“Why are you standing there?”

(Homily for September 20, 2026, the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The scripture readings are Isaiah 55:6-9, Psalm 145, Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a and Matthew 20:1-16a.)

This is a hard one.

I have a tendency to think like a lawyer; I can’t help it. When I read this parable, my tiny little lawyer brain wants to tip my cap to this owner, how he arranged it so everyone received what he was promised, even though some worked longer and harder than others did. Nobody can complain to the owner, “Hey, that guy got more than I did,” because nobody did get any more. Every worker got what he was promised, even though some of them thought they ought to get more. Knowing that Jesus intends this owner to represent God, it reminds me of a reading from Jeremiah we had on a Sunday in August this year: “You duped me, Lord.”  The people who worked the longest; that’s what they’re feeling: “You duped me!”

Even though nobody can complain that some other guy got more, the ones who worked longer still want to complain that they didn’t get treated fairly. They think they’ve been taken.

So maybe this is about love and justice. All the workers got justice, all the workers got love. But some of them felt like they didn’t get either. Why? Because they are thinking as human beings think, not how God thinks. The other readings today and the psalm lay it out: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” God is going to do things God’s way, not our way. Sometimes, God’s way will rattle us. This is one of those times. But the psalm assures us, “The LORD is good to all and compassionate.” St. Paul is constantly reminding us to love all others as Christ has loved us; his preaching just blew up the idea of ranking­ our fellow humans on a scale of value and worth.

Sister Joan Chittister says, “To follow Jesus is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even the religious world. Real discipleship is a tipsy arrangement at the very least. People with high need for approval, social status, and public respectability need not apply.” So if you want to be a disciple of Christ, you better not be attached to being right all the time, or to having all the answers, because God isn’t going to play by our rules, and if all we are trying to do is come out ahead, that is going to bother us, as it did these workers.

Sometimes, following Jesus is going to feel just great. And then it’s going to hurt sometimes. One day it’s going to feel just right, and then it is going to feel hopelessly confusing. If you’re trying to keep score like in a game, remember what happens at the end of a chess game – the kings and queens and the pawns all go in the same box. (The bishops too.)

Jesus’s point is that God is going to take care of all of us, and God is going to do that in God’s own way, not our way.  

Some people think we can earn our way into God’s graces, that we can compete with others for God’s love and attention. It’s almost natural. We live in a competitive environment. We are constantly checking ourselves to see how we are doing in relation to our neighbors. We want to quantify everything, reduce everything we can to metrics.

I read a little article last week, by a Jesuit, Kuruvilla Pandikattu, SJ, who wrote,

“We live in an age obsessed with metrics.  We measure productivity, health, sleep, steps, calories, creditworthiness, academic citations, institutional rankings, and social media influence. Even personal well-being is increasingly translated into dashboards.  The danger is that the same mentality enters religion. How holy am I? How much have I improved? How likely am I to qualify for heaven? Suddenly grace becomes measurable.”

Of course, he went on to say, But it’s not. God’s grace is not measurable. God’s love for us is immeasurable.

The saints, the closer they came to God, the less inclined they became to try to keep score and calculate their spiritual standing. Instead of building up confidence in themselves, the saints built up their confidence in God. Instead of building up a spiritual resume like a scorecard, people on the path to holiness trust God. What holy people care about is the response to make to God’s grace and goodness. Instead of laboring under the illusion that we can earn that goodness and grace, holy people respond with gratitude and trust and a desire to share God’s goodness with everybody.

The landowner asked the very last group of laborers he hires: “Why do you stand here idle all day?” The question is put to us: The saints among us do not stand there idle all day. They trust God to take care of us all and then ask how they can help. Pope Leo says we cannot be unengaged spectators amid the injustice, discrimination and violence in the world. There is work to be done.

Everyone in the story whom the owner called to work responded and did what the owner asked of him. There is work to be done, in our communities, our families, our lives, our relationships. Let’s pray that every one of us whom God calls will do what God asks of us, and that we will just trust God to handle the compensation. Because God will do that the way God wants to handle it, not the way we would. Let’s also pray that we will be okay with that.

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by bobslobig on September 20, 2026  •  Permalink
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Foreigners.

(Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 16, 2026. The readings are Isaiah 56:1-7, Psalm 67, Romans 11:13-15, 29-32, and Matthew 15:21-28.)

Foreigners. The prophet Isaiah warned about “foreigners” in the first reading.  But he wasn’t warning that the foreigners were a threat.  No, Isaiah warned the people that God would favor the foreigners who lived in accordance with God’s covenant.  Through the prophet, God declared, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”  The “foreigners” are not foreigners to God – God welcomed them into his house.  Jesus knew that verse from Isaiah and he remembered it well.  We know how much it mattered to him.   

Psalm 67 reinforces that.  Jesus probably knew that one too, and he probably sang some variation on “Oh God, let all the nations praise you,” the way we sang it today.    

In the second reading, Paul says he is speaking “to you Gentiles” – that’s the non-Jews, the “others”, the foreigners.  Like the passage from Isaiah, Paul recognizes that sometimes it’s those outlanders, not the privileged, chosen people, who can show us something about faith.  Their good example, he says, makes the Jews jealous, and draws them closer to God themselves.

