Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 11, 2021 – Amos 7:12-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

“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: 

There was actually a nun from Australia who had a top ten record with something called the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, which she had set to music. 

There was Oh Happy Day,

Put Your Hand In The Hand,

Spirit In The Sky,

Day By Day,

Jesus Christ Superstar,

And, from Jesus Christ Superstar, I Don’t Know How to Love Him,

Jesus Is Just All Right With Me,

Jesus Was A Carpenter,

Judy Collins’ version of Amazing Grace, which forced the Catholic missalette companies to put Amazing Grace into their missalettes.  

Turn, Turn, Turn, 

Crystal Blue Persuasion, 

Sweet Cherry Wine, 

To Save Us, He Gave Us,

My Sweet Lord,

The Wedding Song by Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, which began “He is now among us, at the calling of our hearts.” 

“Fire and Rain, which, in the second verse, says, “Look down upon me Jesus. You gotta help me make a stand.” 

And there were lots of other songs that referenced Christian values. Just to give a few examples:

Walk A Mile In My Shoes, 

Try A Little Kindness by Glenn Campbell, 

If I Can Dream, and 

In The Ghetto, 

Peace Train, 

What’s Going On,

Black and White,

And, with some reservations, John Lennon’s Imagine. 

We can go on and on. Where did they all go? If you tune into an oldies station now, whether you listen to the 50s or the 70s, you’ll hardly ever hear one of these songs anymore. There seems to be a silent consent among all broadcasters that they cannot or will not play these songs anymore. How did we get from there to here? Well it’s kind of a long story. That’s why I stayed up here, because I need my cheat sheet. 

It all begins with World War II. Before World War II, Catholics were a despised minority in the United States. Across the rural South and the Midwest, some Baptist preachers would even preach that our priests had tails and horns. And people were gullible enough to believe that. But, in the trenches. young men discovered that it didn’t matter what faith you had, fear knew no denominational boundaries. They came home from the war with a different view of people who did not believe the same way they believed. 

At the same time several things happened in the entertainment industry that changed things. During the war, Bing Crosby, a Catholic entertainer, played a Catholic priest in two movies, both of which won Academy Awards. And people’s opinion of Catholic priests changed radically just because of that. In the post war years there was also Perry Como. By the mid-1950s, when he did his Christmas shows, it was essential to the public that he sing his version of the Ave Maria. And then there was “Uncle Fulty.” Father, and then Monsignor, and then Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a program that started out in radio, and then went to television. I wonder if you remember what his program was called. It was called by the very unreligious title, “Life Is Worth Living.” Anybody could have tuned into that just out of curiosity. And there he was, teaching the essential truths of Catholicism, with flair and accuracy. The reason why he was called “Uncle Fulty” is because in the late 1950s his ratings on Tuesday night were higher than those of the nation’s top comedian, Milton Berle, whom people used to call “Uncle Milty.” So, “Uncle Milty” was beat out by “Uncle Fulty.”

There was another priest, a radio personality before World War II, who gave a very negative image of Catholicism. His name was Charles Coughlin, and, along with the United States air hero, Charles Lindbergh, they were the leading isolationists before World War II, and they were both publicly on the radio pro-Nazi. 

During the 1950s, an upstart young politician named John Kennedy made his move to the White House and that briefly resurfaced the ugliest anti Catholic prejudices in the country. But when he won the election, having a Catholic in the White House made a big difference. Despite the fact that in some ways he was not necessarily a model Catholic. And shortly after that we saw nuns and priests marching for civil rights and marching against the war. And people realized that we didn’t just live in our ivory towers. 

In the 1960s, along came roly-poly Saint Pope John XXIII, who said, “Let’s open the windows. Let the spirit in, let Catholicism out into the masses.” Vatican II. And after Vatican II, something else that was unique to American Catholicism, the charismatic renewal. It began at one college campus, the Catholic college. Duquesne. It quickly spread to Notre Dame, and finally landed at a secular campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It became so important, that it spread across the whole world, and finally one of the cardinals was put in charge of it. Cardinal Suenens, who was one of those people who might be considered the next pope after John XXIII had died. The English language Mass opened up what we said and did at the altar to people who never understood it, and who thought it was all literally hocus pocus. 

And finally we wound up with two other Saint Popes who had a traveling show. Both Paul VI and John Paul II took the face of Catholicism all over the world, so that no one anywhere didn’t know what we looked like and what we sounded like.  It was very popular to be a Catholic by the mid-1970s. 

So what had happened in the meantime? Several things have happened. The first is that we may have become so enamored of being in the in-crowd that we began to forget what is uniquely Catholic in our brand of Christianity. The second thing that happened is the clergy scandal. But behind the clergy scandal, the more important scandal, that we have discovered that sometimes our own church leaders ‘speak with forked tongue.’ And then there is the thing that reminded non-Catholics in America of why they don’t like us. We proclaim an ethic of life from the first moment of conception to the last natural breath. A seamless robe, so to speak. And so we have a distinctive position on abortion, but also on pre- and post-natal care, on family leave for child raising, on a just wage no matter where you work or how you work. Compassion for immigrants and refugees. A preferential option for the poor. We look with a jaundiced eye on laissez-faire capitalism. We have strong positions on war, the death penalty, and even on life imprisonment. We have distinctive positions on the use of human sexuality. And we have distinctive positions on end-of-life matters. Some people like part of what we say, don’t like another part. Another group of people in the country, exactly the opposite, liking certain things we say and disliking certain things that we say. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. 

That’s why I asked you to listen carefully for the occupations of the two guys in the first reading. Amaziah and Amos. Amos says “I wasn’t a professional religious person. I was a dresser of Sycamores. I’m a farmer. And God told me to go and talk about my faith to other people. Just like all of you, who are not professionally religious, but expected to stand up for your faith.” Amaziah, on the other hand, is a profit of the King’s court in Bethel. He is paid to tell politicians what they want to hear. On the other hand, Amos is not being paid to speak truth to power. 

Then we get to the gospel. I asked you to listen to the list of instructions from Jesus. There’s something wrong with it. The thing that’s wrong with it is, when you make the list - this, or this, or this - you don’t stop in the middle and say, oh, but this. But He does. If you look across the three gospels - Matthew, Mark and Luke - the thing that keeps changing in the list is whether or not the apostles are supposed to wear sandals. Who cares? That was put in and taken out depending on the situation of the Church to which that gospel was written. Because what are sandals good for? Most people walked around barefoot. If you had to move fast, you wanted sandals, so you could walk or run faster, for two reasons - either to hurry and proclaim the gospel before it was too late, or to run away from those people who you had angered by the gospel. So both situations are possibilities each time we hear this gospel, depending on what’s going on in the only Christian church there was in the first century. 

Which leads us to Jesus’ final word of advice. What does He say about rejection? He says, “If they won’t hear you, if they won’t listen to you, wipe the dust of the town off your feet and move on.” We can’t please everybody all the time if we’re going to be distinctively Catholic. So, when things go wrong, just wipe the dirt off your feet and go away. It doesn’t say to argue. It doesn’t say to fight in public for what you believe. It says just to cleanse yourself of that filth and move on. Or, to borrow a phrase from Sally Field, “They don’t like us. They really don’t like us.”