A homily for the Thirty-Third (and last) Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 17, 2024
Dn 12:1-3, Heb 10:11-14, 18, Mk 13:24-32
Several years ago, when I was in formation for ordination (the fancy name for deacon school), we had a session on time management. Well, kinda-sorta.
The presenter passed out wooden yardsticks and told us to find our ages on them by multiplying the inches by 2. He then mentioned that it’s customary for deacons to turn in their retirement papers at age 75 — just a little ways past the end of the yardstick, which represented 72.
The space between our age in inches times 2 and the end of the yardstick plus a little air represented the time each of us had/has to minister to God’s people.
(I did buy a copy of the time-management book he was hawking but I don’t recall ever reading it. Nonetheless, the in-person lesson stuck.)
Let’s take a quick pause for lyrics, shall we?
From Jim Morrison of The Doors:
Five to one, baby, one in five.
No one here gets out alive
Harsh, but accurate.
And from Billy Joel:
So many faces in and out of my life
Some will last, some will just be now and then
Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes
I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again
Gentler, with a focus on relationships.
And despite the, yes, almost creepy tone of this weekend’s Scripture passages, the reminders of our mortality — memento mori is the philosophers’ buzz phrase — are worth remembering. Where are any of us on that yardstick?
Mom died a month before her 58th birthday — 29 inches. Dad made it to 85½. I’m about midway between them, looking back and looking ahead. Finding my place on the yardstick? Perhaps.
Or, in light of today’s readings, perhaps we need to haul out yet another metaphor (boy, I’m just full of them today!): We really should ignore any footsteps.
In football, when a pass receiver flubs an easy catch, people sometimes say he heard footsteps, as in he suspected that a defender was about to pounce on him, and he was distracted.
We cannot be distracted by omens or signs or rolling thunder or rumbling earth beneath us.
Sorry, Jesus: We have work to do. Your work. For your people, God’s people. Otherwise known as our sisters and brothers worldwide. For all of Creation, the Earth and sky and mind-bogglingly massive universe that appeared when God said, “Let there be…” and there was.
We’re here on Earth, and people are starving. They’re bleeding. They’re fighting. They’re dying. In numbers that make our brains hurt. Or should make them hurt, if we truly are your followers.
Some of those who are fighting and dying claim to be doing it in your name, or that of The Father, as thousands or millions have done for millennia.
I know The Prince of Peace doesn’t want that.
I know The Prince of Peace wants the human family to live as one family, even though Thanksgiving dinner conversations will always get a little testy as the wine bottles empty and the Detroit Lions do whatever they do.
I know The Prince of Peace wants us to bring about justice and the preservation of Creation in whatever time we have.
Whatever time we have in a macro sense — yardstick and all that — and whatever bits and schnibbles of time we have in our daily lives, in between home and church and work and school and activities.
There’s always time for prayer, if we dedicate whatever we’re doing via our God-given skills and talents and intellect as conversations with the Almighty.
There’s always time for kindness, if we shape whatever we’re doing with our God-given skills and talents and intellect into an act of love and charity.
There’s always time for justice, if we focus whatever we’re doing with our God-given skills and talents and intellect toward a fair and just society in a fair and just world.
How many times have any of us flippantly added “or die trying” to an assertion about what we aim to do, especially something trivial?
Do we really intend to die trying to eat the mega-pizza at Pete and Elda’s?
Or should we be a bit more serious?
If, as God demands, we live full lives of gratitude, prayer, charity and justice, then we won’t die trying.
We’ll fulfill our destinies by doing and, God willing, by achieving.