And then in the gospel, we get exactly that:  Jesus gives a hard time to the Canaanite woman, because she is a foreigner.  Jesus teases the woman about not being from Israel, even though she has come to him worried for her sick child.  But by the end of the story he is praising this foreigner’s faith.  So does anybody see a pattern developing here? 

Jesus says some alarming things all through the gospels, but here he says something I found really alarming: Jesus kind of calls this woman a dog, and then he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  We don’t accept that.  We hold that Jesus was sent to us too.  Maybe Jesus did not remember what it was like to be the foreigner himself – he was a toddler when his family fled to Egypt.  But there he experienced being the one from another country. 

This week, I experienced being a foreigner.  I took a little vacation with friends and visited another country for the first time.  I was not born there and I had none of the rights of a citizen. Yet I was welcomed and well-treated.  Certainly, that was partly because I was an American tourist spending American money in the local economy.  But I don’t think that was the only reason. 

The guide who took us around the country spoke openly about the national attitude there. People  care about each other, and they take care of each other.   One big difference – and this really made me feel like a foreigner – was that tipping is not part of the culture, the way it is here.  Instead, the waiters and service providers are paid a living wage.  They don’t want to become dependent on tips, because then their employers could point to the tip income to justify paying the workers lower wages.  So they work happily without expecting tips.

They pay high taxes, higher than ours, and one thing that gets them is free health care.  Our guide’s granddaughter was born with a dangerous birth defect, and she needed a series of surgeries just to survive.  The little girl got them, and the family didn’t have to pay for them, and now she’s five years old, about to start kindergarten, healthy. 

The people of that little country pay a lot for cars and for food and many other things that have to be imported, but they have a nice, laid-back disposition. They recognize that everybody matters.  It was interesting to learn that the country does not have separation of church and state.  The people tend to be pretty casual about religion, but that sense of caring about each other had to come from somewhere. 

It’s Jesus-like to have that kind of care for other people.  That’s why it makes me uncomfortable to see Jesus resisting his chance to show his care for the Canaanite woman and to help her with her worry:  She has a sick child; she needs his help.  Eventually, he gives it to her.  I came up with two ways of looking at that, but they both made me uncomfortable.   

What sits better with you: that Jesus didn’t intend to help this woman, but he came around to the idea eventually, or that Jesus did intend to help her all along, but he had to give her a hard time about it first?  Which version of Jesus do we prefer to believe in?  They both bother me. How do we imitate him if we don’t understand what he’s doing?   The people we look up to show compassion without being reminded to do it, and they don’t give us a bad time about it either. 

I have a friend who’s like one of those versions.  He will give you the shirt off his back if you need it, but he’ll make sure to give you grief about it too.  He likes the attention.  Before now, I didn’t readily think of him as Jesus-like, but maybe he is.

I know people like the other version too.  Including me.  I say, “What was that now?  Was I supposed to be helping here?  Oh — I didn’t know this was my job. But okay, sure, show me what needs to be done and I’ll pitch in.”  Nice to know that side of me may be more Jesus-like than I was giving myself credit for.  

There is an easy message here: let’s be Jesus-like when we encounter a foreigner.  He listened to her; he learned what she needed; he gave it to her.  Even though he started out the encounter by giving her the runaround, she stayed with him, and he ended up complimenting her faith and encouraging her. Jesus got her what she needed.  He did not shut her out of what he had to share.   

I prepared some of this homily in a gate area in the international terminal at O’Hare, and obviously some on the way home.  I was surrounded by people speaking in other languages; people who looked different; people who experience this life differently.  Across from me sat a young family, a dad and a mom, a four-year-old and an infant.  The woman looked plain to me, not really noticeable, until she began to feed her baby.  Then she looked beautiful.  Her love for her child changed the way I saw her.    

In the gospel passage, the love of the mother for her troubled child made a difference to Jesus.  Maybe that is what changed the way he saw her.  For her, his healing of her child was a life-changing experience.  For Jesus, it’s something he did all the time.  You might even say it was like scraps from his table.  He let the encounter with her and her faith change him, and he became more Jesus-like.    

We experience encounters with foreigners, people who don’t look like us, don’t believe like us, don’t speak our language; people with whom we have a difficult time seeing what we have in common.  Do we give them a hard time, or does the foreigner show us something about faith, like this one did with Jesus?  Can we let these encounters change us, to become more Jesus-like ourselves? 

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by bobslobig on August 15, 2026  •  Permalink
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Grace Whiting

(This summer I was honored to preach at the funeral Mass for Grace Whiting. The readings that day were Revelation 21, 2 Cor. 5, and Matthew 5:1-12. Fr. Ed Fialkowski presided at the Mass and gave the homily, but he had me finish it.)

Fr. Ed’s homily introduced the three tables – the Eucharistic table, the first Church — in the home, and the table of evangelization (through hospitality).  He addressed the first two.

