The most important person in a dialysis unit is the dietitian. He or she is always a registered nurse. And their job is to look at everybody’s bloodwork every day and, if they see any changes in certain chemicals in the blood, to give the patients medicines to react to those changes. And the chemicals we’re talking about, everybody has them and they are really good things.  Potassium, phosphorus, calcium, vitamin D. But we have too much of them and, ordinarily, our kidneys filter out what we don’t need. But when our kidneys aren’t working, they build up. And most people who are on dialysis die of a stroke or a heart attack because those chemicals build up.

I have known the woman who is the dietitian at dialysis for about eight years. She is efficient and she’s cordial. For the little children who are here this morning, that means she does her work really well and she’s a nice person. One day, early on in my treatment, she came to me, and she said, “Your potassium has gotten a little bit low. I want you to have a half a banana twice a week.” And I chuckled and I said, “Why can’t I just have a whole banana once a week.” And she said, “Because, if you do, then your potassium might spike, and that would be very dangerous.” 

Friday, as I was leaving dialysis, she happened to be behind the main desk. And she called me over. And not, in her nurse voice, but in her lady voice, she said, “Would you do me a favor? Would you please pray for my people in Israel?” And I said to her, “Do you have family there?”  She said, “No, but I have some very good friends. And I’ve been there. And I want desperately to go back and help as soon as I can.” And, as she said that,  I could see, because we were so close to each other, that she’s not a young woman. I’m guessing she’s in her late sixties. And her face got kind of flush, and her eyes filled with tears, but none trickled down. And, all of a sudden, for me there was a face on the tragedy going on in Israel and Palestine.

I am sure you caught the switch. In the first paragraph, St. Paul uses the phrase, “the peace of God.” In the second paragraph he uses the phrase, “the God of peace.” Listen to how he phrases each one. “By prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God will guard your hearts.” Doesn't that sound like what we all experience when we pray?

Basically, we have four different ways we pray.

• We say, “Please God, don’t let …” or “Please God, make…”
• Or we say, “Thank you, God, because you let…” or “Thank you, God, because you prevented...”“Thank you, God, because you helped...”
• “God, I’m sorry I did what I just did.”
• And “Oh, wow! God, that’s wonderful.”

Those are basically the four sources of prayer. And when we pray that way, whatever anxiety has befallen us begins to get itself back into its cage. A calm descends. The peace of God.

Micro-aggressions. We all are guilty of them. We all are the victims of them. 

During the Covid lockdown, I was one of the few cars on the road on a regular basis because I still went to dialysis three days a week. And the path I take to dialysis is always the same. Using the same roads. Very little traffic on them back then. But when we came back from the Covid lockdown, I noticed something. Drivers were much more aggressive. For example, there is a major intersection on the road that I use, with a traffic light. And usually, traffic piles up at the traffic light and I would be in a queue of, say, eight or nine cars waiting. And somebody behind me would pull out and pass all eight of us on the right - which is illegal - just so they could make a right-hand turn on red. Because “the law says I can do that, so it’s my right to do that.” On that same road, it winds its way through a number of bedroom communities. And people come out of the side roads there without even noticing there’s a stop sign. “It’s their right to come out of that road. Get out of their way.” Micro-aggressions.

Jesus, in today’s gospel, talks about a micro-aggression. We’ve all been there. When we were kids, our parents told us to do something. “I won’t. I won’t. You can’t make me.” That was usually followed by a macro-aggression on the part of our parents. Nonetheless, it’s a part of human experience.  And today’s second reading is meant to talk with us about our micro-aggressions.

