Nahum 2:1,3. 3:1-3,6-7 / Mt 16:24-28
The spectrum of differences within any random group of people is always very broad, not just in talent and appearance, but in the alacrity with which the various individuals connect maturely with life and find their own place. One need only scan a high school or college graduating class […]

Jer 31:31-34 / Mt 16:13-23
When it’s time to prepare a tax return or when the IRS shows up for an audit, there are very few people anywhere who fail to ask the question: “What’s the least that I can do and still stay out of trouble.” It’s a fair question in that circumstance, and […]

Jer 30:1-2,12-15,18-22 / Mt 14:22-36 or or Mt 15:1-2
There are times when our lives are coming apart at the seams and only the most extreme measures are sufficient to hold things together and get us through. The crisis may be a family matter, a financial issue, or something related to our careers. Whatever […]

Jer 28:1-17 / Mt 14:22-36
There are times when our lives are coming apart at the seams and only the most extreme measures are sufficient to hold things together and get us through. The crisis may be a family matter, a financial issue, or something related to our careers. Whatever the issue, there’s no […]

Is 55:1-3 / Rom 8:35, 37-39 / Mt 14:13-21
There was pastor who used his computer to create a personalized printed program for every Baptism. To make each one special, he’d use the computer’s “search & replace” function to find the name of the last baby baptized and then replace it with the next baby’s name.  […]

Jer 26:1-9 / Mt 13:54-58
It must have been fascinating to have been a neighbor or a relative of the Holy Family and to watch Jesus growing up from childhood through adolescence and finally into young adulthood. What was He like? St. Paul gives us an all-purpose answer: He was like us in […]

Jer 18:1-6 / Mt 13:47-53
Most of us have the habit of thinking too small.  Whether at home or at work, in friendships or in business, we miss too many possibilities and we expect too little. We end up making do with far less than we need to: We settle for moribund relationships, boring jobs, and […]

Jer 18:1-6 / Mt 13:47-53
Most of us have the habit of thinking too small. Whether at home or at work, in friendships or in business, we miss too many possibilities and we expect too little. We end up making do with far less than we need to: We settle for moribund relationships, boring jobs, and […]

Jer 15:10,16-21 / Mt 13:44-46
There is something intrinsically fascinating about heroes, geniuses and other people of extraordinary achievement, whatever their field of endeavor. Where did they get it? How did Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, and so many others develop such seeming ease at what they do? Dozens of studies confirm the same answer: Single-minded focus […]

Jer 13:1-11 / Mt 13:31-35
We take great pleasure in toting up lists of our assets and the other things we call “ours.”  But it’s all a fiction and a hallucination, because nothing is ever really ours. A mental stroll through the castles and palaces of Europe makes that abundantly clear. Here are the things that […]

I Kings 3:5, 7-12 / Rom 8:26-27 / Mt 13:24-43 or Mt 13:24-30
A man and his wife pulled into a gas station. As their tank was being filled, the attendant washed their windshield. But when he finished, the driver said, “It’s still dirty. Wash it again.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, searching for any bugs he […]

2 Cor 4:7-15 / Mt 20:20-28
A wise old Irish nun once quoted an old saying to me: “Pain is the price of consciousness.” How regularly that truth is evident in the life of St. Paul, who was painfully aware of his own feet of clay. As he says in today’s epistle, “We possess a treasure […]

Jer 2:1-3,7-8,12-13 / Mt 13:10-17
Today’s gospel doesn’t sound like Jesus. It sounds like the worst and most cynical aspects of a capitalist economy: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And it seems to have the Lord’s blessing!
That’s a misreading of the text! This gospel is a meditation on God’s kingdom, that […]

Jer 1:1,4-10 / Mt 13:1-9
Most of life’s tasks hit us in the face without warning and without preparation. I was never married before — what do I do? I was never a parent before, never a kid before, or a teacher before, or a pastor before, or old before! Why didn’t they give us a […]

Mi 6:1-4,6-8 / Mt 12:38-42
The Roman emperors heard and felt one constant pressure: “Give us bread and circuses!”  Political candidates hear the same chant, and too often they respond with panicky 30-second sound-bites, which mean nothing and add nothing to the large conversation that we’re supposed to be engaged in as a national family.
It was […]

Wis 12:13,16-19 / Rom 8:26-27 / Mt 13:24-30
When a boss is at a dead end with an employee, it can inspire some real eloquence. Here are a few samples of frustrated bosses’ evaluations of their less than competent employees:
1) This employee is a few fries short of a “Happy Meal.”
2) If he were any more […]

Is 38:1-6, 21-22 / Mt 12:1-8
One of the more desirable consequences of growing a little older is that at least some of us begin to develop a greater awareness of our own faults and limitations, and stop projecting them onto other people as often as we did in our youth. So when we hear in […]