Dave, my friend, it is a new and different experience to see you sitting over here in the front row, because we could always count on finding you and Grace in that pew over on the east side of the church, near the pillar, at 9:30 Mass every week, and to see you happily walking home together, back to 750 Lathrop.  After we talked about how the White Sox were doing.

The White Sox have an influential fan at the Vatican, but now in Grace we have a Sox fan who can speak to God face to face.  The White Sox have memorialized section 140, row 19, seat 2 – that’s where the future pope sat during the 2005 World Series.  We ought to do something like that for Grace’s place in our parish, but come to think of it, the most fitting place to remember her is not your regular pew over there, but the kitchen at Fearon Hall.

Fr. Ed talked about the “first Church” of family life.  It was always God’s plan that we all grow closer to him and learn of his love for us first around that table of family life and family love. Katie and Julie get to remember Grace being in the kitchen and making God present at 750 Lathrop.   The rest of us remember how she served us at parish events for the last 40 years, working alongside her husband and best friend, and just personifying hospitality, preparing food, making sure we were well-fed and having a good time.  She made God’s love present in abundance.  She was a Polish mother and grandmother, so there was always enough food to render you unconscious and then leftovers to be packed so you could bring them home.  There were always lots of volunteers Grace recruited by making them included and inspired, never imposed-upon.  She brought those HR skills, the same people skills that led her to chair the Chamber of Commerce, 25 years ago.

That was how she made the love of God present to others, and she just loved doing it.  All three tables worked together; she became what she received. 

I only want to tell one good Grace Whiting story.  There are many, but this one is mine. Several years ago, when our two legacy parishes were merged into one, Grace and Dave did something essential to the success of the new parish, working tirelessly to plan and manage parish-wide events.  Grace and Dave did not see it as a merger but more like a marriage, two families blending together, and our new parish is better for it.  At one of the early parish-wide events, in the gym here, Grace did what Grace always did, serving up all kinds of good food, to people who were just getting to know each other as fellow parishioners.  As the event was beginning to wind down, I stood next to her as she began to break down the serving apparatus and gather the food, we both knew that the parish we now have, St. Luke and St. Bernardine, was something new that we wanted to succeed.  “You know what, Bob?” she said,  “These people from St. Bernardine really know how to party.”   

In the second reading today, from the Book of Revelation, St. John describes a vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.”  God was here with us when SLSB was a brand new parish and Grace was working tirelessly to make it a welcoming place.  God makes all things new, and this is the important part: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”   

In the gospel passage, Jesus tells us happiness is coming for those who mourn, for the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers.  Jesus doesn’t say there will be no sorrow or no grieving; what he says is that this is part of life and that we will be comforted. 

We’re already comforted, by each other and by the memories we share of Grace and the goodness she brought into our lives.  For Grace, life is not ended but fulfilled as she takes her well-deserved place in the Communion of Saints.  The Beatitudes and the book of Revelation speak with one reassuring voice: those who mourn will be comforted, and God will wipe away every tear.  It will be a new heaven, and it will be better than it was before, because Grace will be in the kitchen.    

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by bobslobig on August 10, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on August 10, 2026

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You Bet Your Life

(Homily for July 26, 2026, the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings were Wisdom 12:13, 16-19, Psalm 86, Romans 8:26-27 and Matthew 13:24-43.) 

Everybody knows about “the wisdom of Solomon.” Today’s first reading is all about what a wise choice Solomon made when God said he could ask for anything.  Solomon asked God for wisdom, for “an understanding heart.”  But if Solomon knew what to ask God for, wisdom, doesn’t that tell us that he already had wisdom?

This was no stupid-lucky longshot bet on his part; it was a serious and well-considered response to God’s offer. God liked that Solomon didn’t ask for unimaginative, selfish stuff: long life, riches, wins over enemies.  God rewarded Solomon for caring for the rest of the community, for the people entrusted to him, not just making himself rich or comfortable.  

That grabs me: Imagine God telling us, you can ask me for anything you want.  How many of us are going to ask for wisdom?   God gives us what we need, what God wants us to have, and sometimes God gives us what we ask for.  As an adult I’ve tried to be careful about what I’m asking God for, but now I’m trying to pay closer to attention to what God is giving me without me asking for it. 

Doesn’t gaining wisdom ordinarily come through a process, a process that takes time?  Did God give Solomon his wisdom all at once, or did God give it to him the way we all try to get it, by living through experiences and making mistakes?  Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment – Everybody knows that.

For the wisdom God gave to Solomon to be authentic, I think God gave Solomon wisdom by putting him through some stuff and letting him make some mistakes.  As Solomon grew through his experiences and learned from his mistakes, he learned to become confident in his relationship with God and able to dispense wisdom and justice to the people he served as king.  We can grow through our experiences and learn from our mistakes, so we can become confident in the relationship we share with God.

In the gospel today, Jesus is talking about that confidence, an abiding, enduring confidence in our relationship with God.  Our relationship with God should mean so much to us that we are willing to risk everything else for it.  He tells us to have so much confidence in it and so much commitment to it, to be like the one who sells everything so he can buy the field where the buried treasure is.  The pearl merchant carefully acquired and curated his whole inventory of pearls, and he sells it all off and buys the one pearl of great price.  The very things he used to be committed to give way to the one thing he knows he needs to be committed to.