On the news lately we have been hearing a lot about strikes. The auto workers are on strike. And, in Hollywood, the actors and the writers are on strike. They’re all bargaining and hoping to receive larger wages. And we know, throughout our daily lives, we see some people making more money than we perhaps have made. And we see people such as city workers, electricians, even garbage collectors making a certain amount of money. And then we see professional athletes. Their salaries, really, are somewhat ridiculous. So are the salaries of certain entertainers. And some CEOs are making so much money today and we see why some of their employees are now on strike. So, if you want to get people upset very quickly in today’s world, all you have to do is begin talking about salaries. We often play the game of comparing our salary to someone else’s salary. It’s called “size up our salary.” And when we play that game, we usually compare our wages with the person who is making more money than we are.  They’re making more money, and they seem to have, perhaps, less skill and education. Then we become upset. But we usually don’t say anything, just simmer inside. That’s the way we normally play the “size up the salary” game.

Today’s Gospel gives us a different type of salary game played by God. Today’s readings are all about the sense of justice and the extravagant grace of a merciful God. While God is both just and merciful, God’s mercy often overrides his justice and God pardons us, therefore, unconditionally and rewards us generously by opening up heaven for all people. And we see in today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds His listeners He is opening up heaven, not only for the Jews, but also the Gentiles.

I had planned this morning’s homily expecting to have the same large number of children in the congregation that we had last Sunday, so now I am going to have to pivot a little bit.

I asked you to pay close attention to the very first line of the first reading. I did that because you know what happens in the first reading, right? We sit down and we have to adjust and get ourselves settled. And the first line usually goes by before we’re focused in. But the first line is a key line. “Hatred and anger are terrible things, but the sinner holds them tight,” like wrapping something around you.

Elton John famously told us that “sorry seems to be the hardest word.” But he was wrong. Sometimes it’s actually easier to say “I’m sorry” than it is to say “I forgive you,” although both of them are extremely difficult challenges.  In all of my years hearing confession, the thing people tell me most in confession is how angry they are. How angry they are. The second most common thing they tell me is how they can’t forgive somebody for something. So, these words are a really difficult challenge that Jesus has spoken this morning.

I did not become an altar server until after I had made the decision to apply to the Seminary. So, I was sixteen or seventeen years old. And back in those days, the Mass was in Latin. You  knelt to the right of the priest, behind him. Not only that, but there were side altars where priests said Mass privately while the public Mass was going at the main altar. For example, in this Church, there used to be a side altar to the Blessed Mother there and a side altar to St. Joseph over there. So, I was assigned one morning, early, to serve a visiting priest at one of the side altars. And, near the end of Mass, when he genuflected before turning around to give the final blessing, he farted in my face. And I never forgot that. I never met him, ever again, in my entire fifty-something years as a priest. He died a dignified Monsignor of the Catholic church. But everyone now and then, in the list of dead priests that we are expected to pray for on a regular basis, his name comes up. And when it does, I put him in the Prayer of the Faithful. So, it’s like revenge forgiveness.

One way of understanding today’s Gospel is to see it as a conflict of understanding over the goals and the methods of mission. And, throughout the church’s history, we have struggled with both of those questions. But, through it all, what Isaiah has said in the first reading is the thing that motivates missionary work. And that is that “My heart is burning. I cannot keep in the message of the Good News.” To tell us more about how her missionary order uses mission in the 21st century is Sister Maria.

I am Maria Goetschalckx. I am a Cuban. And, with the exception of one sister, my family lives in Belgium. My family in the Church are the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill. I am proud to speak to you today about our foreign missions in South Korea, China and Ecuador.

Catholics are preconditioned to hear, in this reading, two truths. That the Pope is the successor of Peter and the head of the Church and that the Church has the power to forgive sins in the sacrament of Penance. Both of those things are true. And they emerge from a different context of this reading as the Church grows. When, finally, there were so many Christians that some sort of order, some sort of structure, was needed for their own benefit. It became obvious that the person in the See of Rome was carrying forward the traditions of Peter. When there were so many Christians who were baptized at birth instead of as consenting adults, the problem of sin after baptism became a very powerful reality in the Church. And so, the Church had to look at what Jesus had said about forgiveness to understand what it could do to reconcile those people. But that’s not what this passage was all about when Matthew wrote it. It was about something entirely different.

