Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 10, 2021 – Wisdom 7:7-11; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30

I just want to begin with a reminder about the current drive that we’re having. It’s just for this one month – a Cemetery Preservation Drive. It takes the place of an increased giving campaign for our offertory the archdiocese wanted us to conduct this year. And I gave them my solemn promise that, in its place, we would raise $10,000 in one month for the cemetery. Why? Because our cemetery is a heritage site. People are buried there from the time of the Civil War on. Many of them worked on the canal, and on the railroads in the area. Some of them had the rarified job of being canal boat captain. Some of the oldest stones tell us not only who is buried there, but where they came from in Ireland, what county and what town. It’s a historical register.

Secondly, not only the bodies of our past parishioners, but even our loved ones today, have found their final resting place there. And finally, the cemetery has fallen on hard financial times. Since the beginning of this century, fewer and fewer people choose burial. And so, at this point, we sell very few graves, perhaps one a year, at most. So the income has fallen off sharply, but the costs of maintaining the cemetery continue. And so we have a big dent in our Perpetual Care fund that needs to be repaired. And we need to put aside some money to run the cemetery for the next couple of years.

And finally, looking down the road, we can see that there are vast changes taking place in Sullivan County. We don’t know what our parish will be like, or if there will be a parish, 25 or 50 years from now. But the cemetery will endure, so we have to protect that legacy as best we can.

And finally, let me point out to you that I put my life on the line with the archdiocese with this promise, and since I’m only your administrator, not your pastor, I have to make good on my promise.

I asked you how old you thought the person was who came up to Jesus and asked Him that significant question. I asked you that because one of the other gospel writers, when he tells this story, changes the story, and says, “A young man came up and approached Jesus.” But Mark, the earliest gospel, doesn’t say he was a young man. In fact, if you noticed the answer the young man gave, when Jesus proposed the Ten Commandments as the way to eternal life. The man said to Jesus, “I have kept all these things from my youth.” Which suggests that, maybe, instead of being someone just starting out, he might be someone who is middle-aged, who’s reached that time in life where there have been some accomplishments, when you begin to feel satisfied with yourself. He may feel dissatisfied with where he is in life, and be wondering what else he should do. Or maybe, maybe, he’s an old person feeling the loss of things in life, and saying to himself, “Is that all there is? Is that all there is to life? What I’ve done? That’s it?” So we don’t know what the motivation was.

And did you notice that Jesus treats him harshly? He’s very polite. He came up and said, “Good teacher…” How much more polite could he have been? And Jesus throws the word ‘good’ back in his face unnecessarily, provoking him in a sense, putting him off and allowing the crowds around him to see the harsh interchange. Because sociologically, in that time, there was no middle class like we have today, who are fairly comfortable and settled in their lives. There are a few people who are very, very wealthy, like this man, and everybody else was in poverty. It’s a different kind of poverty than ours, for almost everybody had a place to live, but everybody eked out an existence with some sort of trade, or else they went begging. And so, the audience that Jesus has would be innately hostile to this man, and Jesus echoes that hostility, revealing the man’s weakness, by causing him, eventually, to turn away and not go on the journey with Jesus. What does this mean?

I know that not everybody in the congregation follows baseball, but those of you who do, see how many of these names you recognize – Buster Posey, the Giants; Jason Heyward, the Braves; John Carlos Stanton, the Marlins; Freddie Freeman, the Braves; Starlin Castro, the Cubs; Jose Tabata, the Pirates; Ike Davis, the Mets; Danny Espinosa, the Nationals; Dominick Brown, the Phillies; and Mike Moustakas, the Royals. How many of you recognize any of those names. Just wave at me. Yeah, ok, pretty well-known names. They all played on the same farm team, back in 2009, with another man, whose name you’ve never heard – Grant Desme.

But Grant Desme was better at the craft of baseball than any of these other guys who went to the dance. This is what I was able to find out about Grant Desme. In that same year, when he played with all these other guys, he hit 31 home runs during the regular season, and 11 more in the postseason. He won the Most Valuable Player award for his farm team that year, and he was the talk of the league. As a matter of fact, his coach at the time, Billy Beane, says, “He was going to be a major leaguer. Absolutely. He looked like he’d gotten over the hump. He could’ve been a lot more. He was a great talent.” As a matter of fact, the Oakland A’s offered him a contract that year for $430,000. From the time he was four years old, Grant Desme told his dad he was going to be a baseball player. Not only that, but he was going to be a hall of famer. He lived, ate and drank baseball. He was crummy at academics in school. He played baseball in grammar school, in high school, and college. He just lived, ate and drank baseball. And he was very good at it. Incredibly good at it.

But, a couple of weeks after the Oakland A’s offered him his contract, he called the manager and turned it down, told him he was going to enter a monastery. He became a Norbertine friar. They’re a semi-cloistered community. They live together, and they work together at the simplest tasks. Now he spends his days mowing the grass, and cleaning the toilets, and picking the vegetables. He’s now Father Matthew Desme.

And they asked him why he did it. He said when he got the contract, got everything he ever wanted, he realized that it wasn’t enough. And he turned away from it all because he felt that God was calling him to do this other thing. Unless he did this other thing, he would never fill that hole that he thought baseball was going to fill.

I understand what he meant because every man who enters the priesthood, at some point in the process, experiences that moment when there’s nothing else that will satisfy. But you all have had parallel moments in your lives. When you decided on your career, or found something to do that satisfied you. When you fell in love, found the one person with whom you knew you would spend your life, for better or for worse. People have those aha moments all the time.

But after the aha moment is over, life goes back to its same old, same old. And sometimes you begin to wonder, “Did I do the right thing? Did I make the right choice? Is that all there is?”

“Lord, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Come, follow me.”

Grant Desme lived and breathed baseball until he didn’t. Until he lived and breathed God.

If you are here this morning, you have made that choice. You may not remember it. Hardly any of us can possibly remember our Baptism. Some of us have a vague memory of our First Communion day, or our Confirmation day. But, basically, we don’t remember, anymore, the day we finally decided to be for God, for Christ, rather than basically only for ourselves. That memory has faded to where we’re not even sure if we did it, never mind when we did it. But we did it. Now’s the time for us to live it out.