A homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, March 20, 2022, Cycle C
Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15, 1 Cor 10:1-6, 10-12, Lk 13:1-9
If patience is a virtue, then a whole lotta Americans are far from virtuous. Especially New Jerseyans.
We proudly list the dozens — hundreds, even — of things we jam into every day, and at the (actual) end of the day, we mourn what we didn’t do rather than celebrate what we did.
Yeah, we’re a little warped that way.
A homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, March 13, 2022
Gn 15:5-12, 17-18, Phil 3:17—4:1, Lk 9:28b-36
Celebrity is a strange concept, especially how it’s practiced today.
We have the self-declared so-called Influencers, who use TikTok and other social media du jour to dictate what their followers must say, think and do. Influencers actively promote themselves incessantly and shamelessly. They preen so that they can be seen. And they attract millions of disciples.
We have the Reality Stars, who broadcast and stream from their Los Angeles Kompounds and from their Real Houses all over the world and from the Jersey Shore, and whose lives and loves and fun and faults are laid bare, similarly shamelessly. And millions more kan’t take their eyes off them.
We have Traditional Stars, who mesmerize us on massive movie screens (remember those?) and in our home theaters. Off-screen, they project a public persona that mirrors or dovetails with the characters they play, but they work equally as hard to shield their true private lives from the public’s prying eyes. They, too, have millions in their thrall.
Why, then, would Jesus not want to be in any of those groups? Think what he could have done with all those beliebers.
A homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 31, 2021
Dt 6:2-6, Heb 7:23-28, Mk 12:28b-34
Let’s imagine for a minute that it’s Christmas, and we’re 10 years old.
Our favorite uncle has given us the bicycle we’ve been dreaming about — shiny, painted in a red-and-gold sunburst, custom seat and no training wheels.
We throw our arms around Uncle Joe and say, “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” about a hundred times.
We grab our coat, wheel our prized new bike out into the December chill — which we don’t feel at all — and pedal around the block a few times.
Just like Ralphie in the movie, this is the best present we ever got or would ever get.
A homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 17, 2021
Is 53:10-11, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45
It’s such a cliché: “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” The activity is supposed to give us a sense of what it’s like to be that person, or a person of that person’s ethnicity, or socioeconomic situation, or belief system, but it’s a fundamentally flawed exercise.
I am not, and never will be, anything but a white male human descended from Irish-Welsh-French-Alsatian-Croatian-Slovak stock, raised in the suburban dead center of New Jersey, educated at Catholic grammar and boys prep schools in that aforementioned Central Jersey and at a small, private liberal arts college in the rural dead center of Pennsylvania.
Put me in Manolo Blahnik shoes and I will not be a supermodel. Put me again in work boots atop a pile of hot asphalt and I may labor but I will not be a laborer. Put me in moccasins and — at best — I am guilty of cultural appropriation.
We may try, we may try with every fiber of our being, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, but in the end, the most we can hope for is partial enlightenment.
A homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 10, 2021
Wis 7:7-11, Heb 4:12-13, Mk 10:17-30
It’s still possible to buy a needle threader, an incredibly brilliant yet simple tool that helps people with unsteady hands or so-so eyesight — or without the patience and tolerance for frustration — to pass a thread through the eye of a needle.
The fine wire goes through the eye first, and then the thread gets slipped through the lasso-like diamond on the other side.
A quick tug on the handle — or whatever it’s called — and the fine wire lasso hauls the thread through the eye.
Of course, you have to get the needle threader’s wire lasso through the eye first, but pound for pound that’s a far smaller challenge than jabbing a limp, frayed string through a tiny metal oval.
And, no, using a tool is not cheating.
A homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 19, 2021
Wis 2:12, 17-20, Jas 3:16—4:3, Mk 9:30-37
The core of our faith — the core of our relationship with our Creator and all of Creation — is the Two Great Commandments: Love God and Love Neighbor.
So beautifully simple and pure that even a child can understand them, to paraphrase a slogan, which is part of why Jesus is so often chronicled as embracing children, who in his day were considered replaceable chattel the same way women were.
So we have two radical ideas: Love can be uncomplicated and children and women are people with worth in God’s eyes.
Now what?
A homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 5, 2021
Is 35:4-7a, Jas 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37
Every day is a day for miracles. And every day is a miracle in itself.
The sun rose today (well, actually, the Earth rotated so that we could see more and more of the Sun, but let’s not get too astrophysical …). Out there in the east, cruising through the south toward the west, with or without clouds, Sol is shining on Terra Firma.
A miracle.
God loves us and showers us with gifts, often when we don’t realize it.
More miracles.
Miracles for today and every day of our lives.
But what happens when we start to take miracles for granted and, more to the point, when we remove the role of the Almighty from miracles?
A homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 29, 2021
Dt 4:1-2, 6-8, Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27, Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
When we think of gifts, we usually imagine big boxes wrapped in colorful paper tied up with shiny ribbons and a big bow. And as we tear into them, first ripping through the wrapping and then digging through the tissue paper to find the surprises inside, we try to imagine what toys we’ve been dreaming of could be inside.
Unless, of course, the gift is a pony. Then we just try to figure out how Mom and Dad got it into the box.
Regardless of the occasion — birthday, Christmas, First Holy Communion — we expect any gift we receive to be fun, or pretty, or at least something to keep our feet warm in the winter.
We don’t expect gifts to be stone tablets that tell us “No!”
A homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 22, 2021
Jos 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b, Eph 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32, Jn 6:60-69
As we break open today’s Gospel, we can be tempted to consider The Rock’s reply to Jesus’s question to be rhetorical:
“Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
To whom, indeed.
The answer seems to be such a “Well, yeah, of course,” quip that it does seem rhetorical.
But this was a make-or-break situation for Simon Peter and the rest of The Twelve. There was nothing rhetorical about their reply.
A homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 8, 2021
1 Kgs 19:4-8, Eph 4:30—5:2, Jn 6:41-51
My dad owned a few copies of “The Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas à Kempis, a guide to living in the footsteps of Jesus that, according to Wikipedia, was composed in Medieval Latin circa 1418–1427. That’s way back there.
I first noticed a copy prominently displayed on the bookcase in our living room about 530 years after its publication, when I had learned to read chapter books with big words and, as a good Catholic school second- or third-grader, when I was in desperate fear and hatred of the Antichrist.
You see, my vocabulary at that time grasped big words but not nuances, and I thought the book was about a fake messiah, the way imitation vanilla was fake and tasted fake. I wanted nothing to do with an imitation Christ. I wanted The Real Jesus.
I didn’t realize the title meant how to imitate Christ. So it was years before I attempted to open the book and take in its message.
Ah, youth.