Remember last week? Jesus went to the region of Tyre, in Sidon, and met that Canaanite woman and very reluctantly cured her daughter after saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” You have to know the geography. All of our Gospel writers create a theological geography to tell their story, using real places that people knew about back in those days that we don’t know anything about. Tyre and Sidon were two cities on the Mediterranean seacoast and for Jewish people they were vacation destinations. They were about 30 or 40 miles outside of the actual end of Jewish territory but, because so many people of Jewish ancestry lived there and worked there, it was a comfortable enough place to go, where Jews and Pagans mingled in a friendly manner.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a little article in a news magazine. This group someplace in the Southwest started a charter school. Charter schools are neither public nor religious, they’re private. And they’d just gone to court seeking federal aid for their school. And two bishops of the area had filed an amicus curiae brief in support of their desire for federal aid. The charter for the school says that it’s “open to all children, but we will actively attempt to convert any non-Catholic children to the Catholic faith so that they will not burn in hell.” I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was more angry or sad when I read that because it does not reflect Catholic teaching in any way.

The bishops of the Second Vatican Council issued a large number of decrees, but only one was promulgated as a doctrinal decree, meaning that it required the assent of Catholic people. And that was the doctrine that we call the one on the church, but its Latin name is Lumen Gentium. Beautiful name. The light of the nations. In the twelve paragraph of that document it says that no one is outside the church except those who, knowing for a fact that Jesus is the only Savior of the world, deliberately refuse to believe in Him. That’s, pretty much, people who are insane. So, nobody’s outside the Church.

When I look in the mirror in the morning, I see my father looking back at me. When I sit down like this, unconsciously my posture is frequently that of my Italian grandmother. And I often find myself saying things my mother said forty years ago. Like it or not, we almost all become our parents in some ways at some time.

Sometimes we do ourselves a disservice having these little snippets of scripture at Mass. The only way to understand today’s first reading would be to read the whole thing, which is very, very long, but I’ll summarize it for you. Elijah had a contest with the priests of Baal to get something done and Yahweh God caused Elijah to win. But, after his win, in his victory dance, so to speak, he had all 450 prophets of Baal executed by being beheaded which, of course, enraged Queen Jezebel and King Ahab and she put out a fatwah on him. So, the story picks up today as he’s escaping, running for his life, into the desert. He comes to an oasis and plops himself down under a tree, exhausted and despairing. And that’s when he says, “Lord, take my life, I am no better than my father.” That line, “… take my life, I am no better than my father,” is the key line to this entire story and it’s buried.

So, did you spot the things in the first reading and the gospel that were similar images?  If you didn’t, it’s likely because our minds don’t go in the direction of imagery when we’re reading scripture, but it’s there all the time. The two images that match, in the two readings, are “something clothed in brightness and light” and “someone who is an ordinary human being.” In Hebrew terminology, the expression Son of Man simply is a circumlocution for human being or man in the sense of a member of the human race. And it’s the Ancient of Days that is clothed with light, sitting on a throne of fire. Everything is all brilliance and dazzling to the eye. In today’s gospel, it is Jesus Himself who is clothed in light and dazzling to the eye. But at the end of the story, it’s just good old everyday Jesus, a man like all other men, who speaks to his frightened disciples.

We don’t really know if Daniel was a historical human being. What we do know is that the Book of Daniel is made up of two different parts. The first part has what you might want to call “The Adventures of Young Daniel.” He is part superhero, part advisor/counselor, part political dealmaker. And, in each of the stories, there is either a moral lesson or a happy ending thanks to the work of Daniel. Then, suddenly, in the middle, the book changes and Daniel becomes the interpreter of and the spokesman for various revelations.

Jesus begins by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” The kingdom of heaven is like… And then He tells us two brief stories about searching and strife. The person finds the treasure, digs it up - probably illegally, on somebody else’s property - hides it, goes and buys the property. The other one is searching, always, for valuable pearls. Maybe next week he’ll find a more valuable one than the one he found in the parable, and then what? He’s already sold everything.