The characters in these little stories took huge risks; they were committed, and they were confident they were making the right decision. Jesus’s teaching to us is, Take that big risk. Be that confident. Make the biggest bet of your life, on committing yourself to God, and know that that bet is a winner.  Bet it all on the relationship with God, because the bet will pay off.  But, is it wisdom to risk everything you’ve got on one bet?  In the second reading St. Paul tells us he is all in: “We know that all things work for good for those who love God.” 

The great Groucho Marx had a tv show in the mid-20th century, when tv was still young (and I was too).  The show was called You Bet Your Life.  The name of the show came from a slang expression of confidence:  When someone said, “You Bet Your Life,” it meant “Yes, absolutely yes; you can count on it.”   

Jesus is telling us to bet your life on commitment to God.  You can count on it.    

Our Sacraments are all signs of commitment.  Obviously, marriage: the couple commits to each other for life, and commits to their future family.    

Baptism is a both-ways commitment too: parents and godparents commit to rearing the child in the faith, and the whole Church commits to accepting this person as one of us.  

Confirmation. We save part of the Christian Initiation for a later time when the individual is capable of making his or her own commitment to this faith.  Confirmation is not “graduation” from RE; on the contrary, the real learning is just about to begin. What we celebrate in the sacrament of Confirmation is a lifelong commitment.

I was confirmed in eighth grade, and my teachers had suspicions that in my case, it looked a little risky, and it might not be a good idea. They were right!  Not that I was a bad Catholic or a bad person — It just was not an apt moment in my spiritual development.  Because of the seriousness of the commitment, I wouldn’t ask the 14-year-old version of me to make it.  But it worked out.  A lot of us were confirmed at 14, even though in retrospect I think mine should have been six or seven years later.  I had a bit of wisdom then.  But the Church took a risk on me.  Forty years later, the Church took another big risk on me, in Holy Orders, another sacrament of commitment, the commitment to service. 

Reconciliation. In the Act of Contrition, we commit to change our ways and to do better.  Saying “I’m sorry” is like saying “I love you”: It’s a risk, and it commits me; it doesn’t commit the other person.  Saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t commit God to forgive me.  But God does forgive us, and that also strengthens our commitment to the relationship with God.  God strengthens the commitment, through all of the sacraments.  

Commitment matters. There’s a lyric in the Beatles song, Michelle, “I love you; I love you; I love you! That’s all I want to say.”  Imagine singing, “I love you; I love you, kinda sorta not really.”  Commitment is serious; it’s not just being “invested”.  In a bacon and eggs breakfast, the chicken is invested, but the pig is committed.  If you put something in the collection basket today, you’re invested, and thank you. If you can invest more, please do.  But ask yourself, “Am I invested, or am I committed?”  Are we committed to our parish, to our faith, to each other?  None of us does this alone. 

Jesus fully commits to us in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  That’s why we are here, after all.  When we walk up the center aisle for communion, and we answer “Amen”, we’re not just invested but committed.  We say just one word to declare our commitment at communion time: “Amen.”  Think about that for the next ten minutes:  think about how willing you are to commit yourself to the relationship with God, who has already committed to you, and say “Amen” like you mean it.  With confidence.

We can see signs of our commitment in our sacraments, in our relationships, in our lives.  Jesus is telling us in the gospel, in these parables, to commit ourselves with confidence in God’s promises:  buy that (metaphorical) field where the buried treasure is.  Do whatever it takes to possess the one thing that matters:  Make the biggest bet of your life on committing yourself to the kingdom of God, and be confident the bet is a winner.  We can make the commitment to God, take the risk, bet our lives, and we can do it confidently, because of God’s gift to us of faith, strengthened in the sacraments.  Jesus says to us, You bet your life: bet it on me; it’s a good bet. 

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by bobslobig on July 28, 2026  •  Permalink
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You’re Worth It.

(My Fathers’ Day homily, for the Twelfth Sunday in ordinary time. The readings are Jeremiah 20:10-13, Psalm 69, Romans 5:12-15 and Matthew 10:26-33.)

One sentence in the second reading today really grabbed me. 

 “But the gift is not like the transgression.”  Paul is comparing Adam’s disobedience, his unwillingness to trust in the will of God, with the “gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ.” 

Through one man, Adam, sin and death entered the world; through one new man, Jesus, sin was overcome.  

He’s saying the gift we receive in Christ is a far bigger and better thing than the disobedience of Adam.   

What Adam did introduced sin and death into the human experience; what Jesus did rescued us all from that.   And what was it Adam did?  

He ate the fruit of the forbidden tree: He didn’t trust God, who had told him he could have anything he wanted, just not that one tree – if you eat that one, you’ll die.

After eating the forbidden fruit, what happened next?   

Adam and Eve hid when they heard God coming. They tried to hide from God.   God of course already knew what was going on, but God asked them, what’s with the fig leaf clothes?  Did you eat fruit from that tree, the one I told you not to eat because you would die? 

