Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 24, 2022 – Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13

You know this is not the first summer heat wave we’ve ever had in Wurtsboro. I said Mass here in the summertime for almost all of my 50 years as a priest before I came to live here as your pastor. And, back then, there was no air conditioning in this building. Up there, where that beautiful stained-glass window of Joseph and the boy, Jesus, is now, there used to be an exhaust fan. The theory was that the exhaust fan would suck out the hot air because hot air rises. Nah, not so much. No. And each one of those pillars had a little oscillating fan that went back and forth and just blew the hot air around. The windows, back then, used to open, but they opened from the bottom. They just pushed out a little bit, and a little bit of air could rush in through those openings.

And, on a very hot weekend, I remember that by the time I began the 9 o’clock Mass it was already beginning to swelter in here. It was in the high 80s, maybe the low 90s outside. It was beginning to percolate up into the 80s in here. People were sitting here going like this [fanning] with their missalettes and so on. And I got up to preach and I said, “You think it’s hot in here? There’s someplace else a lot hotter. Stay out of it. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The goal was to get people out as quickly as possible before you had people passing out. But now we have air conditioning. And sometimes it’s nicer to stay here than go back outside.

How many of you don’t like spiders? Put up your hand. Nice and high. Don’t be embarrassed. That’s good. Did you know there are 45,000 species of spiders in the world? 45,000. Now, last night when I gave that statistic, then finished my homily and went back to the altar, just as I was putting the cloth on the altar, a little tiny spider, about the size of one grain of black pepper, crawled across the altar and I grabbed him and I squished him. Then, at the end of Mass, when I was putting everything away off the altar, this great big spider crawled across the altar and I brushed him off. So, if they happen to be the last of the Mohicans of their species, we now have 44,998 species of spiders.

There are - get this - 1,740,330 species of virus in the world. We’re experiencing a great deal of trouble from just one virus and its mutations. But 1,700,000+ kinds of virus! They’re all alive! Like you and me. They have lives of their own. They seek nourishment. They seek to reproduce. They seek to preserve their lives as long as possible.

How many of you speak another language, besides English, fluently? Put up your hands. Nice and high so I can see them. Ok. How many of you can get by at least by reading in some other language besides English? Put up your hands. Even more. There are 7,100 living languages in the world. Languages that people speak to other people every day. Now, I happen to speak two dead languages, Latin and ancient Greek. I can at least write and read Latin fluently, and Greek, a little bit more clumsily. But over 7,000 languages that people speak every day. Which means there are over 7,000 different cultures with different kinds of people.

The Hubble telescope just revealed something amazing to us. They found a star that is 12.9 billion – that’s billion – light-years away. And they said that that star is a mere 900 million light years from the big bang. Think of those numbers. 12.9 billion light-years away, and then another 900 million light-years from the big bang. Getting closer and closer. What does that mean?

It means that the very idea that there could be a six day creation of the world is nonsense. I don’t care if it’s in bible. Catholics do not believe and should not believe that the world was created in six days. And we should not believe that humanity is only ten thousand years old. “But the bible says…” Yeah, I know what the bible says. The biblical myth of creation was a way of explaining the relationship between God and the universe. Science answers the question when did it happen, how did it happen and, primarily why did it happen. Then what does scripture answer? It answers the question who did it happen. Who did it happen? Behind the entire amazing world in which we live, about which we learn more every day, which has things in it that are wonderful and things in it that are terrifying. Behind all of that there is an intelligent design.

Now, scientists don’t like intelligent design because there is also chaos and randomness within the scientific universe. But what our theologians say, drawing from scripture and church’s tradition, is that the mind of God and the heart of God are so wonderful that God creates the chaos and God creates the randomness out of a more deeply ingrained order that is too miraculous for us to understand. When I think about all of this, my mind just goes to “When I see the stars and hear the rolling thunder, my God, how great Thou art.”

The version of the Our Father that we heard this morning in the gospel was not a prayer. It was a teaching on how to pray. St. Matthew’s gospel took Jesus’ teaching and, using the Jewish prayer forms that are found largely in the psalms, created a beautiful prayer from it. But, you know what? Once we get past “Hallowed be thy name” we’ve said it all.