Our understanding of heaven is that, at the very least, heaven is where all strife and searching ends. We are at peace. We have all that we need because we have God. And so, how could the kingdom of heaven be a place of searching, strife, and even duplicity? That’s because Matthew changed a key word. He changed something else to heaven.

In the first version of the movie Footloose, John Lithgow plays a Protestant minister who lost a child in her teenage years to an auto accident caused by drunk teenagers. And, in his bitterness and sorrow, he has forced the village council to issue a law forbidding dancing as well as drinking and drug use within the village limits. Into this small town comes a city teenager who can’t imagine a world in which people are not allowed to dance. And he starts a movement to try to get the law overturned. In the meanwhile, he has both the good fortune and bad fortune to fall in love with the minister’s daughter, which sets up a terrible conflict that’s both political and very, very personal. At the end of the story, the minister loses, and dancing is allowed again. But just before the big reveal, he shows up one night in front of his church and his own parishioners are burning books in the parking lot that they don’t want in the library. And the minister is horrified at the lack of democratic ideals, not seeing the contradiction in his own mind. And he demands that they stop, and he runs to the fire and starts trying to pull the books out of the fire. On the night of the senior prom, all the kids are inside the local hall, dancing, and he’s outside with his wife, pouting at his loss. And suddenly something overcomes both of them. They begin to dance together in the parking lot, realizing that, perhaps there is more to life than they thought.

“For creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord, but because of the one who subjected it.”

Last night at the Confirmation, I asked the three young people, all teenagers, who were about to be confirmed, when they were little and people said to them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One of them said a police officer, one of them said a lawyer, and one said a veterinarian. In one way, things don’t change much from generation to generation. But then I asked the congregation the same question I am going to ask you. How many of you had a fantasy about what you wanted to be when you grew up? Put your hands up. Nice and high so I can see them. Good. Now leave your hands up alright. Now, anybody who wound up not pursuing that fantasy, put your hands down. Aha! Hardly anybody in the congregation wound up being what they imagined they’d be when they were growing up. And why does that happen?  Because our plans change or are changed for us. Lack of money to go to the college we wanted to go to. A sudden death in the family that changes both our social and our financial situation. Hanging out with a different crowd of people who turn our heads in a different direction. Meeting a teacher who inspires us in some way. Winding up moving from one place to another and losing track of things. But we wind up doing something. And the something that we do might be something that we choose, or it might be something thrust on us.

How many of you have ever been to St. Patrick’s Cathedral? Put up your hands. So, almost everybody. St. Patrick’s Cathedral began construction around 1838. There was an old Catholic church there that had been foreclosed upon by the bank and abandoned. And Archbishop John Hughes - they used to call him Dagger John because he was so tough to deal with - Archbishop Hughes bought the property. And then he got thirteen very wealthy New Yorkers, some of them non-Catholic, each to contribute ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars in 1838 was a huge amount of money. With that money they laid the foundation of the Cathedral. From that point on, the Cathedral was built, they used to say, with the pennies of the poor. All the Irish immigrants chipping in a penny or two each week from their meager paychecks.

Construction stopped for a little while during the Civil War. But the building wasn’t completed until the mid-eighties of the nineteenth century - after this parish began. Now, it’s a national landmark. At the time it opened, it got rave reviews from architectural journals and from the popular press. And it’s a beautiful building. Perhaps the most beautiful building in New York City. And, for a little while, it was the tallest building in New York City - for just about a year - and then someone built something that was taller. 

It was 23 years ago, this weekend, that I became your Pastor. I believe that particular year, this was the first of July, this Sunday. I know that many of you got a letter from me sometime during the last week, but those who aren't on our mailing list probably did not. So, I reprinted the letter on the back of this week's bulletin because, starting this weekend, I begin my last year as your Pastor. The Archdiocesan regulations for administrators is that no one may serve as an administrator after he turns eighty, and I will turn eighty sometime next spring.

