Month: August 2023

Solid

A homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 27, 2023

Is 22:19-23, Rom 11:33-36, Mt 16:13-20

Back in 1977, a silly little film called “Rocky” defied all odds and won the Best Picture Oscar as well as a bunch of other awards.

The movie told the tale of a ne’er-do-well second- or third-tier boxer who was given a shot at the world championship as a publicity stunt for the current champ. Rocky Balboa was a simple guy, not credited with a lot of smarts other than street smarts, and he had zero chance of winning. 

Except he almost did win, defying all odds, because he worked hard and believed in himself. And maybe he almost won because he wasn’t savvy enough to understand that he was just supposed to be a punching bag, a laughingstock.

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Wisdom from space

A somewhat brief homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 20, 2023

Is 56:1, 6-7, Rom 11:13-15, 29-32, Mt 15:21-28

E.T. has phoned home and the spaceship has returned to Earth to pick him up. 

As the cultural touchstone film nears its end, the little alien botanist does two things that turn out to be profoundly theological.

He wags his index finger in mischievous Gertie’s face and says, “Be good,” stretching out the two syllables in that scratchy voice.

He then touches Elliott’s chest over his heart, and in a similarly elongated rasp, says, “I’ll be right here.”

The movie script could have come from today’s passages from Scripture.

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Bump in the night

A homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 13, 2023

1 Kgs 19:9a, 11-13a, Rom 9:1-5, Mt 14:22-33

A few years after my college graduation, I visited a friend and her husband in Casper, Wyoming, where they worked for an oil company — she as a geologist and he as a chemist. 

It was my first trip West, high in the Rockies and far different from anything I’d ever experienced as a Jersey Shore kid.

The first evening, Sue and John took me to hear the local symphony, and after the performance, as we walked back to their car, I noticed two things: The stars were close enough that I could pull one from the sky, and the light from the streetlamps didn’t seem to reach all the way to the ground.

Yes, it was that dark.

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Amazed? Or not?

A homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2023

Dn 7:9-10, 13-14, 2 Pt 1:16-19, Mt 17:1-9

I always wanted a time machine. Between the H.G. Wells novel and the cheesy but omnipresent sci-fi shows of the 1960s (thank you, Irwin Allen), the notion of traveling to the future to see what humankind would do and design and build was irrepressible.

When anyone asked me the standard adult-to-child question — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — I usually answered with some variation of “somebody who’s concerned with the future.”

And I still am. Deeply, almost desperately so.

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