Uriah Heep. Uriah Heep, an ugly name for an ugly person. One of the meanest villains ever created by Charles Dickens. He is David Copperfield’s nemesis in the story of “David Copperfield.” He presents himself to the public, all the time, as a very humble man. “I’m just a very ‘umble man.” And he is very humble man, and very proud of his humility. And, underneath that humble façade is roiling anger, and jealousy, and envy, and hatred. It all eventually spills over and threatens the characters in the story.
I tell you that because today’s gospel is about humility, and humility is not a very popular attitude or virtue in today’s society. Think of the way people behave on Facebook and other platforms; counting the number of likes they get, always having to have the last word. Watch the TV news when people are being interviewed at the site of some problem, or disaster, or tragedy. No one seems to have an inside voice anymore. Everything is at the top of people’s lungs. We are an angry and self-first population. When we are like that, it’s hard for us to hear anything about humility because we see it the same way Charles Dickens created this caricature of humility, something really not to be admired, but rather despised.
The Righteous Brothers had a huge number one hit in 1965 called “You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” So big was the song itself, that it was recorded again only four years later by Dionne Warwick, and she brought it to number 14, and Elvis used it quite frequently in his touring. So I’m going to recite the very last verse and leave out the last line. I want to see if you can fill in the last line.
“Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, whoa, that loving feelin’. Bring back that lovin’ feeling, cause it’s gone, gone, gone.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“Nope.” Nice try. Only the last time in the song.
“…cause it’s gone, gone, gone. And I can’t go on … whoa, whoa, whoa.“ There’s the “whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“And I can’t go on.”
We may say that that’s a little melodramatic for the breakup of a teenage love affair, but nevertheless, it’s true to life. And it gives us a window through which to observe our first reading.
The 1950s was the era of the big sprawling western. The biggest thing about them was they were almost all in Technicolor, and they were shot in the great outdoors. They were great to look at, but sometimes the plots left something to be desired. There was a movie called “Pony Soldiers” (and it was called “Pony Soldiers” because the Canadian Mounted Police, just like much of the United States cavalry, rode on ponies rather than horses because they were lighter). But this particular story takes place in Canada. Sitting Bull, trying to escape from the US cavalry, after the battle of the Little Big Horn - and this is a fact of history - crossed the border into Canada because the United States and Canada did not have reciprocal treaties. So United States troops could not pursue him into Canada. And he tried to make a home for his people among the Western Cree Indians in Canada. And everything was hunky-dory until the Canadian government decided they didn’t want Sitting Bull there, and then things went south rather quickly.
That’s the basic historical fact behind the story, but the story is ridiculous. Somehow or other, some Canadian mounted officer makes friends with the Indians, and they’re going to go to war over this whole thing, and he convinces them that they should wait. And then a wonderful sign appears in the sky - it’s a paddle wheeler. And the plot wants us to believe that Indians are so stupid that they’ve never seen a mirage; only white people know what a mirage is. And this mirage, supposedly, is a steamship that’s on a river hundreds of miles away. It’s impossible that this phenomenon should’ve taken place in the sky, but the white man says to the Indian, “See this is the sign from the great mother in England that you shouldn’t go to war.” And the Indians all lay down their weapons and say, “Okay, we won’t go to war because…” It’s kind of silly.
Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with you this morning here at St. Joseph’s. When our Holy Father, Pope Francis, declared this year a special year in devotion in honor of St. Joseph, I made a promise to myself that in all of the parishes that are under his patronage in my area of responsibility, I would try very hard to get to them and offer Mass in each and every one of the St. Joseph churches. So, I am so very grateful to your pastor, Father Madori, for allowing me to be with you today to fulfill my promise to St. Joseph, who is very dear to my heart and in my prayer life, and I try to model myself after his faithfulness each and every day.
But today is also, declared by our Holy Father, the World Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving for Grandparents. Isn’t that wonderful? It sure is. You deserve every day in honor of grandparents. But today, especially, the church throughout the world honors those very special people. And we’ll conclude our Prayer of the Faithful this morning with a prayer that was composed for this day. A special prayer in thanksgiving. A special prayer asking God’s blessings upon those who continue to form our lives, whether in person, or in the great treasure of our memory.