Is 26:7-9, 12, 16-19 / Mt 11:28-30
We human beings have an uncanny knack for making simple things complicated. We go from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Hong Kong, we respond to simple questions with answers befitting a Philadelphia lawyer, and we stonewall a friend when a simple “I was wrong” would fix […]

Is 10:5-7, 13-16 / Mt 11:25-27
It’s something of a standing joke in our culture that some of the most learned professors and cleverest scientists are thoroughly incompetent at the most basic of tasks, like changing a tire or pumping their own gas. But the mismatch between general ability and the performance of ordinary tasks doesn’t […]

Is 7:1-9 / Mt 11:20-24
By the very nature of the human condition, we get caught up in the little stuff. Somebody has to pick up the dry cleaning, pay the light bill, fill the car with gas, and carry out the trash.  Those things don’t get done by themselves. As a result, we can get […]

Is 1:10-17 / Mt 10:34-11:1
When we think of Jesus, the images that usually come to mind are of a man of peace who brings healing and forgiveness to people, the man who saved the life of the woman caught in the act of adultery, and the man who raised dead people back to life.  So […]

Is 55:10-11 / Rom 8:18-23 / Mt 13:1-13
A bright little fifth-grader was doing an experiment on a grasshopper for his science project. He put the grasshopper on a table, leaned down till his face was just inches away, and shouted, “Jump!” The grasshopper leapt into the air. Then the boy carefully removed one of the […]

Hos 14:2-10 / Mt 10:16-23
Today’s gospel contains one of the most notoriously misused passages in all the Bible, and the chief culprits are the clergy. Jesus said, “Don’t worry about what you are going to say or how you will say it. When the hour comes it will be given to you.” It doesn’t take […]

Hos 11:1-4,8-9 / Mt 10:7-15
Some problems have no easy solutions, but that doesn’t stop the toughest of us from continuing to try, and try, and try again. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” And more often than not, persistence pays off.
But there are few problems that can be more intractable than matters […]

Hos 10:1-3, 7-8, 12 / Mt 10:1-7
For those of us who are reasonably conscientious and self-aware, the reality of our unfinishedness can sometimes be a heavy burden. It’s more than just our sins, which, like the poor, seem to be with us always. Sometimes it’s the lack of the wisdom that we feel we should […]

Hos 8:4-7, 11-13 / Mt 9:32-38
Good help is hard to find. It’s always been so, and we need only listen to our own conversations to verify it. In the course of any week, a lot of us will have rendered judgment on the inadequacies of gardeners, politicians, grocery store clerks, teachers, preachers, and host of […]

Hos 2:16-22 / Mt 9:18-26
Every one of us carries considerable baggage left over from earlier parts of our life’s journey.  And not only our bodies but our spirits bear many wounds, some self-inflicted, others the result of simple bad luck, and still others the intentional work of those who wish us no good.  These are […]

Amos 8:4-6, 9-12 / Mt 9:9-13
Self-knowledge is a hard-won treasure, and even the best of us are blind to much of what our friends see clearly. Too often we blithely give convoluted explanations of our actions and intentions which convince no one but ourselves. Fictions like “I was just resting my eyes during the third […]

Eph 2:19-22 / Jn 20:24-29
More than a century ago, Abraham Lincoln made the famous observation, “You can fool all of the people sometimes, and some of the people all the time, but you can never fool all the people all the time.” Quite so, yet a lot of our politicians keep trying!
For us, an important […]

Amos 5:14-15, 21-24 / Mt 8:28-34
In every generation, one of the most popular children’s games is Hide-And-Go-Seek. And, one of the more rotten things that children sometimes do in this game is to send their playmate off to hide and then not bother to look for him or her. Adults often do a variant of […]

Amos 3:1-8; 4:11-12 / Mt 8:23-27
Fear is the real Public Enemy Number One.  It’s what lurks behind every one of our sins.  Greed starts with the fear that I won’t have enough. Anger is rooted in the fear of losing something that is essential to me. Philandering draws its power from the fear that I […]

Am 2:6-10, 13-16 / Mt 8:18-22
Most people are fairly accomplished at the art of making excuses, no matter what the issue.  Indeed many of us got an early start with the dog eating our fictional homework or our little brother throwing that same fictional homework out the car window on the way to school.  Or […]

Acts 12:1-11/2 Tm 4:6-8, 17-18/Mt 16:13-19
A salesman rang the doorbell at a rather fine suburban home, and the door was answered by a nine-year-old boy who was puffing on a long black cigar!  Hiding his amazement, the salesman asked, “Is your mother home?”
The boy took the cigar out of his mouth, flicked the ash on […]

2 Kgs 25:1-12 / Mt 8:1-4
There’s an old saying, “Some folks never get the message.” There’s no doubting that it’s true, and it’s rarely more obvious than on those two Sunday mornings every year when the government announces that we must spring forward or fall back an hour. There’s always about five percent of the […]

