A homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 17, 2023
Sir 27:30—28:7, Rom 14:7-9, Mt 18:21-35
When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
Mark Twain
We all get angry; it’s a basic human emotion. For some of us, anger is one of the most powerful emotions, if not the most overwhelming. Anger’s power makes it difficult to contain or cool down from. When anger overwhelms us, it provokes action.
A homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 3, 2023
Jer 20:7-9, Rom 12:1-2, Mt 16:21-27
What if maybe, just maybe, Linus was right?
What if, even just once, Linus Van Pelt’s pumpkin patch was the most sincere in the whole world?
What if everything the “Peanuts” character believed about The Great Pumpkin was not a cockamamie fairy tale?
Would the kids have stopped laughing? Would the adults have stopped making the muted cornet “waa-waa” sounds?
Would everyone everywhere have started to believe?
A somewhat brief homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 20, 2023
Is 56:1, 6-7, Rom 11:13-15, 29-32, Mt 15:21-28
E.T. has phoned home and the spaceship has returned to Earth to pick him up.
As the cultural touchstone film nears its end, the little alien botanist does two things that turn out to be profoundly theological.
He wags his index finger in mischievous Gertie’s face and says, “Be good,” stretching out the two syllables in that scratchy voice.
He then touches Elliott’s chest over his heart, and in a similarly elongated rasp, says, “I’ll be right here.”
The movie script could have come from today’s passages from Scripture.
A homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2023
Dn 7:9-10, 13-14, 2 Pt 1:16-19, Mt 17:1-9
I always wanted a time machine. Between the H.G. Wells novel and the cheesy but omnipresent sci-fi shows of the 1960s (thank you, Irwin Allen), the notion of traveling to the future to see what humankind would do and design and build was irrepressible.
When anyone asked me the standard adult-to-child question — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — I usually answered with some variation of “somebody who’s concerned with the future.”
And I still am. Deeply, almost desperately so.
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.
