Sunday Homilies

2025 Apr 6 SUN: FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT Is 43: 16-21/ Ps 126: 1-2. 2-3. 4-5. 6 (3)/ Phil 3: 8-14/ Jn 8: 1-11 Last week I spoke of the Easter Triduum and specifically the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper. That will be 7 p.m. Thursday, April 17th right here.  I mentioned foot washing and, along with the sign-up for the chicken dinner, I have a sign-up for people who will commit to having their feet washed at that Holy Thursday Mass. So I hope you will sign up. I think I had, last time I looked, I had four out of the twelve. So please give that careful consideration.  I have something rather disturbing to talk about first of all. I, just yesterday, I read about a priest in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas who was shot to death on Thursday. He was from India and specifically the Diocese of Cuddapah. Now just in the past couple of weeks I have been in touch with another priest of the Diocese of Cuddapah, one who works in South Carolina, because the Diocese of Cuddapah is to be the recipient of our offe

2025 Mar 30 SUN: FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT Jos 5: 9a. 10-12/ Ps 34: 2-3. 4-5. 6-7 (9a) / 2 Cor 5: 17-21/ Lk 15: 1-3. 11-32 Well, we are coming close to the celebration of Holy Week and the Easter Triduum. And I ask you especially to keep Holy Thursday in mind. We'll have the Mass of the Lord's Supper here Thursday, April 17th at 7 p.m. And you know that there is an element of Holy Thursday which is very, very dear to the heart of Pope Francis. And obviously he is not going to be doing this himself this year. But we need to do it, all the while praying for his good health and his recovery. It's the washing of feet. And you know that Pope Francis has gone to various places in Rome on Holy Thursday to perform the foot washing. And very often he goes to prisons when he washes the feet of men and women alike. And many of the people are not Catholic or Christian. But he has gone and he has performed this singular demonstration of service as a prelude to his ultimate service of offering himself on the altar of the cross

2025 Mar 23 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT Ex 3: 1-8a. 13-15/ Ps 103: 1-2. 3-4. 6-7. 8. 11 (8a)/ 1 Cor 10: 1-6. 10-12/ Lk 13: 1-9 It is good to learn that Pope Francis has been released from the hospital. He was going to do -- so this would have been almost four hours ago, a noon praying of the Angelus that is a Sunday noon day custom, there in Rome. And following that he was going back to his home in the Casa Santa Marta. And the doctors say that he will need at least two months of recuperation. It's remarkable that the doctors also said he's been a very good patient. Well, I hope so. [Laughter] But, you know, we're talking about repentance today, and from what I can tell, Pope Francis has this deep, deep urge to be active. And when you have that attitude, it is a hard thing to acknowledge your limits. And you've probably heard this more than once from me that word "limits" is a very big word in my own spirituality. Because I remember that I am God's creature. I am necessarily limited. I am not the one God who is

2025 Mar 16 SUN: SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT Gn 15: 5-12. 17-18/ Ps 27: 1. 7-8. 8-9. 13-14/ Phil 3: 17 -- 4: 1 or 3: 20 -- 4: 1/ Lk 9: 28b-36 My brother had a friend when we were growing up, and my brother passed along to me some of the things that he heard from this friend about their family.  So apparently it was kind of a ritual with them: that they would start on a vacation getting into the car and driving and their dad was driving. He would at some predictable point exclaim, "Isn't this great, kids?"  The kids did not know what was so great. I'm sure that the dad was enjoying the fact that he was not at work and he was looking forward to some time where he could just be present. And really I think that's what he was expressing. Just being present to the moment. But his kids thought it was funny.  St. Paul says to us today, "Our citizenship is in heaven." And we in fact can be aware of heaven in our midst. The more that we are just present to a moment of relaxation and rest and contemplation, we can be filled w

2025 Mar 9 SUN: FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT Dt 26: 4-10/ Ps 91: 1-2. 10-11. 12-13. 14-15/ Rom 10: 8-13/ Lk 4: 1-13 Our Scriptures begin today with an account from Deuteronomy of some of the history of God's chosen people. It refers to slavery and liberation. We move on to St. Paul, and he is telling us that the gifts of salvation and liberation, which come from our God, are not exclusive. He says that everyone, whether Jew or Greek, calling upon the name of the Lord Jesus, will enter into salvation and a great sense of peace in the presence of God. And we see through the Gospel that Jesus has embraced our difficulties to the ultimate degree because he has been subject to temptation. Now as we mentioned at the beginning [of Mass], we might say, well of course he resisted temptation because Jesus is God. Well, we have to understand that Jesus really did embrace our human nature, and as Paul says in Philippians chapter 2, he emptied himself. He did not cling to his identity as the Son of God. He entered into our miseri

