I am sure you have been in a situation, perhaps in a doctor’s office or someplace else, where someone has said to you, “Let me do this real quick.” “Let me take your blood pressure real quick.” “Let me just give you this injection real quick.” “Let me take some blood real quick.” Of course, there is no such thing as real quick. Blood pressure takes as long to take as it takes. An injection takes as long to give as it takes. But two generations of functioning adults now, who work for us and with us, grew up being told as children, “Let me do this real quick,” in order to not have a temper tantrum or an episode of fright or anxiety.

The other thing you hear those two generations say quite frequently is, “Perfect.” You buy something with your credit card, and they hand you a receipt to sign, and you sign it and they say, “Perfect.” No, it’s not. It might have been the sloppiest signature you ever gave. It’s perfect.  Because, growing up, not to hurt their wounded little hearts and souls, every time they did something, like color outside the lines, they were told it was perfect because at least they didn’t break the crayon while they were coloring. But we are stuck, now, with these two phrases in society - perfect and let me do this real quick. And I was reminded of that when I read today’s Gospel. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And I said to listen to the quotation in the first reading that Jesus changes in the Gospel, and that was it.

Recently I have taken to watching a British murder mystery series called the Dr. Blake Mysteries. It takes place in Australia and, as you probably know, many people in Australia are Catholic. Because the first white settlers in Australia were prisoners sent there from Ireland in a large deportation. When their prison sentences were up, many of them stayed, and they raised families there, and began a new life there. This Dr. Blake is a fallen-away Catholic, hasn’t been to Church in many years. But some of his friends and close associates do still go to Mass.

So, in this particular episode, a number of them are suffering. One has been the victim of a crime, another one is a victim of unfairness within the police department, and another one is carrying a great burden, a great sadness. And, near the end of the episode, Dr. Blake goes into a Catholic church for the first time in many, many years. And, like most Catholics, he sits in the back. And he says to God, out loud, “Don’t you care? Don’t you care about … ,” and he lists each person, in order. Don’t you care about this one? Don’t you care about that one? And, after he finishes, he gets up out of his seat, he walks up the center aisle, and the camera is behind the cross on the high altar, so we can see through the cross at him walking up the aisle. And we think to ourselves, “Oh, he is going to tell God he loves Him. This is the big conversion scene.” He walks right up to the altar, he stares up at the cross, he shakes his head, he turns around, and he stomps out of the Church.

Whenever Rachel Ray is cooking, she throws a little bit of salt over her shoulder for good luck. I wonder if you know how that custom began. It’s actually a reference to the story of Lot in the Old Testament. Where Lot and his wife, having escaped from the destruction of Sodom, are looking down the mountain and Lot’s wife turns her head, looks over her left shoulder, so to speak, to see what is going on down in the city they just left, and, as punishment she is turned into a pillar of salt. That’s where it comes from. The idea is that the devil is on your left shoulder and your guardian angel is on your right shoulder. And so, you want to throw salt in the devil’s eye.

But there are two things that Rachel says about using salt when you are cooking, and they are very important. The first one is that you always salt your pasta water because it is your only chance to give flavor to the pasta. And, when you are cooking with vegetables to sauté them, a mirepoix, you salt the vegetables while they are sautéing, because salt draws the juices out of the vegetables. And that’s what you want in the bottom of your pan is those juices to work with. So, basically, for her, salt gives flavor to things, and it draws flavor out of things. But that’s not what Jesus was thinking, primarily, when He used the metaphor “you are the salt of the earth.”

I’m sure some of you may remember when there was no Route 17. This road right out here was Route 17. The first time they brought my Irish grandmother up to Wurtsboro and made the big turn around the bend up there on Shawangunk Ridge and she could see the whole valley for just a moment, she said, “Oh, it looks just like Ireland.” The first time my father and mother brought my Italian grandmother up here, as they rounded the bend on the Shawangunk Ridge, my Italian grandmother said “Oh, it looks just like Italy.” When Samuel Morse was ready to test out his brand-new invention, the telegraph, the words he typed, hoping they would go out over the airwaves as Morse Code, were “What hath God wrought.” What hath God wrought. Alexander Graham Bell was a little more prosaic. When he picked up the telephone for the first time to call his assistant in the next room, he said, “Come here, Watson, I need you.” But when Neil Armstrong stepped off the last rung of the ladder onto the surface of the moon, he said, “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”

At critical moments, when people are struck by the immensity of what they see and hear, they tend to express themselves that things are awesome. Now, we call it an “aha” moment. We are so used to hearing the story of the Beatitudes and the story of The Sermon on the Mount that it no longer impresses us, but it was, at one time, an “aha” moment. That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to what was missing from the story. What’s wrong with the story as I read it this morning?