2 Kgs 24:8-17 / Mt 7:21-29
Most of us were very young when we first heard the old adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And very probably most of us paid no attention to its wisdom at the time, because as children we’d been guests at an extended free lunch for as long […]

2 Kgs 22:8-13;23:1-3 / Mt 7:15-20
Forgetfulness is something we all have to struggle with.  As children, we start out by forgetting simple things like our times tables and our locker combination. Later we graduate to forgetting meetings, birthdays, anniversaries, and safe combinations. Eventually, of course, we enter that stage of life where “senior moments” become […]

Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist
Is 49:1-6/Acts 13:22-26/Lk 1:57-66, 80
A jetliner was roaring down the runway when, just before takeoff, the pilot reversed engines, slammed on the brakes, and taxied back to the gate. Then it just sat there for more than an hour before finally taking off. A nervous passenger asked the […]

2 Kgs 17:5-8, 13-15, 18 / Mt 7:1-5
Not so long ago, I found myself trapped in a long, unavoidable, and thoroughly inconsequential meeting, and the refrain of an old song began running through my mind: “Yakety yak, yakety yak”!
For most of our waking hours, we are surrounded by the insistent chatter of people trying to […]

Jer 20:10-13/Rom 5:12-15/Mt 10:26-33
Here’s an unusual prayer:
Dear Lord, I want to thank you for being with me so far today.  With your help, I haven’t been impatient, or lost my temper, or been mean, cantankerous, grumpy, or judgmental.  But now, Lord, I’m really going to need your help, because, in a just few minutes I’ll […]

2 Kgs 11:1-4, 9-18, 20 / Mt 6:19-23
There are very few of us who cannot see well enough to drive or read or watch TV.  We may have to wear glasses or even use magnifying glasses for close tasks, but almost all of us can see what we need to see in order to function […]

Sir 48:1-14 / Mt 6:7-15
Our ways of praying reveal so much about what we really think about God. As Jesus says in today’s gospel, many of us multiply words in prayer, as if we had to persuade God to do good things for us. Isn’t that astounding! The God who made us out of nothing, […]

2 Kgs 2:1,6-14  / Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
The perennial question asked of small children, and older ones as well, is “what do you want to be when you grow up?”  After a while kids develop stock answers for that, and college age folks learn how to fake it too as they’re trying to figure out the […]

1 Kings 21:17-29 / Mt 5:43-48
Every year without fail, there is heartbreaking news at almost every high school of any size: Some students have been killed in a tragic accident.  A glance backward at old high school yearbooks reconfirms such events in times gone by, and the newspapers announce that the pattern continues.  There’s a […]

1 Kgs 21:1-16 / Mt 5:38-42
Our access to the internet, cable TV, 24-hour-a-day news, and all sorts of print media has broadened our lives immensely and has expanded exponentially the boundaries of what seems possible. Indeed, we are more and more reluctant to use the word “impossible” for fear of seeming foolish. We […]

Ex 19:2-6a / Rom 5:6-11 / Mt 9:36-10:8
A little girl was saying her night prayers with her mom at her side. “God bless mommy and daddy and Nana. And please, God, don’t let Stevie shoot any more little birds with his BB gun. I like Stevie because he plays with me when nobody else will, […]

1 Kings 19:9,11-16 / Mt 5:27-32
It’s hard to imagine a worse nightmare than finding oneself in the middle of a vast desert with neither food nor water.  The hours pass and then the days, and we rapidly grow weaker and more desperate.  There seems no escape and the end seems very near.
Many of the greatest […]

1 Kings 18:41-46 / Mt 5:20-26
By the very nature of things, life is filled with conflicts. However charming and mellow the people we live with may be, we inevitably have differences of taste, preferences, interests, goals, visions,…and whatever. Because of that fundamental reality of the human condition, we have to become experts at the art […]

1 Kings 17:7-16 / Mt 5:13-16
Heroes energize us and draw us forward. Sports heroes regularly do what seems impossible — run the mile faster than ever, swim the channel in record time, sink the longest putt ever recorded. Entrepreneurial heroes put together deals that are beyond imagining, and suddenly, the high-rise rises, the dream […]

1 Kings 17:1-7 / Mt 5:1-12
“Desperation” has many meanings. It can mean, as in today’s Old Testament reading, that there’s a famine, no more food or water and we’re facing death. It can mean that we’ve just lost everything and have gone from rich to poor in a millisecond. It can mean that we’re guilty, […]

Hos 6:3-6 / Rom 4:18-25 / Mt 9:9-13
What an interesting dinner party that must have been at Matthew’s house, with Jesus and his host at the head of the table, the prim and proper Pharisees hovering on the side, a handful of Jesus’ disciples talking among themselves, and then, arriving late, a lurid array of […]