A homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 7, 2025
Wisdom 9:13-18b, Philemon 9-10, 12-17, Luke 14:25-33
Amid all the news recently about wars and famines and the melting of the Earth’s biggest iceberg, one item stood out.
A young man named Doogie Sandtiger was awarded the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Crocs. The Connecticut resident owns more than 3,800 pairs of the shoes, and he is still collecting. He hopes they will form the basis of a Crocs museum.
A fascinating human interest story, or just a crock?
How we view our own stuff will determine which side we come down on.
First and foremost, there’s no denying that we Americans are deeply into stuff. Ours is a consumer-commodities-based society, with deep economic and political implications over and above the moral and spiritual questions that conspicuous consumption triggers.
We measure our human wealth and social status in terms of stuff, the rarer and the shinier and the bigger and the tastier, the better.
Or some people say.
The truth is that the affordability of anything — housing, transportation, food, clothing, health care — dominates our conversations currently. What’s in our wallets has many of us worried day and night. We would love to have a few luxuries, but instead, many of us are forced to make tough choices about which bare-bones-basic necessities we can afford.
Food vs. medicine. Rent vs. power and heat. The list of X vs. Y goes on and on. These can be life-altering choices.
And, again, because we cannot silo off our work lives and home lives and leisure lives and spiritual lives into separate “lives,” because all of these are part of our entire lives, we sit at a puzzling moral spot.
The puzzle being: How do we renounce all our possessions to be Christ’s disciples?
Do we, can we give everything away? Can we sell our houses and cars, and camp out in the city park? Do we go off the grid? Do we look for manna from Heaven in the morning and quails at night?
For many of us who hear this Gospel passage, shedding everything in this world seems to be what Jesus is saying. And that understanding leads many of us to decide that discipleship is not worth the cost.
Discipleship does cost a lot. No argument there.
But before we chuck out the whole follower thing, we need to review the fine print (unlike the user agreements we agree to after a fast scroll through about 263 computer screenfuls).
The fifth and sixth lines of Psalm 95 poetically explain:
For the Lord is the great God,
the great king over all gods
The key to understanding being lowercase-G “gods.”
The other key, from today’s Gospel reading, is the significance of “renounce.”
How often do we find ourselves swept away by news of the latest iPhone or electric BMW? Even if we already have perfectly fine stuff, the madness that Madison Avenue fires up in us can make us drool a little, lust a little, put some piece of stuff on a pedestal like a golden calf.
And even when we’re mostly satisfied with the stuff we have, how often does our stuff — our screens, especially — dominate our attention?
Because we’ve all seen four family members sitting around a restaurant table with their faces buried in their smartphones.
Their lowercase-G gods.
The lowercase-G gods that distract us from seeing anything in this world we have the power and grace from God to fix, improve, rescue.
We don’t have to ditch all our stuff, as long as that stuff is useful to us.
We do need to keep our priorities straight. We need to renounce our stuff — to put our stuff in its proper place in our lives.
By renouncing our stuff, by sharing our stuff, by recognizing that our stuff doesn’t love us, but that God and our sisters and brothers do, we will prioritize love and kindness and discipleship.