 When God asked Adam what was going on, Adam had a couple of choices.  One choice was to be real about it, to trust God and tell God the truth. 

He did not pick that one.  Instead …

He blamed his wife.   Instead of facing the truth about himself like a man, he turned on his life partner, the person who had made him happy.  He blamed her.  Just 14 verses earlier, Adam was naming all the animals God showed him, but none of the animals looked like a good partner for him.  So God created Eve and brought her to Adam, and Adam said, “Wow! … This one is the one.” 

Then, as things were about to go sideways, what seemed to matter to him the most was that his error was her fault.

“The woman you put here with me.  She did it.  It’s her fault.”   Let that sink in a minute.  “It was her fault, not mine.”  That’s not something my father would have done. 

Such an ironic contrast to what the man was saying to God about the same woman when they were first introduced. 

Because of all that, you and I have to work, and we don’t live in a carefree paradise.

Why am I talking about this?  Because a lot of us would have done the same thing.    

And it’s not just about letting down our spouses and loved ones, or unfairly blaming them for whatever goes wrong.  It’s about all the times we fail to show up being the better version of ourselves; all the  times we have a sense of what God would want us to do, and we go and do something different instead. 

I’m pretty sure that when Adam blamed his wife, he was acting out of fear, and not out of humility. Certainly not out of trust in God.  He was afraid.   If Adam and Eve had been trusting God at this moment, they would not have been hiding.  Before tasting the forbidden fruit, hiding would never even have occurred to them.  Before tasting the forbidden fruit, blaming would not have occurred to them.  

Before they tried the forbidden fruit, fear would not have been known to them,

All through the Gospel, and especially in today’s reading, Jesus says fear is something we can all do without.  “Don’t be afraid,” he tells us.  Today’s gospel beings, “Fear no one.”  

Jesus himself always acted out of trust for God, his father.  Always. Never out of fear.  He was never afraid.  He teaches us to put our trust in God, our father, and to make our decisions based on trust in God, our father, not out of fear, not based in blaming, not based in hiding.     

Those things are associated with sin and death.  Jesus is saying live without fear, live without blaming, live without sin and death.  Trust in the loving God.  

Jesus remarks that two sparrows sell for a penny.  They were the cheapest animals you could buy.  Not worth very much, so from a human point-of-view, there is not much reason to pay attention to them.  That’s the way people think; the way God thinks is different. Jesus says  God pays attention to every one of them.  They are his creation.  His point is, We are God’s creation too, precious and valuable to God.  If God pays attention even to each and every little bird, how much more will God take care of the people God loves? 

You’re worth it, Jesus is saying.  You are worth more than lots of sparrows.    

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to blame someone else because you’re afraid.  Trust God, and know that God is in love with you.  The gift is greater than the transgression, and you’re worth it.  

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by bobslobig on June 21, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on June 21, 2026

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Love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself. 

(A little homily I added to a prayer service for migrant, refugees and asylum seekers on June 14, 2026. The scripture readings were Isaiah 58:6-11, Leviticus 19:33-34, Colossians 3:12-17 and Matthew 25: 31-40.) 

 “Sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house”

“You shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens”

Love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself. 

These are kinda radical ideas.  But these are not radical new ideas.  They are radical old ideas.  

By “radical” I mean at the root.  These messages have been foundational to our shared humanity for as long humans have been humans.  The Isaiah passage is nearly 3000 years old.  Levitcus is even older, from the time of Moses.  God gave Moses The Law.  God gives us the law too, by writing it on our hearts. We can’t ignore it; it’s part of us. 

We have come back to church on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon to pray for our neighbors, especially those who are strangers in a strange land.  Many of us here grew up in Twentieth Century America, learning the nation’s values and customs, forming relationships with neighbors.  Now we too are strangers in a strange land.  What happened to the customs and shared values that we Americans were accustomed to, taking care of each other and treating that as normal?   

That’s what the gospel passage reminds us.  Our lives are a constant sequence of opportunities to find our loving God present in others, and to treat them accordingly.

Sadly, we spend much of our lives avoiding these opportunities to encounter our loving God present in others, and then trying to excuse ourselves for the failure to do that. 

Paul tells us to “Put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”

Instead we worry about scarcity, while forgetting abundance.

We worry about compliance with laws written 60 years ago, while forgetting the law that is written on our hearts.

Because each person – each migrant worker, each asylum seeker, each refugee – is a person, not expendable, not a statistic, not a drain on scarce public resources. Each person matters.

Each was created in the image and likeness of God.  Each carries within the spark of the divine life.  Each person is a manifestation of the presence of God, and God will remember how we greeted and treated him, when we encountered him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  

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by bobslobig on June 19, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on June 19, 2026

https://bobslobig.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/love-your-neighbor-as-yourself-because-your-neighbor-is-yourself/

Good Enough.

(Homily for the feast of the Ascension, May 17, 2026. The readings were Acts 1:1-11, Psalm 47, Ephesians 1:17-23 and Matthew 28:16-20.)

This is the same set of readings that we heard before my first-ever Sunday homily in the parish.  It was a Sunday in May 2003, and I was the brand-spankin’ new deacon, ordained just the day before. 

