A homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 26, 2026
1 Kings 3:5, 7-12, Romans 8:28-30, Matthew 13:44-52
If we count all the noses in the world, we discover that there are 8.3 billion-with-a-B people on Earth. Here in the USA, we make up almost 350 million members of our human family. We’re quite a crowd.
Every one of the 8.3 billion of us — North and South Americans, Africans, Europeans, Asians, Australians and even Antarcticans — has a brain. It’s been that way for tens of thousands of years, maybe even millions.
That’s quite a gift. Thank you, God!
And every one of our brains is different from everybody else’s, just as most of us have distinctive eyes and noses and chins and lips. But unlike those features, which can be reshaped by a plastic surgeon’s scalpel or a dab of some infomercial Plexa-goop, our brains, our minds require much more to shape them. And much, much, much more to change them.
By the way, we often use the terms brain and mind interchangeably, but the oatmeal between our ears is where our souls, our personalities, our creativity, our faith, hope and charity, and our consciences hang out. So we’re really thinking about our minds.
Which may or may not be as magnificent as Solomon’s was. And that’s OK. It’s part of God’s divine plan.
(Actually, I read somewhere that God promised ol’ King Sol he’d never be equaled. So there’s that.)
Every one of our minds is a unique combination of innate intelligence — again, that gift from God — mixed with our individual experiences, shaped by geographic and historical perspective, and seasoned with a little bit of luck. Or a lot.
Each of us uniquely blends what our senses have flooded into our brains and we whip those sensations into our own smoothie of insight. We blend them into artistic or athletic or mechanical achievements. We come up with something new under the sun.
And as members of the human family, we are encouraged to add what we’ve learned or figured out or invented to humankind’s vast treasure trove of knowledge, for the betterment of everyone.
For use by everyone. Everyone, everywhere, every when.
We are invited by God to share our inspirations. We are prodded by God to let the whole world know what the Holy Spirit led us to.
Ah, yes: the Holy Spirit. The ultimate source of in-spir-ation. The source of grace that refreshes our souls. A source as abundant to us as he was to Solomon.
If we are open…
Most of us know the story of the Judgment of Solomon, how two women each claimed to be the mother of a baby boy, and how Solomon used a drastic idea to figure out who the real mom was.
Do we ever face those kinds of cut-the-boy-in-half dilemmas?
How many times a day do we have to make important decisions? Make serious choices? Maybe even life-or-death ones, God forbid?
How do we make those decisions? How do we decide correctly and righteously? And then, how do we do it again?
Do we rely on God’s help? God’s wisdom?
We do, even when we think we don’t. God pre-loaded us with the tools and the power.
Here’s the beauty of God’s design: Our brains, our personal-personal computers, which our Creator wired long before Alan Turing or Steve Jobs ever touched a screwdriver, are millions of memories and experiences of all shapes and sizes percolating through intelligence and emotions. We have habits and beliefs and the knowledge of right and wrong.
Every place we go, every person we meet, every word we read or hear shapes and re-shapes our minds. We’re all built that way, according to the divine plan. We’re all built to be inspired — in-spir-ed — and we’re all built to act on those inspirations.
Some of those decisions we make will indeed be Solomonic. Our complicated, troubled 21st-century world flings challenges at us nonstop. Challenges in all shapes and sizes and deadlines.
We can stand up for our sisters and brothers who’ve been pushed to the edge of society, physically or through xenophobic discrimination. Catholic social justice teaching demands that we do.
We can help renovate a house for a family in need, if we have the skills and experience. We can choose to spend our free time visiting a lonely or grieving person instead of watching the 974th rerun of “M*A*S*H.”
And we should decide to make time to pray, even if all we do is thank God for, well, everything.
Because when we think about it, really mind-of-Solomon think about it, we all have our own God-given version of David’s son’s wisdom.
Let’s weave all of our minds together, all of us, with God’s help. It’ll be Earth-shaking. It’ll be Earth-saving.
