A homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 30, 2023
1 Kgs 3:5, 7-12, Rom 8:28-30, Mt 13:44-52
It all started with Classics Illustrated.
As all good parents do, my folks always brought my brothers and me some small gifts from their Florida vacations away from us — usually orange marmalade, stuffed baby alligators (cool at the time; not so much now), tropical candies and, for me, a Classics Illustrated version of some novel I hadn’t yet read.
A homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 23, 2023
Wis 12:13, 16-19, Rom 8:26-27, Mt 13:24-43
The Bible is amazing and awesome.
First of all, it’s a book of books. We Catholics believe that the Old Testament comprises 46 books, and the New Testament, 27.
And Christians and Jews alike believe that these books contain the Word of God, faithfully recorded by women and men whom the Holy Spirit inspired.
We of the Judeo-Christian faith traditions believe that these books contain Truth, with a capital T.
That doesn’t mean these books aren’t head-scratchers sometimes.
A homily for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 16, 2023
Is 55:10-11, Rom 8:18-23, Mt 13:1-23
Late in my freshman year in college, I was persuaded to give Army ROTC a try. It didn’t stick, but that’s another story. And from my buddies in khaki, I first heard about The Rack Monster.
No, this wasn’t/isn’t the rack of medieval torture infamy. In military slang, a rack is a bed, a bunk, a cot, and, occasionally, a couch.
Thus, The Rack Monster hangs onto you and clamps your backside to the bed when reveille sounds.
A homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 9, 2023
Zec 9:9-10, Rom 8:9, 11-13, Mt 11:25-30
It’s been said there are two kinds of jobs, the ones you bathe before and the ones you bathe after. I’ve held both.
It’s also been said that we learn more through our fingers than we do through our eyes and ears, and I agree.
A homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 2, 2023
2 Kgs 4:8-11, 14-16a, Rom 6:3-4, 8-11, Mt 10:37-42
In the wacky 1992 comedy movie “Wayne’s World,” based on the “Saturday Night Live” skits by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, and often in those skits, the Wayne and Garth characters bow down in adulation before their musician idols and chant, “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”
In the wacky spring and summer of 2023, far more than two young people are screaming and waving and jumping up and down before their musical idols. Those fans, worthy or not, could cause Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to gross $1.4 billion.
We humans do get excited when we’re in the presence of our favorite celebrities.
And we react in a host of different ways.
A homily for Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023, Mass During the Day
Acts 2:1-11, 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13, Jn 20:19-23
When I was a Boy Scout, the quarterly Parents Night extravaganzas invariably meant each patrol was responsible for putting on a skit, a skit that usually pushed the boundaries of taste and wit. In other words, something a dozen pre-teen through mid-teen boys would find funny and parents would find off-putting, like Mad magazine.
The recent passing of a Scouting friend’s younger sister reminded me of a skit their dad, a creative genius in the advertising racket, helped script. Dan and his patrol buddies staged a mock television newscast that poked fun at our troop leaders and included a forecast predicting the weather for Evanston, Illinois — headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — would be dry. Dry today; dry tomorrow; dry forever.
Of course, only the savviest members of the gathering got the joke, which is to say not too many attendees did. True genius can puzzle some people, and Dan’s family’s genius was writ large.
A homily for the Ascension of the Lord, May 21, 2023
Acts 1:1-11, Eph 1:17-23, Mt 28:16-20
Years ago, I visited friends in Colorado Springs and Casper, Wyoming, taking a nonstop flight first to Denver and then a short hop from there to Colorado and back to Denver, and to Wyoming and back to Denver for my flight home. It was my first time west of Ohio.
En route to the Springs, the 737 flew above the Rocky Mountaintops, which were hugged by clouds, and I gasped. At first glance, I was convinced I had seen a city in the sky, the unfiltered sun glistening on the snowcaps and the crags looking like palaces and temples and skyscrapers.
Nature’s skyscrapers. And so they were.
A homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 14, 2023
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17, 1 Pt 3:15-18, Jn 14:15-21
I’d like to start with a story about what not to do.
Right after my college graduation, my then-girlfriend and I went to a concert in New York’s Central Park and, after it was over, we headed on foot to her apartment. We were waiting at a street corner for the light to change when she grabbed my arm, leaned closer to me, and shook her head in the direction of a man who was sort of shuffling his way toward us while trying not to make eye contact.
“Bill, that guy looks like a mugger,” she said, and for some bizarre reason I barked back, “Stay here.”
I grabbed the program from the show out of my coat pocket and walked briskly toward the man, waving the paper and saying, “Do you know Jesus? Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior. I have a tract right here that…”
He took off like a shot.
A homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023
Acts 2:14, 22-33, 1 Pt 1:17-21, Lk 24:13-35
I watch a fair amount of cable TV, primarily news, and with the programming come the unavoidable commercials, mostly for medicines and the like. You know the ones: They start off by listing the one or two benefits of that particular snake oil and then rattle off the 10,000 possible side effects that include painful death or dismemberment, significant gain or loss of weight, or terminal halitosis.
(And have you ever noticed that the actors playing some of these couples’ children are biologically inaccurate, if not impossible?)
A homily for the Resurrection of the Lord (Easter), April 9, 2023
Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9
We Americans celebrate holidays oddly, especially holidays with religious roots.
By one measure — how much money we spend to celebrate — Christmas is way up there. The winter holidays, as retailers refer to the season, are worth three times all the other holidays combined. Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier, in some places overlapping the tail end of BTS (back to school, not K-pop) and overshadowing Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Halloween is no slouch in the retail advertising world, though, and supermarket chains go all out for Turkey Day.
But there’s no mega-blitz of TV commercials for Easter, Cadbury bunny auditions notwithstanding.
And that’s perfect.