2025 Mar 2 SUN: EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Sir 27: 4-7/ Ps 92: 2-3. 13-14. 15-16/ 1 Cor 15: 54-58/ Lk 6: 39-45 Have you ever heard this expression: "Just sayin'"? I hear that and this is how I translate it. "I'm going to pass along some information to you and it may be distasteful to you, but I am distancing myself from it. Please don't hit me." That's how I feel about that statement. And it certainly goes against the idea which we hear very clearly from the book of Sirach and from the gospel today, that every one of us is responsible for the words we say. There's another example. In the online world, there is a lot of reposting that goes on, reposting done by people who don't even know for sure if the original post is true. So we have to consider how we take responsibility for what we say. And as Jesus tells us, it comes from what is stored in our heart. And he gives us another image of a good tree bearing good fruit. We have to ask ourselves, "What is my participation in my social situations doing? Is i

2025 Feb 23 SUN: SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Sm 26: 2. 7-9. 12-13. 22-23/ Ps 103: 1-2. 3-4. 8. 10. 12-13 (8a)/ 1 Cor 15: 45-49/ Lk 6: 27-38 HOMILIST'S NOTE: I ran afoul of Pope Francis's directive from his general audience of December 4, 2024, when he said that a homily should be in the six-to-eight-minute range.  This one ran over 12 minutes. We all know that at every weekend Mass following the Profession of Faith, we have a prayer that goes by a lot of different names. You've heard it called the Prayers of the Faithful. It's also called the Universal Prayer. If you go to other English-speaking countries, you may hear it called the Bidding Prayers. My favorite term for it is the General Intercessions. Now for some months I have been writing the general intercessions and I believe in keeping them concise and for the lector who has those prayers, I want to make sure it's on just one sheet of paper, one side of the one sheet of paper. And in fact when I'm keeping it concise, I'm able to present it in a pr

2025 Feb 16 SUN: SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Jer 17: 5-8/ Ps 1: 1-2. 3. 4. 6 (40: 5a)/ 1 Cor 15: 12. 16-20/ Lk 6: 17. 20-26 We know that in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount gives us eight or maybe nine depending on how you count them, eight or nine beatitudes. They are promises that people are going to be happy in unexpected ways. We remember the first one, "Blest are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God."  Well, we turn to Luke's Gospel and this is called the Sermon on the Plain. It says there that they're on a level stretch of ground. And it's interesting that Luke has Jesus proclaiming four beatitudes and four woes. And you know I've been in the habit recently of referring to people to whom I believe the woes reply -- [rather,] to whom the woes refer. But to some extent every one of us has sold out to one of these things that Jesus warns are woeful. We trust in wealth and we trust in not missing very many meals. And instead of developing a genuine sorrow

2025 Feb 9 SUN: FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Is 6: 1-2a. 3-8/ Ps 138: 1-2. 2-3. 4-5. 7-8 (1c)/ 1 Cor 15: 1-11/ Lk 5: 1-11 If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? You've heard that expression. And it seems that in our culture, the test of whether you are intelligent is whether you make a lot of money. Now, in fact, there are plenty of intelligent people in the world who go about their lives doing things for which money is not the main object. But what do we have today? We have some people who consider themselves very smart and who happen to be very rich, and who say, "It's my riches that prove to me and to you that I am the most intelligent and I will go about doing things from my mind alone." These people are so full of themselves that they allow no room for some other inspiration, perhaps the voice of God Himself. In contrast, as we turn to the Gospel here, we find Peter with his net empty. And obviously he identifies with his net, and he feels himself empty. And that is a good thing for him, because in hi

From time to time I have heard people speak of what is called an elevator speech. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. If you are in some sort of group that is sponsoring a cause of some kind, for instance, the elevator speech is the way you summarize and distill your message to such a brief amount of time that you can give this speech during a journey in an elevator. I don't think I've ever succeeded at this, mainly because the things that I care about I think require a lot of explanation. But it occurs to me that today's feast of the Presentation of the Lord gives us something close to an elevator speech about who Jesus is and what he came to do. So we have this remarkable Gospel, a moment when Mary and Joseph are bringing the child Jesus, when he is 40 days old, to the Temple in Jerusalem. And then we have the figure of Simeon. Simeon who has waited into old age so that he himself can gaze upon the consolation of Israel. He takes the infant Jesus in his arms, blessing God, and he offers a prayer whic