 I was pondering ideas about how to preach on the same readings today, and I remembered my wife saying she always liked that first one.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.  But I wouldn’t recycle that homily and give the same one again.

Or would I?  Was anyone else here that day in 2003?   

No, I don’t recycle an old homily.  Even if it was a good one.  You’re always going to get something fresh.  You know what would be worse than recycling an old homily though?  Having an artificial intelligence write the new homily.  Wouldn’t that be worse than re-using an old one again?  I’m really not sure of the Church’s teaching yet, although I expect Pope Leo to have a lot of useful things to say about how we should use and develop AI.  Just a week or two ago the pope convened a new commission to address the effects of AI on humanity. 

Man, I’d be worried about going to hell if I gave you a homily that I had gotten from an AI instead of writing it myself.

So of course I tried it.

I opened up the laptop last week, intending to write what you are hearing now, and the AI function asked me what I wanted to write.  So, I told it to write me a homily for the Ascension.  In less than a minute, I got back an anodyne, plain vanilla thing that I wouldn’t deliver from this or any pulpit, even on a bet. It was awful.  My AI isn’t bad for recipes, but for a Sunday homily, I’d still rather have me.  There was one thing you might like about the experimental AI homily: It was short. 

But it wasn’t good enough, because the Ascension is one of our great glorious mysteries: Somehow, in a manner we can’t really understand, the Risen Jesus was lifted back up to God, and his days of walking the Earth on his own two feet  were over.  What the apostles saw is recounted in today’s first reading, which comes from the Acts of the Apostles, written by St. Luke.  Matthew’s gospel does not repeat the story, but we do hear Jesus say, “I am with you always, until the end.”  And we hear his great commission, to go and make disciples.    

Something else caught me during the gospel passage:  When the eleven disciples saw the risen Jesus, “they worshiped, but they doubted.”  That the apostles both worshipped and doubted isn’t surprising, but it is surprising to me that Matthew wrote it down.  

Jesus entrusted these worshipping/doubting disciples with his mission, his legacy.  Is the world ever going to know his name?   That will come to be — or not — because of these 11 guys, and what they do after Jesus has returned to heaven.  If they are both worshipping and doubting, is it really a good time for Jesus to leave?  Should he spend more time with them, so they get it? 

That part about worshipping but doubting seems so much to be about us.  We worship:  we show up in church on Sunday; we recite the Creed; we give generously; we receive the Eucharist.  We hear, right in this gospel today, that Jesus will be with us to the end, that it’s all going to be all right. 

Then we go back to our jobs, our family grievances, our investments, our whatever, and even though Jesus has promised us everything is going to turn out all right, we act like it’s not going to turn out all right.  We don’t act like we trust him.  Instead, we put our faith in political parties and leaders.  We put our faith in big companies, in investments, in power.  We put our faith in our own abilities to take care of every detail.  Which is an illusion. 

Doubt is not an evil thing.  It’s a prompting to address something.  Keeping doubts to yourself is the problem.  Sharing those thoughts with a trusted friend or a spiritual director opens us up to better understanding and improves our relationship with God.   

If we don’t open up about our doubts, we can believe on Sunday mornings, but Monday, you can fall apart; Tuesday, Wednesday, break my heart; Thursday doesn’t even start — You know the rest. 

It’s some consolation, that if the apostles themselves worshipped and doubted, then there must be hope for us too.  We can take a lot of consolation in Jesus’s promise to be with us to the end, and in the knowledge that Jesus had hope too.  He hoped his apostles would do what he sent them to do.  He hopes that you and I do what he has sent us to do.  I don’t think he expected the apostles to be perfect or to do a perfect job, and I don’t think he expects it of you and me either. 

It’s a good thing, because “Perfect” is out of my reach.  If I try to be perfect, I’m going to fail, because coming up short of perfect is a sure thing.  Thinking you have to be perfect is going to lead to failure and disappointment.  But, if I set a goal to keep showing up and to be good enough, consistently, I can do that most of the time.  I’m usually going to succeed at being good enough. 

The other thing that helps is to know that I am not in charge.  God and I can collaborate on what is “good enough”, and that’s where I can listen and learn. I don’t need to hear God saying, “That’s perfect,” and I don’t ever expect to hear it, but it’s so comforting to sense God saying, “That’s good; that’s good enough.”  On the other hand, it’s motivating to hear the voice of God saying, “That’s not good enough.  You know you can do better.  I want you to do better.”  That voice and God’s grace lead me to return to being not perfect, but good enough.  It really helps when we trust him, and when we ponder that he also trusts us.

So this week, when stuff happens, and you know stuff is going to happen, ask yourself, Right now, am I worshipping or am I doubting?  If it’s doubt, then who am I going to talk to about it?  Do I trust Jesus to be with me in what I am looking at here? 

Jesus has promised all of us that he will be with us to the end, and he is counting on us to continue his mission to make disciples of all.  He knows that we will both worship and doubt, and he still has hope about us.  He knows that we will not be perfect, and he still loves us, and trusts us, even when we don’t always trust him.  Out of love for us, he sends us the Holy Spirit, and to hear about that, you have to come back next week.  And wear red.  

