Sermon 14 - Unpaid Bill

Able like Abel

A homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 10, 2023

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, in the last quarter of the 20^th century, I was a high-paid babysitter, maybe the highest-paid in New Jersey. It had little to do with me or some spectacular talent I may have had, and pretty much everything to do with my clientele.

I looked after the children of many one-percenters who knew the family whose name was on the side of the trucks of the construction company I worked for during my college summer breaks. Whose owner was one of my dad’s best friends. Thus, I was vouched for. And to them, I was William. Never Bill or Billy or Will or Willy.

Wow, that was a long trip for a setup. I hope that made sense.

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Bucking the tide

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?

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Solid

A homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 27, 2023

Is 22:19-23, Rom 11:33-36, Mt 16:13-20

Back in 1977, a silly little film called “Rocky” defied all odds and won the Best Picture Oscar as well as a bunch of other awards.

The movie told the tale of a ne’er-do-well second- or third-tier boxer who was given a shot at the world championship as a publicity stunt for the current champ. Rocky Balboa was a simple guy, not credited with a lot of smarts other than street smarts, and he had zero chance of winning.

Except he almost did win, defying all odds, because he worked hard and believed in himself. And maybe he almost won because he wasn’t savvy enough to understand that he was just supposed to be a punching bag, a laughingstock.

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Wisdom from space

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.

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Bump in the night

A homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 13, 2023

1 Kgs 19:9a, 11-13a, Rom 9:1-5, Mt 14:22-33

A few years after my college graduation, I visited a friend and her husband in Casper, Wyoming, where they worked for an oil company — she as a geologist and he as a chemist.

It was my first trip West, high in the Rockies and far different from anything I’d ever experienced as a Jersey Shore kid.

The first evening, Sue and John took me to hear the local symphony, and after the performance, as we walked back to their car, I noticed two things: The stars were close enough that I could pull one from the sky, and the light from the streetlamps didn’t seem to reach all the way to the ground.

Yes, it was that dark.

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Amazed? Or not?

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.

Continue reading Amazed? Or not?

Pulp wisdom

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.

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On bended knee

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.

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Reveille

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.

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When do you shower?

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.

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