2025 Jan 26 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Neh 8: 2-4a. 5-6. 8-10/ Ps 19: 8. 9. 10. 15/ 1 Cor 12: 12-30/ Lk 1: 1-4; 4: 14-21 (I added 4: 22-30, which would have been heard next Sunday, were it not for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.)   It happens that we have some really wonderful Scriptures prepared for us here in the early Sundays of Ordinary Time. One difficulty, however, is that a week from today we will be celebrating the feast of the Presentation of the Lord and some really good Ordinary Time readings are going to be skipped. So I commend to you the reading on your own of First Corinthians 13. This follows on what we've heard -- this really utterly understandable analogy of the body which St. Paul has given us. It goes on to say that, yes, we have many gifts but without love our gifts are nothing. And if you were following along there in Breaking Bread you noticed that the gospel went a little long because I included the Gospel which we would have heard next Sunday, had there not been the

2025 Jan 19 SUN: SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Is 62: 1-5/ Ps 96: 1-2. 2-3. 7-8. 9-10 (3)/ 1 Cor 12: 4-11/ Jn 2: 1-11 We are getting started on a course we will pursue during this entire year, and that is we are getting started on Ordinary Time, which is actually a favorite time of mine because we hear the Scriptures in a continuous fashion. Now during this year of Ordinary Time, we will be reading primarily from the Gospel of Luke. But we haven't heard from Luke yet today because we have some business yet from the Christmas season. Two weeks ago we celebrated Epiphany, which means manifestation. And associated with Epiphany are three events by which Jesus manifested himself to all of the human family. First of all, the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus. And then what we celebrated a week ago, Jesus' baptism by which he expressed solidarity with all human beings. And then finally, as John calls it, the first of his signs, the changing of water into wine at this wedding. So these are ways in which Jesus m

2025 Jan 12 SUN: BAPTISM OF THE LORD F Is 40: 1-5. 9-11/ Ps 104: 1b-2. 3-4. 24-25. 27-28. 29-30 (1)/ Ti 2: 11-14; 3: 4-7/ Lk 3: 15-16. 21-22 We have had an interesting few days. We received more snow than we're used to. And from my point of view, it's a hardship. It's tough to get around. Of course, we can think of the inconvenience of the snow and realize that there is no comparison with what people are undergoing with these fires in the Los Angeles area. We know that real hardship is common to the human family generally.  Today we are completing the season of Christmas. And this is a time for merriment. But I believe that as year after year gets added to our ages, we are all the more aware that even merriment does not do away with hardship. And we want to make sure that our hearts are united with those who are suffering for any reason, whatever. And of course, that leads us to prayer. And we can all increase both the time we spend in prayer and its intensity. We see very, very clearly how much we need thos

2025 Jan 5 SUN: EPIPHANY OF THE LORD S Is 60: 1-6/ Ps 72: 1-2. 7-8. 10-11. 12-13/ Eph 3: 2-3a. 5-6/ Mt 2: 1-12 I want to start by looking at two words. It seems to me that more recently there has been some confusion between these two words, and I think it is helpful for all of us to maintain a distinction between them. The words are epiphany and insight. Very often, and I believe this is the source of confusion, you will hear people say from time to time, "Oh, I've just had an epiphany." Well, I think they're really talking about an insight, and I want to explain the distinction that I see. As we said at the beginning of Mass, epiphany means manifestation. It means something external that people can see. An insight, however, is something that goes on within us when we are looking at what appears to be the same reality we've always known, but somehow we see something quite different about it. And that is a change within ourselves. I think that insight is really the proper word for that concept. And in the Word

2024 Dec 29 SUN: HOLY FAMILY F 1 Sm 1: 20-22. 24-28 or Sir 3: 2-6. 12-14/ Ps 84: 2-3. 5-6. 9-10/ 1 Jn 3: 1-2. 21-24 or Col 3: 12-21/ Lk 2: 41-52 I find that these readings today can be summed up by quoting another reading, not found among these. I'm thinking of a verse in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 6, in which he says, "You are not your own. You have been purchased and at a price." Paul is referring to the mystery of Jesus' death and resurrection, by which all of us have become new people who absolutely belong to God.  We turn to these readings and it seems as if they are saying, "Your children are not your own." There is a universal tension behind these words. They are felt in every family, these tensions. Because we know what the normal response of parents is to their children. They want to exercise some sort of control over them. At the very least, even though they won't say this outright, parents will be hoping that their children will not repeat their own mistakes. They may be ho