For those of you who were not here when Mass began, I asked the congregation to look around the church and see what things were different. Because every now and then you get one of those puzzles where the same picture is printed twice, side by side, and there are changes in the second picture, and you have to figure out what they are. Usually there are about twenty of them, and I always get about three. So here’s the changes I made in the church. I moved the credence stand off the platform to the floor. By the way, credence stand is the English for credenza. And many of you still have a credenza in your dining room set. I separated the two candle stands, which were together. And I moved the kneeler from here to here. Did anybody get that, or any part of it? I didn’t think so. The reason why I did that is because of today’s gospel.
Before I discuss today’s gospel you have to understand something about ancient writing. We have so much print in our society. When we finish with the daily paper, if we still get one, we put it out with the garbage. We have magazines, all sorts of things. We’re inundated with print media. Writing was extremely rare in the ancient world. Few people could read. And even fewer could write. That seems odd to us. How could you be able to read and not write? But they weren’t taught to write, only to read what they had to read to get by. Not only that but there weren’t many words. If you took all the words that existed in Ancient Greek and put them in a dictionary it would take up only about a quarter of any standard American dictionary in size. That’s how small the language was.
I’m sure you figured out what’s the most famous opening and closing of a story in history, and that is “Once upon a time” and “They lived happily ever after.” When I was studying Greek in high school we read the famous epic, The Odyssey. And every now and then you’d come across this line, “And then the early born rosy fingered dawn appeared.” And we liked when that showed up, because we wouldn’t have to translate that line after the very first time; it was a giveaway. But the author used it (this mysterious unknown author) every time a new episode in the story was about to begin. So it was a standard opening to an episode.
That’s what we have in today’s gospel. We have a standard opening that the gospel writers inherited in the tradition before the written gospels. And the standard opening was this: “He was moved with pity for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd and so He ____.” That’s where it ends. Fill in the blank.
“You like me. You really, really like me.” Those words have been attributed to Sally Field as her Oscar acceptance speech for the movie Places In The Heart. She didn’t really say that. And that was her second Oscar win after winning for Norma Rae. But legend has it that that’s what she said. We’re going to use that as the lens through which to understand today’s gospel.
I came across something on the internet the other day. A group of people reminiscing about Jesus rock. Those of you who were teenagers in the 1970s will remember Jesus rock. The rest of you, let me clue you in. In the late 1960s, up until around 1972, the airwaves in popular music were flooded with songs about religion and about morality. And many of them specifically referenced items of the Christian faith, especially centering on Jesus. Here’s just a small sampling:
It’s been a long time since July 4th fell on a Sunday. It’s almost ten years. And that’s important for us to know because, ordinarily when we celebrate the Fourth of July, it’s on a weekday, and we have a special Mass just for that day. When the fathers of the Second Vatican Council were preparing the changes in the liturgy, they decided that every nationality be able to have some Masses exclusive to its own culture and its own nation. And so, the American bishops were invited to write special prayers, a special Mass for July 4th. Ordinarily we celebrate that Mass and we invite people to come. Part of that Mass is always a large selection of readings from which to choose. And so, naturally, you look for those readings that have a sort of uplift to them because, after all, it’s our national holiday, we want to be happy. And yet, here we are, on July 4th, stuck with the readings for the Sunday because, in our liturgical forms, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, always takes precedence over all except the most important feast days. This August we’ll have the feast of the Assumption of Mary, which will take the place of Sunday, but that’s very, very rare.
And so we wind up this Sunday with three readings that don’t fit our mood. I asked you to listen, and see what you could figure out was the common thread going through all the readings. That is, what we would call in the 1960s, a downer. They’re very depressing. We’re going to look at each one of them and see what it’s all about.
I’m sure that many of you remembered the AT&T slogan used to be, “Reach out and touch someone.”
There are many reasons why I chose the long gospel this morning. Most of the time, when we have an option, I choose the short option, because of my attention span. But one of the techniques that St. Mark uses is to make a sandwich of two stories. He starts one, breaks off the story and puts another story inside of it, then he continues the first story. When he does that, he wants us to evaluate each story in terms of the other story. And there are six points of contact between the two stories that make them stand out.
Back in the 1970s, there was a hit song by Gordon Lightfoot, called “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” And some of the verses went like this. “They (meaning the people on the ship) might have split up or they might have capsized. They may have broke deep and took water. And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters … The church bell chimed ‘til it rang twenty-nine times, for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee. Superior, they said, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early.”
How could a boat capsize in storm waves on a lake? Well, Lake Superior - I looked it up - is 350 miles wide by 160 miles long. It’s the size of the state of Maine. And it is the largest fresh water lake in the world.