So, when Chloe wrote to Paul and told him what was going on in their parish over in Corinth, he said, “I hear that there are rivalries among you.” Rivalries. Factions. Divisions. There are always going to be factions in every community. In our nation, in our state, in our town and village, among all Christians, in any particular branch of Christianity, and every local community of that branch of Christianity. It is inevitable that there are factions.

I told you to listen carefully to the way in which Galilee is described, both by the Prophet Isaiah, and when Matthew quotes the Prophet Isaiah. It’s “Galilee of the Gentiles, where the people who live in darkness have seen a great light.” Why are they living in darkness? And what is the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, for goodness' sake?

In the late Spring of either my fifth or sixth grade, so 10 or 11 years old, I hung out with a large group of boys in my neighborhood. We all went to the same Catholic school. We walked to school, walked back and forth from school with your friends, hang out on the street corners. At that time of the year, stick ball would begin. And, although I was very popular with my friends, I did not know how to play any form of baseball. But, because we all had been tutored by the nuns, we all knew what proper behavior was like and how it was good to be kind and generous to one’s friends. And so, in choosing sides, they knew it was going to be difficult to choose me, but they did it anyway.

Remember that song in the 1970’s, a very odd song by an odd person, Janis Ian, At Seventeen. She sings about “those whose names are never called when choosing sides for basketball.” So, it didn’t happen to me. I got chosen, reluctantly, by one team of friends. Then the problem was what to do with me. So, when our team was fielding, they placed me in the outfield. They said to me, “Nothing is going to come out here, but if something does, just pick it up and throw it to that guy.” So, as luck would have it, a little grounder rolled out my way.  And I picked it up, and I walked over to the other guy while two runs scored. And they forgave me. 

We all know who Dracula is. Not as many people know who Vlad Tepes is. He is a historical figure. A mighty defender of the eastern end of Europe against the onslaught of the Turks, but a great evil man, whose ways of killing were dreadful. Bram Stoker took that one fact about a historical figure and wove a whole tale around him.

Many of us were forced to sit through reading The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when we were in grammar school. Longfellow took a historical figure - Hiawatha was the one who engineered the union of the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy that lived across western New York State and were always feuding with one another – and he built on that one simple name a fabled character, from a different tribe, who was a sort of superhero for white people to read about instead of Indians.

(Said very fast). “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

We pray the Hail Mary so off handedly, and sometimes so rapidly, that we hardly even hear what it is we are saying. Especially since we tend to focus on the first half of the prayer, which is just a polite form of address to Mary, and we miss the beginning phrase of the second half - “Holy Mary, Mother of God.”

The Hail Mary was not prayed among Catholics for the first thousand years of Christianity. It is an invention of a Church that was growing in stature and in spirituality at the turn of the first into the second century of the Christian era. But I’m sure all of you with me this morning remember when we didn’t call this the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God. We called it the Feast of the Circumcision. How come the change?

There are actually, as I mentioned before the first reading, four masses for Christmas. And this was extraordinary, back in the days before the new liturgy, because it was one of the few times that the priest was allowed to celebrate Mass more than once. But the way the liturgy breaks up the Christmas celebration is there’s a Vigil Mass, a Mass at midnight, a Mass at dawn, and a Mass during the day. For the gospel of the Vigil Mass, they read the genealogy of Jesus, which is very boring. For this Mass, which is actually the Vigil Mass, we are using the Mass for midnight. We’ll use it again at 9 o’clock tonight, with the gospel we just heard, which is the gospel everybody expects to hear at Christmas. See, that’s the strange thing. This is the gospel that we think should be read all the time.

If you came to Mass at the crack of dawn, you would hear the second half of this story. After the angels go away, the shepherds go to visit the stable. But, if you came during the day, the gospel you would hear was the beginning of John’s gospel, which is not about Christmas at all but, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A lot more words and then, “…As the Word became flesh and made his dwelling here with us.” And that’s the only reference you get to the fact that Jesus was born. So, it’s a good thing you came to this Mass, because this is the gospel you want to hear.

Yesterday, Turner Classic Movies was doing a Jesus marathon. First, they did King of Kings, with the beautiful blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus. And then they did The Greatest Story Ever Told. The one they didn’t do was one of the best of all the biblical narratives of the life of Christ.  It’s called The Gospel According to St. Matthew. It was an Italian production, done in 1964 by Pier Pasolini. And he chose a non-actor to play Jesus. But the opening scene in that movie is an absolute masterpiece.