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by bobslobig on May 17, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on May 17, 2026

https://bobslobig.wordpress.com/2026/05/17/good-enough/

Pray for peace.

(Mini-homily for a peace prayer service at my parish this afternoon, May 3, 2026.)

We ask ourselves, “What can we do?”   This is what we can do: 

First, work for peace here in our own community.  It is easy to denounce a conflict occurring on the other side of the world, and I’m going to do it; what is hard is examining how we might be contributing to conflict and division right here at home, in our families, in our communities.  Do the hard work to solve conflicts without violence.  Be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.     

Second, be diligent in pressuring the government, our government, to oppose the escalation of violent conflicts.  Secretary Hegseth said that the war in Iran has cost $25 billion, so far.  Demand that the next $25 billion go to nonviolent conflict prevention, to diplomacy and peacebuilding.  Demand it. 

And pray for peace. Constantly.  (I should have said that first.)  

Then Resist.  Refuse in the name of Jesus Christ to support violence.  Resist the liars and charlatans who invoke God’s name to justify their violence.   

There is a darkness on our land:

            The President threatened to wipe out an entire civilization in a single night. The Congress, confronted with its own power under law to constrain the Executive, took a recess and went home for a long weekend instead. 

            Our government is counting on us.  Counting on us to be silent, complacent and complicit.  They want us to be worried more about the price we pay for our gas and our food than we are for lives being taken and lives being destroyed.  Instead of worrying for our own people in our nation’s armed services, whose lives are at risk.  Our government is bringing darkness on our land.

But darkness is the environment where the light of faith can shine:  Jesus came into the world as light, so that everyone who believes in him might not remain in darkness.

Today we are going to light these candles as signs of our faith.

Signs of Hope, to drive out the darkness of despair

Signs of Solidarity, to drive out the darkness of division

Signs of Courage, to drive out the darkness of complacency and timidity  

Signs of Truth, to drive out the darkness of lies and deceit.  

We are entrusted, we are called, we are obligated to spread the light of our faith, so others will see that light shine, and to let the light of Christ guide our feet into the path of peace.   

 

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by bobslobig on May 4, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on May 4, 2026

https://bobslobig.wordpress.com/2026/05/04/pray-for-peace/

Now You See Him, …

(Homily for April 19, 2026, the Third Sunday of the Easter Season. The readings are Acts 2:14, 22-33, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:17-21 and Luke 24:13-35.)

So what do you think this gospel is all about? I hesitate to say this gospel is “all” about anything, because there is a lot going on.  A good preacher can get ten excellent homilies out of this gospel.  I hope to give you one modest one.

What this is about for me, this time around, is the reality of Jesus being with us, walking among us, and the difficulty we have seeing him and recognizing him.   

Isn’t it funny how we can sustain the observance of Lent for 40 days, but we seem to forget that the Easter Season lasts 50 days?   Especially when Easter is all about joy and celebration of life, and Lent is, you know, kind of the flip side of that.  We slide back to our  old ways. 

After the crucifixion of Jesus, some of his followers thought that the dream was over, that everything they were hoping for was shot down and that they might as well give up and go back to what they had been doing before they dropped everything to follow Jesus.   That’s what this pair of disciples was doing: they were horrified on Good Friday; on Saturday they let the sabbath pass, of course; and then on Sunday morning they heard stories about the Resurrection — but did they believe them?  This is Easter Sunday afternoon.  Even though these two have heard from Mary Magdalene and the other Mary that they had seen Jesus that morning, by Sunday afternoon they were out; they were getting out of Jerusalem and going home.  Back to the old ways.

We go back to our old ways all the time, over and over again.  That’s our problem.  Consistently sticking with following Jesus.   It’s something we don’t do.  We recognize him as present once in a while, we might even tear up when we do, and then we don’t see him again and we just go back to whatever we were doing before. 

In the gospel story, it’s an encounter with Jesus that brings them back.

At the start of the conversation, the two disciples think they’re filling him in, telling him about what had just happened in Jerusalem, since he appeared to be the only person who didn’t know about what was going on.  Picture Jesus just sidling up and saying, “Whatcha talking about?”  Jesus walked and talked scripture with these two for miles, and soon they were lapping it up.  When they got to Emmaus, they didn’t want Jesus to keep going on.  They didn’t want it to stop.  It’s like falling in love: it’s new and different and it gets feelings going inside you.  You don’t want it to stop.  They wanted him to stay and keep talking.

When he eats with them, their ability to see him, to recognize him, suddenly kicks in.  And then he’s gone again. 

Like the couple sitting down to the evening meal in Emmaus, we get to see Jesus just for a glimpse sometimes; we can have that sudden insight, that realization of the presence of God right here, blessing what we are doing, … and then not see him again.  We get sucked back into the demands of life, the work, the trouble, the distractions, the joys and the sorrows, and the illusion that I’m handling all that on my own.  But I’m not.  

In fleeting moments of clarity, I am aware of God’s presence and loving care.  I see – often in hindsight, like these two – that was Christ traveling with me back there, caring for me, helping me get things sorted out, and I didn’t see it until now.