2024 Dec 22 SUN: FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT (O Rex Gentium) Mi 5: 1-4a/ Ps 80: 2-3. 15-16. 18-19 (4)/ Heb 10: 5-10/ Lk 1: 39-45 You know that for several weeks we have been looking at Scriptures which have to do with what are called the last things. Again, that technical word is eschatology. We've been thinking about the fact that people find something quite emotional in a concept called the end of the world. And we learn to understand that what people call the end of the world is simply the beginning of eternity. And therefore we take comfort in all the things that we are hearing, especially about the definitive, glorious coming of the Son of God when God brings all things to completion and perfection. And we read from the prophet Micah a mention of a place called Bethlehem. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bethlehem is noted as the place of the birth of Jesus. And remember that Bethlehem is associated with King David -- that he came from that area. And remember that the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew

2024 Dec 15 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT Zep 3: 14-18a/ Is 12: 2-3. 4. 5-6 (6)/ Phil 4: 4-7/ Lk 3: 10-18 Very quickly, I want to let you know that we have a number of people who are coming forward and seeking to enter the Catholic Christian way of life, and therefore we are planning to reform our team for what we properly call the Order of Christian initiation of adults, the OCIA. You'll remember it used to be called the RCIA for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but now we're told that Order is the proper word rather than Rite. So we'll be making plans to come together after the first of the year, so you have time to consider whether you might want to participate in the process of bringing people into the Catholic Christian faith. Obviously, today the theme is joy, and we hear this very clearly from St. Paul. We also hear it from the prophet Zephaniah. He wrote a very brief book of about three chapters. It is surprising that he ends up talking about joy, because Zephaniah is also the source of a hym

2024 Dec 8 SUN: SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT Bar 5: 1-9/ Ps 126: 1-2. 2-3. 4-5. 6 (3)/ Phil 1: 4-6. 8-11/ Lk 3: 1-6   I imagine that many of us, when we're trying to read the Bible, find a particular frustration in that we would like for the Bible to be sort of like journalism or a history book that mentions dates. We want to know when certain events happened. And the Bible is not good about that. These [issues] are not a priority.  We do, however, have today the Gospel of Luke. It is using a lot of different data points to fix a particular event in history. And essentially to say that this event is for the sake of rewriting all of human history. Luke does this in the beginning of chapter two. We always hear at the Christmas Mass during the night about the first census of the Roman Empire and the fact that Jesus was born during that time. Luke then turns to a much more recent event, and he has a lot more data points. So we hear about who the emperor was and who the empire's governor was and various kings and high

2024 Dec 1 SUN: FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT Jer 33: 14-16/ Ps 25: 4-5. 8-9. 10. 14 (1b)/ 1 Thes 3: 12 -- 4: 2/ Lk 21: 25-28. 34-36 I have been thinking about how the events of our life present a variety of contrasts. Things we may desire, things we may not desire so much. Yesterday I have to say I was not happy to see the snow come, Although I know that many people like to see the snow. For me it's one more thing to get through and try to live with.  On the other hand, my nephew scored three touchdowns yesterday. So this is how we all experience life. It's a series of things. And I think especially the good things just take us by surprise. And we understand that we do not have to be the ones who die of fright, as Jesus says in the Gospel today. In fact all the Scriptures today are very encouraging. We have the promise from Jeremiah. This is really a promise and a prophecy related to Jesus. The last shoot shall come to establish justice.  And likewise St. Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians that they can look fo

2024 Nov 24 SUN: CHRIST THE KING S (Thirty-fourth and Last Sunday in Ordinary Time) Dn 7: 13-14/ Ps 93: 1. 1-2. 5 (1a)/ Rv 1: 5-8/ Jn 18: 33b-37 This Gospel is a part of the passion according to John, which we read every year on Good Friday. And we need to take note of the overriding quality of that we find here. And that quality is the fact that Jesus is presented to us as someone who, though about to be condemned to death, is in fact in charge of the situation. Pilate is troubled, even though he goes ahead and condemns this man to death. He really doesn't know what is going on. And he is in fact just caught up in events which seem to be of his making because he makes that decision to have Jesus crucified. We heard at the end of this passage Jesus' words, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And we may remember that immediately after Jesus makes this statement, Pilate asks, "What is truth?" He is not asking as a sincere seeker. He is asking as a cynic. Because Pilate gave up his search fo