wants is not simply nice people. The world wants that. The Lord wants a people who belong to one another, that are a counter environment because environments form you and shape you, whether you realize it or not.

We are all being formed by some environment, very often negatively. I never realized that until once at Georgetown University I was in course in the graduate department of the medical school with all these highly educated people. I found myself intimidated; unable to speak of faith because they would think badly of it. And I said to myself, "My word, I am deformed." The culture had formed me without my being aware of what was happening. This is the way a culture, an environment, works.

The Lord wants to use this situation to His advantage. He doesn't want you to be simply a nice person. He wants you to be a sign. Being Christian is not enough, for all you need to be Christian is Jesus. The world has no problem with a Christian who has a relationship with Jesus, as long as that Christian keeps it to myself. The world can not see Jesus, so as long as there is only you and Jesus there is no counter environment created. There is no sign. The world can simply walk right by and ignore you. It's the rest of us who will enable you to be a sign. Anybody can love Jesus, even the world. They have no problem with Jesus, what they have a problem with is the likes of us. The Lord wants to use us to create a counter environment so that the world can not simply ignore us. This is why He made us to be Catholics. To be Catholic you need the rest of us. This is why the Catholic Church is such a stumbling block to the world. It is meant to molest the comfortableness of the world, to mess it up. Total conversion for its own good. Only in this way can the world see there is another way to live your life. That you don't have to grit your teeth from Monday to Thursday and then gleefully say "It's Friday, we can have our weekend."

There is another way. It is the way of Jesus Christ, the one who was able to recognize that God still loved me when I was my enemy, so that we can discover that in spite of the weekend, there is something much better, the Lord's Day, the day in which we gather as a people to give praise and thanks to God for having loved us as we are. We give Him thanks for having chosen us to be a sign to this generation to give meaning to our life. We give Him thanks through the baraka, a Eucharist, a Thanksgiving. And it is only when we can experience this gratitude at this deep a level that our liturgy truly will come alive. This is what is at the heart of everything. "Father, we are here to thank you and to praise you for making us a sign to the others. That they may have lives and have it to the full, - seven days a week. Not just on the weekend."