I’m sure that many of you, who have a profession, are expected to keep abreast of the latest developments in your field of activity. As a matter of fact, some of you probably have to be recertified every so many years to prove that you’re staying on top of the latest information.

Well, priests are expected to keep studying all during their lives. And so, I try to buy and read a couple of books about various areas in theology every year. I bought one recently, and I just threw it away, because I got to the part in the book where the person was going to prove how Jesus was not divine, but that the church made him divine later on. And I wasn’t surprised to find that, because it’s an ancient heresy that comes up every now and then in different guises.

Before I tossed the book, I have to tell you, his opening chapter was really great. Because it talked about his growing up in a little Midwestern town, where everybody in the town was either Catholic or Lutheran. So, no matter which church you went to, you had the same presuppositions about God, about Jesus, and about the Christian life. And, basically, he said the supposition by which all the adults and children ran their lives was that you try to be good here in order to go someplace else later on. And you can see that in our old Baltimore Catechism. Those of you who are at least in your mid 60s will remember the second question in the catechism. “Why did God make me?” “God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world, in order to be happy with Him in the next.”

So, what do you think? Did Simon Peter accept the “hard saying” or not? Notice that the dialogue is not about what Jesus taught, but who Jesus is. “Do you also want to leave?” “To whom shall we go?” “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And so, maybe, Peter found the saying just as hard as everyone else did. And maybe he stayed for another reason, and not because he accepted the hard saying.

Most scripture scholars believe that the writer of John’s gospel had access to probably both the gospels of Matthew and the gospel of Luke. That would seem a natural thing to us, but to the ancients it would not have been. First of all, in the first seventy years of Christianity, the Christian settlements around the Mediterranean basin were far separated from each other. And although the Roman roads were good, and there was access to the sea lanes, it was hard to get information from one place to another, and it took a long time. Secondly, writing was expensive and rare. And so, for a community to have a complete copy of one of the gospels, would have been a treasure. And so, if John had access to Matthew and Luke, that would have been a wonderful thing. And the reason why they think he did is because it looks, to most people, when they take each gospel as a whole, that John is responding to some of the great stories in Matthew and Luke, and turning those stories to his own purposes, to say something new, to say something different, to a different audience.

In a religious education class, the teacher asked the class, “What do you think we mean by Mary’s Assumption?” One little child raised her hand and said, “I think it means that she was so holy, we simply assume that she went to heaven.” And that little kid spoke more truthfully and at a deeper level than we can possibly imagine. So, what is the Feast of the Assumption?

In the Latin language, one of the simplest words, just like in any other language, is the word Am, Is, and Are. ‘I am’ is simply sum. If you add ad to it, you get ad sum. The old ritual for ordination to the priesthood required that when the role was called with the names of the candidates to be ordained, each one would stand and say, “Ad sum.” When we translate it into English, the way I was ordained, it loses something when you say, “Present,” because it means something more than simply ‘present.’ It’s ‘Here I am, ready willing, and able,’ all summed up in that one word – Ad sum.

And so the word drifts into the story, at the end of Mary’s life. As though we imagine her stand before the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit saying, “Here I am. Here I am.” A cry of joy and victory.

The Righteous Brothers had a huge number one hit in 1965 called “You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” So big was the song itself, that it was recorded again only four years later by Dionne Warwick, and she brought it to number 14, and Elvis used it quite frequently in his touring. So I’m going to recite the very last verse and leave out the last line. I want to see if you can fill in the last line.

“Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, whoa, that loving feelin’. Bring back that lovin’ feeling, cause it’s gone, gone, gone.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“Nope.” Nice try. Only the last time in the song.

“…cause it’s gone, gone, gone. And I can’t go on … whoa, whoa, whoa.“ There’s the “whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“And I can’t go on.”

We may say that that’s a little melodramatic for the breakup of a teenage love affair, but nevertheless, it’s true to life. And it gives us a window through which to observe our first reading.

The 1950s was the era of the big sprawling western. The biggest thing about them was they were almost all in Technicolor, and they were shot in the great outdoors. They were great to look at, but sometimes the plots left something to be desired. There was a movie called “Pony Soldiers” (and it was called “Pony Soldiers” because the Canadian Mounted Police, just like much of the United States cavalry, rode on ponies rather than horses because they were lighter). But this particular story takes place in Canada. Sitting Bull, trying to escape from the US cavalry, after the battle of the Little Big Horn - and this is a fact of history - crossed the border into Canada because the United States and Canada did not have reciprocal treaties. So United States troops could not pursue him into Canada. And he tried to make a home for his people among the Western Cree Indians in Canada. And everything was hunky-dory until the Canadian government decided they didn’t want Sitting Bull there, and then things went south rather quickly.

That’s the basic historical fact behind the story, but the story is ridiculous. Somehow or other, some Canadian mounted officer makes friends with the Indians, and they’re going to go to war over this whole thing, and he convinces them that they should wait. And then a wonderful sign appears in the sky - it’s a paddle wheeler. And the plot wants us to believe that Indians are so stupid that they’ve never seen a mirage; only white people know what a mirage is. And this mirage, supposedly, is a steamship that’s on a river hundreds of miles away. It’s impossible that this phenomenon should’ve taken place in the sky, but the white man says to the Indian, “See this is the sign from the great mother in England that you shouldn’t go to war.” And the Indians all lay down their weapons and say, “Okay, we won’t go to war because…” It’s kind of silly.