4 - 2023 - Unpaid Bill

The GOAT was a shepherd

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 30, 2023

Acts 2:14a, 36-41, 1 Pt 2:20b-25, Jn 10:1-10

The genius Bill Watterson, father of the long-missed “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip, had his characters invent Calvinball after mischievous boy Calvin grew tired of so-called organized sports. Instead, Calvin cobbled together the first truly disorganized or unorganized sport, a sport with only one rule and a mishmash of sporting goods that may or may not be suitable for use.

The one permanent rule in Calvinball dictated that players could not play it the same way twice. The game involved croquet wickets and mallets, volleyballs, basketballs, gloves, bare hands, goggles, and anything else that seemed remotely sporty or otherwise preposterous.

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Eye drops

A homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023

Acts 2:14, 22-33, 1 Pt 1:17-21, Lk 24:13-35

I watch a fair amount of cable TV, primarily news, and with the programming come the unavoidable commercials, mostly for medicines and the like. You know the ones: They start off by listing the one or two benefits of that particular snake oil and then rattle off the 10,000 possible side effects that include painful death or dismemberment, significant gain or loss of weight, or terminal halitosis.

(And have you ever noticed that the actors playing some of these couples’ children are biologically inaccurate, if not impossible?)

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See, then do

A homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 16, 2023

Acts 2:42-47, 1 Pt 1:3-9, Jn 20:19-31

One of the many great advantages of having a doctor as my dad was the supply of free copies of Highlights for Children magazine that piled up in his waiting room, alongside ancient Time, Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest relics. It was heaven for a voracious reader like me.

Back then, as I recall, Highlights had a feature called “Tommy the Talker and Danny the Doer.” And if it wasn’t a Highlights feature, Tommy vs. Danny appeared somewhere. So let’s go with it.

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Keep X in Easter

A homily for the Resurrection of the Lord (Easter), April 9, 2023

Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9

We Americans celebrate holidays oddly, especially holidays with religious roots.

By one measure — how much money we spend to celebrate — Christmas is way up there. The winter holidays, as retailers refer to the season, are worth three times all the other holidays combined. Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier, in some places overlapping the tail end of BTS (back to school, not K-pop) and overshadowing Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Halloween is no slouch in the retail advertising world, though, and supermarket chains go all out for Turkey Day.

But there’s no mega-blitz of TV commercials for Easter, Cadbury bunny auditions notwithstanding.

And that’s perfect.

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Hop in, Lord

A homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, April 2, 2023

Mt 21:1-11, Is 50:4-7, Phil 2:6-11, Mt 26:14—27:66

Some spring morning early in the second half of the 20th century, the fourth- or fifth-graders (I forget which …) at St. Leo the Great School in Lincroft had an assignment: If you invented a time machine that took you back to Jerusalem in 33 A.D. and saw Jesus along the Way of the Cross, what would you do?

The answers — most of them illustrated as best as we Warhol wannabes could — ran a wide gamut as we each stood up and presented them to the class.

Some of my classmates insisted they would snatch the cross from our Messiah and take his place on Golgotha. Some said they would comfort him as he walked past, offering him water and snacks. Some promised to be yet another Simon of Cyrene.

I guess my answer was Cyrenian, sort of.

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