A Great Honest Sermon

When Father Brown (Jim) gave that sermon it really resonated with me, as it did with the crowd. Here are several points:

(1) The world can be a very scary place and often you can feel that you are all alone or actually are all alone with no one to help you.

(2) For compensation, you can seek power, position, or becoming rich in order to provide yourself a position of safety. The problem is power, position, or money can be taken away from you. The more power, position or money you have the more likely people around you will desert you when times get rough.

(3) Even if you don't lose those things, you can still lose a child of yours to some type of illness which no doctor or amount of money can cure. You are not immune to heartbreak.

(4) Is the bible true, without error or inconsistency? Whether it is true or not is a much debated question, and it does have plenty of errors and inconsistencies in it.

(5) Is God good? Who knows? The bible is something that can give a person a small degree of comfort when they are going through a hard time and if it does, is that such a horrible thing?

(6) Perhaps the bible is totally false and you are a fool for believing in any of it. If so, that is your buisness. It's better to be a fool with some degree of comfort than a fool with absolutely no comfort.

As one of the monks basically stated, we do need some rules to live by, and we do need to get them from somewhere.