When I was 16 years old and a senior in high school, one of my classmates died. Our school didn’t have much in the way of a science program. In senior year you got to pick between physics and chemistry. And, apparently, my classmate, who sat next to me in several of my classes, was a science buff, and set up his own little chemistry lab in the basement of his parents’ home. And, on a Friday afternoon, after he got home from school and his parents were out, he was tinkering with something in the basement and accidentally created a noxious gas. Recognizing that he was in trouble, he lurched toward the basement window to open the window and didn’t get there in time. His parents found him dead in the basement when they got home. At least that’s the story we were told. Now, as an older man, I’m more cynical. I think perhaps my classmate may have taken his own life deliberately.

Nonetheless, we did not find out until Monday morning, when the principal made the announcements over the loudspeaker. And then we were expected to get on with our day. You know, most of us growing up in those big Catholic households in the 1950s and 60s were no stranger to wakes. But death happened to old people. And we couldn’t wrap our minds around it. The next morning, one of our teachers, a nice young Jesuit - probably a kid himself, 22 years old maybe, just out of college and one year of novitiate before going out to teach – sat down at his teacher’s desk and talked to us, in that intellectual way Jesuits have, about how to respond to this tragedy and what we should think as Catholic young men. And I sat there hating him. Absolutely despising him. Because me and my friends could not deal with this loss, and there he was, blathering on about stuff in Catholic religion. And, to the end of my graduation year, I still hated that poor young Jesuit, who thought he was doing the right thing. I was just too young to understand.

Those of you who are at least 60 years old remember a time in Catholicism when we did some things that we don’t do now and didn’t do some things that we do do now. But, if you remember having conversations with your parents and grandparents, they would have told you that there’s some stuff we do as Catholics now that they didn’t do when they were growing up and some stuff that we don’t do now that they did do when they were growing up. And so, it’s fair to say that, when our children and grandchildren are our age, they will be able to say the same thing. There are things that we do as Catholics now that we didn’t do back then and things we don’t do anymore that we used to do back then. The church has allowed itself to obtain the image of being rigid and unchangeable. The fact is that the church is always in the process of changing. It is an evolutionary change in the sense that each new idea or movement grows organically out of some thing or some doctrine in the church’s past. So there’s never a time when there’s a complete and irrevocable break from one thing to the other.

That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to the issue that sent Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem to see the apostles and to the solution the apostles came up with. The issue was circumcision. Not much of a deal for us, but for the Jews of Jesus time it was a make-it-or-break-it deal. Circumcision existed among the Hebrews probably from before the time of Abraham, certainly since the time of the patriarchs. But it became a critical issue in their faith only about a hundred years before Jesus was born.

So, did you find what it was? The phrase was, “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” It appears twice in the Book of Revelation or the Book of Apocalypse, if you prefer. Once near the beginning, once near the end. And between those brackets comes a whole bunch of stuff that people are very confused about.

I don't know if you noticed, on the way into the parking lot, we have our flag at half-mast. The president requested that we do that to honor the million dead from Covid. I looked it up. That’s just under twice the number of people, Americans, who died in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. We lost just under 700,000 people in four wars. We lost over a million people to a disease that could have been handled better. The thing of it is that we are not grieving about all of this. Now, everybody knows those Kübler-Ross steps of grief. First comes the denial, then the anger and the bargaining, and then they enter into depression and then, at the other end, something called closure. We’re all stuck on go. We’re all still in denial about the extent of this tragedy. And, until we begin to grieve, we will not be able to move forward.

How can you tell that there’s a gang of really faithful Catholics here? No one’s sitting in the front. I often dreamt of building a church that had only one pew, then one day I found one. I was visiting a Byzantine rite church in Ulster County. The church is built as a circle and there were benches all around three-quarters of the walls, and the last quarter of the wall was where the altar was hidden behind an iconostasis. But everybody got to sit up front and in the back at the same time.

1959 was a banner year for an otherwise obscure country western singer named Stonewall Jackson, named after the great Confederate general. At the beginning of the year he had a number one hit called “The Battle of New Orleans,” but later on in the year he made it into the top five, which means he sold several million copies of a song called “Waterloo.” And, if you remember the song, as maybe two or three people in the congregation might, the first verse went like this.

So, I asked you, before the first reading, “Do you love God?” It’s a difficult question because we can’t see or feel or touch God. He’s an intellectual concept. How do we love an intellectual concept? Even if we talk about loving Jesus, the stories we know about Jesus took place 2,000 years ago. And we’re told that He’s with us in the Church and in the Eucharist but, aside from that little piece of bread, we can’t see Him or feel Him or touch Him, so it’s hard to love Him.

Today’s gospel provides one avenue through this puzzle. But, before we talk about it, we have to talk about today’s gospel. Because last Sunday, at the end of the gospel, John, the writer, told us that, “… there were many other things that were not written down in this book, but these are written so you may believe and, believing, have life in His name.” End of story! He just finished writing his gospel, then this morning we read the next chapter of the gospel. It’s got two endings. And the two endings are very different.