But I've known more of the pastor's here than not. I remember all the way back to Fr. William Cassidy. Us kids called him “Hop-a-Long.” And after him, came E. Harold Smith. An interesting thing about E. Harold Smith is he had no car. Up here in the boondocks. And the man who had the gas station catty-corner across the street, who at that time was Roosa, used to drive Father Smith around everywhere. And, when Fr. Smith left here as pastor, he got out of a cab in front of my church in the city to be my pastor there. And he is the one who signed the papers for my entering the Seminary.

About two years ago, there was a viciously anti-Catholic cartoon among my favorite cartoons in the Times Herald-Record. And, for two years, I refused to read that cartoon, I was so angry. But now I'm reading it again because it really is a funny cartoon. Way back in the late 1970s or early ‘80s, when I was working in the Chancery office - it was probably right after the stonewall incident or maybe at the beginning of the terrible HIV crisis - I was walking along Fifth Avenue passing store windows and a very flamboyant gay person walked up to me and spit in my face. I took out my handkerchief and wiped off my face, and as soon as I got to where I was going, I went to the men’s room and vigorously scrubbed my face. In one parish where I worked, we had a small village, like the village of Wurtsboro, with just a mayor and two trustees. It was a very interesting village because it was very old, and the sidewalks were very high. They were created so that people stepping out of a carriage could step right onto the sidewalk without having to step up. And then, underneath that sidewalk, there was another sidewalk that jutted out into the street, and that’s where the carriage wheels would edge along. So, if you stepped off the curb, you had to be very mindful of that second curb. Well, one night I missed it, turned my heel, and broke my ankle. And, because the sidewalks had been there for 150 years and there was no marking to warn anyone there was a danger, I wanted to sue the village. Well, one afternoon the doorbell rang, and one of our parishioners, who happened to be the only and the very first Catholic trustee ever elected to office in that village, came to me and said, “I've been sent to tell you, Father, if you try to sue the village, we've noticed a couple of cracks in the church’s sidewalk and we will make the church tear up all the sidewalk on both of the streets that it owns.” We never think that we are the victims of prejudice or persecution, but sometimes we are.

“They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.” A little unseasonable, but I think you’ll see the point. Janis Ian had a surprise hit in the 1970’s with the line, “Valentines that never came, and those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball.” All of us have felt the sting of exclusion at some point in ourr lives. Being rejected because of what we were or what we were not. Put on the sidelines. Ignored. But we got over it and moved on. Nevertheless, it continued to rankle for months or perhaps years afterward.

So then why, literally in the name of God, does Jesus practice exclusionism in today’s gospel? He says to his apostles, “Go only, only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Don't go into Pagan territory. Don’t even go into Samaria where those heretic Jews live.” Why would He do that? 

The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ means three things at once. It is, obviously, the celebration of our Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. It is also a celebration of the physical life of the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. And it is also a celebration of all of us, the mystical Body of Christ – He, our head, we, His members.

I asked you to listen for the questions in each reading. And I said that the first reading, from the book of Deuteronomy, had a virtual question. Because it's Moses speaking, and because this is the book of Deuteronomy, which is about law, we hear this sentence as a harsh rebuke. “Remember how, for 40 years now, the Lord your God has directed all your journey through the desert. Remember that!” But there are no punctuations in ancient languages. Suppose this were a question instead of a command. “Remember? How, for 40 years, your God protected you in the desert?” Very different meaning, isn’t it?

The choir didn’t know it, but they committed a heresy when they were singing the Alleluia. The heresy is right here in the book. It says, “Glory to the Father, [comma] the Son and the Holy Spirit.” That’s an ancient heresy called modalism. You cannot use a comma between the Father and the Son. You must use the word and. You say to yourself, well po-tay-to, po-tah-to, who cares?

Well, apparently, a long time ago somebody did care, and they pointed out that it seems to suggest that there’s only one God, but he changes form from time to time from being a Father to being the Son to being the Holy Spirit. That’s not what our doctrine is. Which just indicates how difficult it is to understand the Blessed Trinity. Well, of course it’s hard to understand. It’s a mystery.