We are on the balcony of a little home where Mary and presumably, her mother, live. And we’re looking out toward the desert. And this little tiny figure keeps coming nearer and nearer to the camera. And it’s Joseph, coming to visit his espoused, because they’re not living together yet. Then the camera switches position so that we can see Mary and Elizabeth. And Mary is clearly pregnant, holding her belly, watching with joy as her intended husband is coming toward her. And Joseph takes one look, when he gets closer, and he turns around silently and walks the other way, and the camera watches as he walks back until he becomes just a little dot in the center of the screen. Not a word is spoken. Because the presumption is that Joseph was dismayed, ashamed, embarrassed and angry that Mary was pregnant, when he knew it was not his child.  That’s the presumption.

A lot of you folks here this morning know who Peggy Lee is.  I guess most people would describe her profession as a chanteuse. But she had a couple big records. One in the late 1940’s, a comedy song called “Mañana.” And then, she wrote the entire musical score for Lady and the Tramp, which included the very pretty Italian love song that takes place as lady and the tramp are having their spaghetti dinner. It’s a very famous scene where the song is. “This is the night, it’s a beautiful night, and they call it bella notte.” And that became a big hit for several Italian-American singers. In the rock and roll era, she surprised everyone with a song called Fever. And, although it was a jazz song, many rock and rollers over the years have actually done a take on it.

But her last big hit was sort of unusual. It was a song called “Is That All There Is,” and part of it was narrated and then she would sing the chorus. The first thing when she talked about when she went to a circus as a child. She was all excited to go, then was disappointed with the circus. Then she talks about how a house in her neighborhood burned down. And she went to the fire and watched the house burn down and she said, “Is that all there is?” The refrain is, “If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.” It’s a very gloomy song.

What a great group they are, aren’t they?  Please be seated, relax, okay? I think that you know that what I always like to do is to meet ahead of time with the candidates just to get to know them a little bit.

I was back in my home parish - I grew up outside of White Plains - I was back in my home parish doing Confirmation in May. So, I was sitting there and one of the candidates was sitting there with his brother, who was his sponsor. And, we’re talking. And I had been thinking about what homily I was going to use. I have one on scouting or another one, and I wasn’t sure which one I was going to use. So, these two boys sat down and one of them told me that he was in Scouts. And I said, “Ah, maybe that’s the one I should use.” So, we’re talking, and he said he was in Troop 1, Purchase. And I said, “Oh, I was in Troop 1, Silver Lake.” And his brother looks at me and says, “We know.” I said, “How do you know?” And he pulled out this old scout handbook, and I looked at it and said, “Wow, I haven’t seen something like that for years.” He said, “Open it up.” I opened it up and on the next page was Troop 1, Silver Lake, and my name.  It was my handbook. This was sixty years later. I have no idea how he got the handbook. It was given to him as a gift when he became an Eagle Scout. Well, that decided it. I said, “Okay, it’s the Scout homily tonight.” And guess what? You’re getting the Scout homily, too.

For over a dozen years, part of my assignment in the Archdiocese was to work for the Office of Communications in the Chancery Building and that assignment would find me every other week at 1330 Avenue of the Americas. That is the headquarters of the ABC Network, and it’s a very beautiful part of Sixth Avenue. The building has a large outside plaza. You walk up two stone steps from the sidewalk and then there’s a big open area with two sets of stone benches, and in between the stone benches, beautiful plantings. Whenever I would arrive, there was a guy sitting or standing among the benches. His name was Moondog. At least that’s what they called him. Moondog. He was dressed in a leather tunic with a leather belt around his waist, no pants, and buskins for his shoes, and a Viking hat with the big horns, the whole thing, and a staff in his hand. And he would harangue passersby, especially those coming in and out of the building. Now, that building housed the corporate offices of one of the most powerful media networks in the country, the facilities of WABC local radio, ABC national radio and WPLJ, among other things. So, some of the most famous, and some of the wealthiest people in the country came in and out of that building every day. It always struck me as odd that they never had the cops remove Moondog. I often wondered about that. I suspect that some of those people going in and out of the building might have occasionally slipped Moondog a ten or a twenty to keep him from starving.

The song Now and Then There’s a Fool Such As I was a standard in country music long before Elvis Presley got hold of it. But it’s interesting to look at the sheet music or at a record label with the name on it because the way it is printed is this: [parenthesis] (Now and Then There’s) [close parenthesis] A Fool Such As I. And that parenthesis is very interesting. Now and then. For most of us, most of the time, that expression means pretty much the same thing as occasionally. Now and then. But, in the song, it means all the time. Back then and even now. Now and then.

Back in the 1950’s, the Coasters sang a story song about Sweet Sue and Salty Sam and Lonely Lanky Jones. And Salty Sam was always trying to do dastardly things to Sweet Sue but, just as the crisis was about to strike, who would come along but Lonely Lanky Jones. And, in order to build up the suspense in each of their little stories, the Coasters would go, “And then…, and then…, and then….”  In that song, the “then” is very interesting.  It’s not a “then” of “back then.” It’s a “then” of right now.

