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.