Mass of the Holy Spirit: All I am saying . . . Just Give Jesus a chance: Homily for Thursday, September 7, 2023

Given at Christian Brothers College High School, Town and Country, Missouri. Listen to our other homilies. Mass of the Holy Spirit: All I am saying . . . Just give Jesus a chance When the Powerball or Mega Millions has a very high jackpot, people all over the United States are eager to buy tickets (sometimes a lot of them) in the hopes that they will win an awful lot of money. It is absolutely amazing what we will take a chance on, even if the odds are stacked against success. But when it comes to faith, it can be very difficult for some to do the same. We have all kinds of excuses for not taking a chance on Jesus, but what have we got to lose? It's very rare that it's the case that I change a little bit about what I'm going to say the morning of a homily. Usually I'm prepared and I know what I want to say, and that's a good thing. But this morning, when I glanced through the headlines in the newspaper, I saw that three high school students from Ladue High School died yesterday in a car accident.  And I thought to myself, wow, how many lives have been changed by something that occurred in a matter of a few moments? I always think first of their parents, the parents of these kids who died. Because I think to myself, that's just something I-- not for example, I don't have children of my own, but even if I did, or maybe especially if I did, that's every parent's worst nightmare. And I don't care how old your children are.  And then I thought of their friends. And I thought to myself how their lives have changed. People that they were probably just joking around with, now not here on this earth. And I thought to myself, precisely because of moments like this, when everything changes and not for the best, "Do we need to have something that we can depend on?"  Certainly the people who grieve and mourn the loss of these kids will have friends and relatives and so forth to depend on. Despite the support and despite the fact that life will go on, the parents, quite frankly, will probably never be the same because their children are no longer alive. And I say all this not to start us on a downer in terms of the Mass of the Holy Spirit, but it seemed quite appropriate for what I was intending to say today. You know, a few weeks ago, the -- I don't remember if it was Mega Millions or the Powerball, but one of them was well over a billion dollars in terms of its prize. And I suspect that there were people who thought, you know, maybe I'll buy a ticket. What harm could there be? There were probably people who said, "Well, if I really want a good chance to win, I'll buy 10 tickets." Or maybe 100. Even though, I think Ms. Schupe could tell you, your chances of winning if you buy a Power Bowl ticket when it's over a billion dollars, given the number of people that buy tickets, you could buy probably a million tickets and not really increase your odds all that much.  My quest today is to ask you to think about something. The interesting thing is when it comes to buying a Powerball ticket and winning, winning the big prize, for many individuals, their lives get worse, not better. And surprisingly, for many, when they win a big lottery prize, their lives get worse financially than they did before they won, which seems so odd. But they're not used to money. They don't know what to do with it. They think that it's going to be infinite, and they'll always have it.  And so I'd invite you today to think about what is it and who is it that you depend upon. Who is it that you depend upon? If you're like me, it can't just be myself, even though that seems to be the easiest way to go about things. I only have to rely on myself and that seems like a good thing. I screw up all the time. Depending just on myself, that would mean that quite frankly I'd be doing all kinds of things that are wrong...