I am sure lots of you know where and what Touchdown Jesus is.  If you’ve ever watched a Notre Dame football game, you got a couple of really good shots of it.  It stands about three stories high, it’s a beautiful mosaic.  In his touring days, Elvis once booked out the Notre Dame stadium for a concert.  And as fans are wont to do, they were screaming to him, close enough to the stage that you could hear some of them. One girl kept screaming, “Elvis you are the King!” He stopped and looked in her direction and he said, “No honey, I’m only a singer. He’s the King.” And he pointed to Touchdown Jesus.

We have a great fascination with royalty.  It came out again at all the beautiful ceremonies surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth.  She truly was a noble lady. Like all of us, she had her faults and blind spots, but she was an amazing image of what kingship and queenship might be.

You know that I don’t like to talk about money, but that’s not a personal feeling of mine. The fact is that the time for the Homily should not be commandeered to talk about money.  So, I always hope that when I have to, the scripture readings will help me, and today they did.  There’s three terrific lines in today’s Gospel that make a lot of sense for our situation. “Troubles will come.” “But it is not yet the end.” And “I will give you words and a wisdom.”

So, if you were to compare the life of a parish to the life of a human being, I would say that our Parish is in late middle age.  That’s where we are right now, late middle age.  How did we get there?  Well, it all started back in 2008 with the bank collapse.  A lot of people in our area were seasonal parishioners.  They had a home here and a home someplace else. And they discovered that, finally, they could not afford to maintain both places, to pay two sets of taxes and everything else, and they stopped coming.

Mackerel snappers. Mackerel snappers. That’s the term of derision, very much like other terms of derision that we all know well, that was used against Catholics starting in the nineteenth century because the hordes of immigrants to America, who were despised partly because they were immigrants and partly because they were Catholic, kept the Friday fast. Not eating meat on Friday and substituting fish, especially cheap fish, available easily in the marketplace. It is 55 years since Pope Paul VI abolished that custom of meatless Fridays among Catholics, and yet, in many households, the custom still holds sway now.

Before I became your pastor here, I served under seven pastors in my lifetime. Four of the seven required their housekeepers and cooks never to serve meat on Friday despite the fact that the Pope, in one sense their boss, had said that they didn’t have to do that anymore. Certain customs cling and they die hard.

I’m sure you caught the verb. It was the word see. In one form or another, it’s repeated seven times in that very short paragraph and it’s the key to the story. At the very beginning, Luke tells us that Zacchaeus sought to see. He looked to see. Using the same word twice in the same sentence. He was looking to see. And then, it says he climbed a sycamore tree to see who Jesus was. Then Jesus looked up and saw Zacchaeus. But when the people saw what Jesus was doing, they were angry. At end of the story, Luke says that Jesus said, “I have come to seek. I have come to seek out the lost and save them.”

In October of 1964, a pope came to the United States for the very first time and it was a big honkin’ deal for several reasons. First of all, because in 1964 the United States had no diplomatic ties to the Vatican and so there was no diplomatic channel through which the Pope could be invited to America. And so, the American bishops could not invite the bishop of Rome to come to America. So, they found a work around. The United Nations invited Pope Paul VI to speak there on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, October the 4th, about peace in the world. And it was arranged through the Secret Service, the Vatican Diplomatic Corp, the Archdiocese of New York and the New York City Police Department that just by accident, the Pope’s limousine would leave the East Side at the United Nations and wander through Harlem to bless a housing complex built in a certain parish through the cooperation of the pastor and parishioners. And just accidentally happen to cross the East River and wind up, somehow or other, in Yankee Stadium where, just by coincidence, 30,000 people would be waiting for the Pope to say Mass. That’s how they did it.

Jesus doesn’t need any help from me this morning to explain what he was trying to say. So, I thought maybe we would focus on the second reading.

Last week, if you were at Mass, you remember that I talked about playing the long game. Last weekend, all three of our readings were about playing the long game. Being faithful to the end. And that’s what today’s second reading is about, again.

I asked you to listen carefully to the metaphor and the simile that St. Paul uses at the beginning of his letter. “I have been poured out like a libation.” That metaphor comes from the worship customs of all ancient peoples, both Jewish and non-Jewish. When they wanted to make a sacrifice of some sort to God or to the Gods, they tried to render it useless for anyone else. And so, if you had a jug of expensive wine or freshly produced olive oil, you took it and poured it all over the altar. It could never be used again. A libation. That’s how the writer says his life is. He’s simply being poured out, never to be used again in fidelity and in service to God. And right after that he says, “I have finished the race.” That image is too simple to even need an explanation or description. But both of them describe a person who is in it for the long game.

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.