October 16, 2022
Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 16, 2022 – Exodus 17:8-13; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8
Last night, when I began my homily, that whole row of pews over there was completely empty. Now, this whole row of pews is completely empty. There must be, like, a rolling disease going across the pews or something.
Very strange readings we had this morning, you know. After listening to the stories of the Amaleks and Moses, you gotta ask yourself why? Why do they put that reading here for us on Sunday. Who cares about this ancient battle? And the Gospel reading. It’s very difficult to understand how Jesus makes a corrupt judge the hero of his story. A sinful character.
That is why I asked you to listen carefully for what St. Paul says to Timothy are the circumstances under which to be persistent. He says, “Preach the gospel …” - and our translation said – “… when it is convenient or inconvenient.” Other translations say, “… in good times and in bad.” Now those are two different notions. One has to do with something outside of you. You don’t have any control over whether times are good or bad. But you do have control over whether things are convenient or inconvenient for you.
So, I looked up the original words. In the original Greek, in which St. Paul wrote, the words are eukairos and akairos. Kairos is the Greek word for time. The preface eu, as you know, still in English means something good. A euphemism, for example. A means something bad. So, it’s definitely about time. Good time, bad time. You turn to St. Jerome’s Latin translation, which is the normative, definitive translation for Catholics - St. Jerome’s Latin translation for the fourth or fifth century. He says opportune et inopportune. You can hear the word in English right there. Opportune and not opportune. So, that’s convenient or inconvenient. So, we have to take the long view of this. And, if you want to take the long view, what unites all three readings is, in fact, a long view. Each one of them says you have to step back from the immediate picture and see what’s needed over the long haul. So, I am going to tell you three long-view Catholic stories.
When my parents and I left here on Labor Day in 1959, I believe it was, maybe 60, there was just an empty space right here, where there had been an old barn. When we came back for July 4th the next summer, this building was here because they needed this building to deal with the number of people who came to Church back in the late 50s and early 60s. Because that little building over there only holds 180, 190. What would happen, every Sunday morning, is that the first sixteen cars would get the first sixteen spaces. There was no parking lot back there; it wasn’t our property. Everybody else had to park on the street in the village and then walk back through the village to church. By the time they got here, all the seats were filled, and they stood in the parking lot and listened to Mass through the open windows.
There were six morning masses - 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. There was no evening Mass. That didn’t exist yet. And this road out here was the only Route 17 that there was. And so, people emptying the hotels up in Monticello would clog the highway, because you had to get out of your hotel room at eight o’clock in the morning. And you had to wait for some kind person to stop his car to let you come out of Wurtsboro Hills or Yankee Lake or Mountain Lakes Camps to get into the flow of traffic to get down to the village. If you didn’t leave your house 45 minutes before the Mass you intended to get to, you wouldn’t get a parking space and you’d be really late for Mass. Convenient or inconvenient?
My first assignment was to a parish in Staten Island. I learned a lot about the history of Catholicism in Staten Island when I was down there. I don’t know how many of you ever have been on Staten Island or lived there, but the premier parish on Staten Island was St. Peter’s. If you’ve ever gone across the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island, St. Peter’s dominates the skyline as you look towards Staten Island. It is up on a ridge.
In the 1800s, it was the only church on Staten Island. The only Church. Now, Staten Island wasn’t vastly populated, but any Catholics that there were had to come from all the other points on the island to St. Peter’s for Church. Not only that but, in the 1800s, the Archdiocese of New York included most of that part of New Jersey. So, people who lived in Jersey City or Linden, New Jersey were part of the Archdiocese of New York, and they had two choices to go to Mass. They could travel by horse or by carriage up to Newark, which was a long haul from Linden, or they could cross the Kill Van Kull, that’s the waterway that runs down the west side of Staten Island. There were no bridges back then. No
Goethals Bridge, no Outer Bridge Crossing. By ferry, they had to come across from those places in New Jersey and then ride all along the north shore of Staten Island to get to St. Peter’s. Which meant that those people, if they wanted to go to Mass, had to start out early in the morning and pack a lunch. Remember, back then, if you wanted to receive Holy Communion, you had to be fasting from midnight. So, if you had a three- or four-hour journey by horseback to get to Mass, you had two choices. Either never go to Communion or never eat breakfast. So. people rarely if ever made that journey and when they did it was, what? Convenient or inconvenient?
At one point in my ministry, I met an elderly couple, and they told me their story. They both had been born in the early days of the twentieth century and she was married off at the tender age of 16. That could never happen now, but back then it was not an uncommon occurrence. And, innocent and ignorant as she was, it turned out that she married a raging alcoholic, who beat her. She left the marriage within a year and filed for a civil divorce, which was a great scandal in a Catholic community. And so, for many years, she lived as a single woman. But, during those years, she fell in love with a very nice Catholic man. He himself came from a good Catholic family. And, at one point, there was some possibility that he might think of becoming a priest. But it turned out that he had to leave school right after grammar school to help support his family. They fell in love, and for many years they courted at a distance because they were good Catholic people and getting married civilly after a divorce was a grave, grave sin. Eventually they did marry, by a justice of the peace, recognizing that they put themselves at a greater distance from the church. But they had their children baptized, they sent them to Catholic school, and they too went to Mass every Sunday, never ever receiving Communion. And then they told me that, at some point, they met a priest at a social function connected with the school, and they happened to get into a conversation about their situation. The priest told them that they could get a Decree of Nullity. And she told the priest, “When I went and asked my priest, when I was 16 years old, if I could have a Decree of Nullity, he told me, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it.’” A combination of both ignorance of Canon Law and arrogance. Inconvenient or convenient?
Three different stories. Some of them have to do with lighthearted things, some with things of great gravity. The thing is that all the different translations of that phrase have something to do with our lives. How many of you have been Catholics at a time or in a situation where it was inconvenient for you? And, if Catholicism becomes inconvenient for you, what would you do?