There’s a teensy, tiny miracle at the beginning of today’s gospel story. Jesus somehow or other sees the sequence of events that are going to happen when the disciples go into Jerusalem looking for a place to host the Passover. Not a big deal as far as miracles go. What do you think is the greatest miracle of all? Was it the multiplication of the loaves and fishes? The early Christians were so enamored of that miracle, they told it six times in four gospels. Maybe it was turning water into wine. Wouldn’t that be nice? How about cleansing ten lepers all at the same time? Or calming the storm at sea, “Peace, be still?” Or its companion piece, walking on the water? How about that? That’s pretty nifty. Or maybe raising Lazarus from the dead? Maybe that one. If you’ve ever been to Lourdes or Fatima or have seen photographs of the shrines, walls of crutches and prosthesis left behind by people who were cured by praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary at her shrine. But it’s none of them. It’s none of them.
The greatest miracle is the one that we celebrate today. The Body and Blood of Christ. It’s a three part miracle. It begins with the second person of God’s Blessed Trinity becoming a human being. What an amazing miracle that is that the One who launched this great universe by the will of His word should decide to enter it, looking, sounding and acting like you and me. That’s the first part of the miracle. The second part of the miracle is that He was able to leave Himself here in physical form despite that He, as a human being, died, miraculously rose, and returned to the spiritual kingdom of His father. The third part of the miracle is you and me.
You can search from the first to the last page of the Bible, and nowhere, nowhere do you find the word trinity. The Holy Trinity is not mentioned anywhere. How come? When we talk about the Blessed Trinity, we’re talking about what we call systematic theology. That is to say, the definition of a clearly delineated proposition. That’s not what you get in the Bible. What you get in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, is relational theology. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all through the New Testament. And there are hints of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity here and there in the Old Testament. The people who wrote the Old Testament would not have been able to discern those hints because they were so fixated on the idea that God was only One that any other concept would not compute.
But what you find in the New Testament, both of the writings of St. Paul and the other apostles, and the Words of Jesus himself, is talk about how we relate to each person and how each person relates to each other person. Jesus almost always speaks of God as Abba, a term of endearment for the father or the patriarch, of a clan, or the head of a family. Abba. He talks about My Father all the time. In John’s gospel he says, “The Father and I are one.” He says, “The Father and I will send the Spirit.” St Paul talks frequently about the power, the action of the Spirit within the Christian community. And so, there are two different ways in which the doctrine of the Trinity is relational in the scriptures. First of all how the persons of God relate to each other. And secondly, how they relate to us, and we relate to them.
So I asked you to pay very close attention to the very first line of the first reading, where Luke gives us a time signature. “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled.” The word, Pentecost, simply means fifty. So why didn’t he just say, “After fifty days?” Because this is redundant. “When the time for the fifty days was fulfilled,” doesn’t seem to make much sense. But St. Luke wanted us to be clear about what Jewish feast was being celebrated at that very moment. Jesus came to Jerusalem, probably with a large entourage. St. Luke tells us that, among his disciples were at least seventy, in addition to the so-called twelve. Those seventy were almost certainly all men. So in the entourage would’ve been the wives of the majority of them. Certainly the women whose names are mentioned as watching the crucifixion from a distance. Almost certainly his mother would’ve come to Jerusalem for the Passover. And probably the women whose names are mentioned as going to the empty tomb. All in that group as they came, and they had to find lodging for the feast. It would’ve been like going to Daytona during the car races. The place is mobbed. Some of them perhaps had encampments outside the walls of the city.
And so after the devastating events of Good Friday, they would still be in the city for the feast of Passover, which began to be celebrated on the night they buried Jesus. And, after the stunning experience of the Resurrection, most of them probably would’ve stayed on. St. Luke is the only one who tells us that Jesus continued to appear over the course of forty days - an artificial number. It means to suggest that Jesus was preparing His people for something. In John’s gospel we are never told when Jesus ascended into Heaven. In Luke’s gospel, we’re told He ascended on the very night of the Resurrection. Now here, Luke is telling us the exact opposite story. That Jesus hung around for forty more days. So, if Jesus ascended into Heaven after forty days, then something else happened on the fiftieth day. Ten days later.
Those of you who like to go to a casino now and then, know that most of the time you don’t win. Every now and then, if you’re lucky, you come home with a couple of bucks more than you left with, but most of the time you made a huge donation to New York State. But most of you would never dream, as you drive or ride to the casino, of praying to God that you have a good day. And yet, here we have, in our first scripture reading, praying to God, and then using the most common form of gambling in the first century, to choose a replacement for Judas. How come?
