Homilies - Fr. Joe
The Last Piece
On the evening of October 31st about 9:00 o’clock after your children came home with full bags of candy, it might have been very easy for you to get a pretty good-sized piece of candy if you would have asked them. Ask them today—different story. What is it about the last pieces—whether it be the last piece of candy; the last piece of pie; the last dollar—whatever the last thing it is? There is something of value added even though it is not any different necessarily than all the others.More...
Power and Glory
Think for a moment of the most egotistical, self-centered, pompous, self-important, prideful, self-serving person that you have known in your life. (Just chose one. If they are sitting near you do not make eye contact.) What bugs us about these kinds of persons? Perhaps it’s that they are successful. It’s that mother who keeps on nagging the teacher to get a place for her kid in the play—gets it; that person at work, who keeps on groveling over the executives actually gets promoted. Or perhaps what bothers us is that when we see them, we see a little bit of ourselves. When we are around people like that, we become like them.More...
The Kingdom of God: A Relationship, Not a Possession
This past summer, the great University of California (somewhere north of here), released a study about the effects of wealth. Part of the study included a rigged game of Monopoly in which one of the players was given a disproportionate amount of money at the start of the game and every time he complete one round. The other player was given a much less amount initially and throughout the game. The second player was also given only one die. It was impossible for the second player to win and the whole point of the game was to see the effects of wealth.
In the beginning, these two players would joke around not taking the game seriously. As the game progressed, the researchers found that the richer player started to get a littler haughtier and his body language actually conveyed disdain. At certain points in the experiment words of disdain were exchanged from the richer player. More...
A Marriage Worth Dying For
There was a young boy who went to church for the first time with his mother. As they walked in, this little boy noticed a crucifix. He pointed to it and said, “Mommy, Mommy, who is that?” She turns to her son and she says, “Well, that is Jesus Christ.” He gasps and he says, “Mommy, you shouldn’t say that. We’re in church!”More...
Our Life: Scandal or Prophecy
When we get up to heaven, we might be surprised who is there and who is not. A similar question was posed to the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas: “Why are there people more virtuous than Christians?” And the short answer of his response: “To shame the Christians.” There are elements of truth that are outside the confines of the Catholic Church. Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II document we just studied, has a very important line in the 25th paragraph where it says: “The Church subsists in the Catholic Church”; meaning that there are elements of Christian truth not only in the Catholic Church.More...
The Antidote to Envy
I learn a lot about human nature by observing my nieces and nephews. I have observed that most of the time-outs originate from envy. Envy over who’s got the remote control, envy over how much longer a sibling has a shared toy. When all my nieces and nephews are gathered together, there are a whole lot of time-outs. The equation of envy is exponential with the number of kids.
How old is envy? The first three chapters of the book of Genesis provides the anthropological landscape of who we are. We see creation as made good by our God. We see that Adam and Eve are tempted by the nice things of the garden and are attracted to it for use for themselves. Envy and jealousy has been part of our human make up from the very beginning.More...
Who Do You Say that I Am?
Many people call my generation of Catholics “The John Paul II Generation” because I was born in his pontificate and really knew no other Pope until Pope Benedict. He was the first non-Italian Pope in 500 years. So this was kind of a big deal. So big that I even picked it up as a kindergartener—I think I mentioned that I dressed up like him as a kindergartener for Halloween—and look how I ended up. (So if your boys want to dress up like the Pope, let ‘em dress up like the Pope!)
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Spiritual Deafness: A Choice, Not a Condition
A story is told about a man, who increasingly had trouble hearing. So his wife and his kids and his grandkids started bugging him to get it checked out. He finally goes to his doctor who indeed finds some problems. After giving the man an ear piece, the doctor says he would be able to hear perfectly fine and that he should return in a couple weeks to make sure all things were checking out. So two weeks later, the man returns and the doctor says, “You know it must be great to finally be able to hear your wife and all your kids and grandkids.” “Well,” the man replies, “I actually have not told them yet. And I have changed my will three times after listening to my kids.”More...
To Whom Shall We Go?
The Real Presence, Really
At the great University of California at Berkeley (Go Bears!) there are a lot of different ways of thinking. It is Berkeley after all. As soon as my colleagues found out that I was Catholic, there were always inevitably several things that came up in conversation-the history of the Church, some of the Church's teachings, and inevitably a question about cannibalism. They would say, "You Catholics believe that you eat the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Do you not believe this?"More...