This is why I think the two disciples had given up on Jesus and his mission and decided to get out of Dodge on Sunday afternoon.   After the encounter with Jesus on the road and in the breaking of the bread, these two travelers turned around and went right back to Jerusalem: “they set out at once”, it says, to Jerusalem, back to the believing community they had just abandoned.  The day was almost over, but they went back, certain to arrive well after dark — back to the apostles, to tell them they had seen Jesus.  To tell them, “those stories going around, about the Resurrection: they’re true. They’re all true.”   To share the good news.  Mary did see him and talk to him. We did too. We should have believed her.  

I think we are encouraged to see Jesus walking with us, talking with us, helping us get things sorted out.  And we’re warned that there will be times that we suddenly recognize the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives and then we don’t.   

I think the Risen Christ in the late chapters of the gospels is elusive and mysterious, kind of a now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t.  He’s real, as real as can be, but he’s not confined to the same old concepts of time and space that we seem to be. 

And that’s how we experience him, isn’t it?  A moment comes and fills us with joy and excitement: I’m aware of the presence of God; I get it now!  And then that feeling is gone, and we’re back to wondering when we may ever see him again.  You can say that Jesus is elusive, but I think you have to allow that he’s here, always here.  He’s within our reach.  If we’re not getting to see him, it’s not because he’s hiding from us, unless you want to consider hiding in plain sight: Jesus hides on the margins, and if we never venture out there, maybe that explains why we don’t see him.  Jesus hides in our loved ones, the people who would do anything for us, just like he would.  Jesus hides in the bread of the Eucharist.  He’s dying to get inside us, where he can rise again, and then he wants us to get back to the beloved community, to tell them what we have seen and heard.

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by bobslobig on April 20, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on April 20, 2026

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I am the resurrection and the life

(Homily for March 22, 2026, the Fifth Sunday in Lent. The readings are Ezekiel 37:12-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:8-11 and John 11:1-45.)

In the first reading, God says God will open your graves and have you rise from them

In the second reading, St. Paul says the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also.

In the gospel, Jesus raises one of his best friends from the dead, after four days.

So does anybody else see there’s a theme here?   All three readings promise life after death, and all three readings say that it’s God who gives that to us.  The resurrection of Jesus, which we will celebrate in two weeks, is for us too.

You didn’t need me to tell you that.

Anybody here could put these three readings next to each other and come away thinking, God is going to save me from death.  Have faith, and there is nothing to worry about.

And yet we worry.

How can you tell whether or not you live in an ideal world?  One way is to determine what is the price tag on doing the right thing.  In an ideal world, it should cost nothing to do the right thing.  In our world, we know that sometimes doing the right thing comes with a steeper cost.  Sometimes that cost is enough, or almost enough, to talk us out of doing the right thing. Notice how we admire people who consistently do the right thing regardless of the cost; we call them “saints”.  Notice how we do not feel good about ourselves when we don’t do the right thing, because the price tag scared us.  We call that “sin”.

To see his good friends, Lazarus and Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, Jesus would have to go back to Judea.  The apostles pointed out that people in Judea wanted to stone him, and they asked him incredulously, “You want to go back there?”  Aren’t you thinking about what this might cost us?

When Jesus arrived in Bethany, his friend Martha told him she had faith that her brother would rise again, on the last day.  We have that faith too.

But Jesus wasn’t about waiting for the end of time, for the last day.  Jesus called Lazarus to come out of the tomb, and the dead man came out.

Pay attention to what Jesus said next: “Untie him; let him go free.”  Nothing about that says, “Wait for the end of time.”  Nothing about what Jesus did here says it will all work out on the last day.  The last day isn’t soon enough: Jesus wants his friend to be alive now, to be set free, now, to be able to live and love some more, now.

We are Jesus’s friends.  Jesus wants us, his friends, to be alive now, to be set free, now, to be able to live and to love, now.  God is doing something here in this world of ours, and God wants us involved in it.

The tomb Jesus calls us out of is not a mausoleum or a cave with a stone across the entrance; it’s more of a prison of our own making.  We are stuck inside, bound like Lazarus, immobilized by the false idea there is nothing we can do. Held back by the false idea that the cost of doing the right thing is more than we want to pay.

The graves Jesus wants us to rise from are not holes in the ground; they’re where our spirits are stuck in neutral, while God’s irrepressible love goes on around us, inviting us to join in.

Today, Jesus tells us again that he is the resurrection and he is the life. If we believe in him, we will not die.  And he asks us, “Do you believe this?”  We have to ask ourselves too: Do we?

Martha told her friend Jesus of her faith that her brother would rise again on the last day.  Nothing wrong with that; we have faith in that too.  What the gospel tells us today is, Don’t wait for that last day.  Jesus himself didn’t wait.  Jesus showed her that it’s not just about rising from the graves at the end of time; it’s about rising to participate in what God is already doing right now.

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by bobslobig on March 22, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by bobslobig on March 22, 2026

https://bobslobig.wordpress.com/2026/03/22/i-am-the-resurrection-and-the-life/

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