I told you to listen carefully to the numbers that are placed into the first reading. The first number comes up so quickly that you were probably still getting settled into your seat, when it passed you by. There are a hundred and twenty people gathered. Where were they gathered? They couldn’t possibly all be in the upper room, where the Pentecost event is going to take place; they wouldn’t have fit. These hundred and twenty people are probably the disciples mentioned so often in the gospels. Saint Luke puts a number on the disciples - seventy or seventy-two - depending on which manuscript you go by. So, when you count disciples in the first century, you only count men, because only men can be witnesses. But most of them were married, so part of the hundred and twenty were their wives. It certainly included the women who watched the crucifixion from a distance. And the women, some of them the same, some different, who, according to different gospel stories, went to the tomb. So why Matthias and Justus? Strange thing about Matthias and Justus. One of them gets chosen by lot, and the other one not, but this is the last time that either name appears in the church’s story. Matthias gets chosen, and disappears from scripture. It almost didn’t matter which one was chosen. The criteria, though, is what matters. This is what St. Peter said was the criterion, “Those who accompanied us the whole time that the Lord Jesus came and went among us, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day on which Jesus was taken up from us.” The reason why, is because they must become witnesses. Witnesses. Not apostles, witnesses. We tend to put the same category being a missionary, and being a witness. The twelve apostles were not viewed, in the early church, primarily as missionaries. They were viewed primarily as witnesses.
All of you here this morning who are parents, especially on this lovely Mother’s Day, all of you who are Moms, here’s a question for you. Would you die for your children? It’s almost a rhetorical question. Almost everybody will automatically say, “Yes.”
Now here’s another question, a little more awkward. Do you have a favorite? I know you do. We’d all like to say “I love all my children, equally.” Well, yes you do, but someplace way back here, there’s a favorite.
In the forty-ninth chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah pictures God as saying to the Israelites, “I will never forget you, my people. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand. Can a mother forget her children, a child within her womb? Yet even if she should forget, I will not forget.” It’s one of the few places in the Old Testament - and there are some - where God has pictured as mother rather than father.
At a certain point in seminary training you have to learn how to give a homily, and how to interpret the scriptures to give that homily. And so, the professor assigned us to preach on a parable of the Lord Jesus, because they’re fairly easy to preach on. One enterprising young man got up and said to all of us gathered to listen, “What Jesus was trying to say, here in this parable…” And the whole classroom burst into laughter. Except the professor, he didn’t think it was so funny. And the young man didn’t realize what was funny about it. “What Jesus was trying to say,” as though Jesus doesn’t say it very well, and needs an interpreter.
And that’s the case with today’s gospel. The extended metaphor of the vine and the branches is so plain, so easy to understand, that it does not bear commentary by any of us mere mortals. I’ll say just three things. Within the parable, there are words of comfort, words of encouragement, and words of warning.
Although this is Good Shepherd Sunday, I was drawn to the opening line of today’s second reading, because it’s one of my favorites. “See what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called the children of God, yet so we are.”
I wanted to put a picture on the front of this week’s bulletin that reflected that line in scripture, and thereby hangs the tale. This is the cover I came up with. It shows people of every ethnicity. I didn’t want to use photographs, because photographs are too particular. I wanted an artist’s rendering. And I didn’t want all little children; I wanted people of various ages that represented pretty much the world as we know it today.
“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain. My friend, I’ll say it clear. I’ll state my case of which I’m certain. I lived a life that’s full. I traveled each and every highway. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.” So this song is a journey song. “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do. I saw it through, without exemption. I planned a charted course, each careful step along the byway. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.”
Frank Sinatra was not what most people considered an exemplary Catholic. Just like the other big crooner of his generation, Bing Crosby, Frank played a priest in at least two movies. In one of them, he was your friendly neighborhood pastor, and in the other one he was a troubled man on mission in a place about to be destroyed. But he divorced his first wife, married at least two more times. He was a known associate of criminals. And he appeared, at times, to have a violent streak. What most people may not know about him is that, later on in his life, he reconciled with the church, very quietly, was able to get a decree of nullity, married his last wife. His charitable giving, which had been extravagant, but hit and miss, became much more consistent, much more generous. And he died a respected public figure and a loyal son of the church.