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In this homily, I am going to do something that I regularly tell others never to do. Along the way, I have given quite a few workshops on sermons, to deacons and to priests, and to lay preachers. And there are two things I always tell them. I tell them, number one, "Don't talk a lot about yourself." And, number two, and this may sound like a surprise, I tell them, "Don't talk about the gospel." What I mean by that (when I say don't talk about the gospel) is I say, "You are not there for a Bible study. You are not there to retell. You are not there to repeat the gospel story. You are there to talk about life. And people are not there to listen about your life, but to reflect on their lives in the light of the gospel and in the light of faith."

Well, today, I am going to share a little bit about my own growing up and tell more about myself than I usually do, and I am breaking one of my rules. I hope you don't find it boring, and I hope you find something of value in it. You see, in today's gospel story, Jesus is laying out a critique, a criticism, of people who don't catch on, people who don't grow, people who refuse to change. Now, it's hard to change. Change is always hard. It always will be, always has been. I remember, this goes way back.... This goes back before we had the RCIA, before we had the era of good feelings between Protestants and Catholics that we call ecumenism, back to the days when even those Catholics who didn't go to Mass on Sunday prided themselves on the fact that they never ate meat on Friday. Well, one man, after thirty years of marriage to a Catholic wife, decided to finally become a Catholic. He took instructions. He became what we called in those days a "convert." He was baptized. And, after about six months, the pastor who had baptized him dropped in to see how he was doing. And he confided with the pastor, "I am doing all right, but I have one big problem. I know I have been instructed. I know I have been baptized. I know I am a Catholic, but I feel like a Protestant. I still feel like a Protestant." Now, in those days, pastors were a lot smarter and wiser than they are today. So, this pastor had an answer right away. He said, "What I want you to do for the next month, any free moment you have, I want you to keep saying, between your teeth to yourself, 'I'm a Catholic, not a Protestant. I'm a Catholic, not a Protestant.' " It will make all the difference." So, a month later, he checked in on him and he came on a Friday, and as soon as he stepped into the house, he could smell meat cooking. And the wife said, "It is terrible. He has been doing this every Friday since you were here." And the priest said, "I can take care of it." He walked into the kitchen. There the man is standing over a beautiful piece of meat on the stove and saying, "You are a trout, not a steak. You are a trout, not a steak."

Now, the reason I use that to illustrate how hard it is to change, the reason that underlines how hard it is to change, is not the joke, but that I have been telling that joke for forty years, and I am still telling it!

What I want to do is share with you some of the people who have helped me catch on, helped me to grow, helped me to change, although I am still very unfinished. I'd have to start with my parents. My father shared with me a strong sense of integrity that he had, and a great concern for working people, for unions, and for those who were out of work. Now, I was wondering how he got to that point. And I think it was because he ran a working man's bar, and when people were out of work, they didn't drink as much.... Actually, when people were out of work, they drank more. They just didn't pay for it. So, he developed quite a concern there. And, then, for my mother, she shared a sense of humor about life and a healthy skepticism about Church leaders and Church leadership.

Another group that helped me catch on, grow, change along the way, would have to be my peers and classmates. I'll name just two. There could be many more. One would be Bishop Mike Kenny, who was a close and dear friend from the ninth grade until his untimely death in 1995. Mike passed on to me and to everyone around him a sense of joy and a sense of drama and he was so completely uninhibited that it loosened the rest of us up a little. Completely uninhibited. I was at dinner with him one night at Spenger's in Berkeley, the Fish Grotto, crowded noisey place. He brought it to complete silence, and a standstill simply by singing at the top of his lungs, in his Irish tenor voice, the grace before meals, that embarassed the daylights out of the rest of us. And then, a little later, when his main course arrived, which was Dungeness Crab, he grabbed one of the claws, latched it onto his nose, and ran around the restaurant saying, "It got me. It got me. Help! Help! Don't order one of these things." When he was Bishop in Juneau, Alaska, he went to Skagway one winter night, for Confirmation. The altar server showed up in huge moon boots so he could get throught the drifts of snow, but he was supposed to bring his normal shoes for serving at this important ceremony. He had forgotten, and his father bawled him out in the sacristy and said, "We are not going home. You are just going to have to be an embarrassment to all of us with those ridiculous boots." His father left, and Bishop Kenny turned to the young server and said, "Don't worry. Just do what I do." He kicked off his shoes, and they both celebrated Confirmation barefoot that evening, a matching set.

Another classmate would be Father Dan Danielson, who is pastor in Pleasanton now, and we argue a lot. I remember driving from the Bay Area to Santa Cruz in 1964 and talking about, of all things, sanctifying grace all the way down. Talk about an occupational hazard! But, by the time we got to Santa Cruz, my whole thinking had been changed by that discussion from that grace certainly is not a misty substance in our souls, nor is it just our relationship with God, but that it is, even more than that, our relationship with one another. And that is what is being described. Dan and I still discuss and we still disagree a great deal, but he makes me think. And I hope that I make him think too.

Another group, I would have to say, that helped me catch on and grow and change would be clergy that are hard-headed, rigid and offensive. This is the truth. When I came out of the seminary, I was the most conservative member of our class. I was subscribing to the National Review and the opinions of William Buckley politically. And, with regard to Church life, I was dragging my feet and putting up my defenses against any major changes in the Church. And I was assigned with an experienced priest, ordained five years ahead of me, who was the senior assistant pastor. And he was so hard on people, and he was so hard on me, and he was so unreasonable when it came to pastoral concerns and so angry about anything new in the Church, that I realized that was not right, and I caught on, and I grew, and I changed. If it is just the same to you, I am not going to share his name with you.

One last group, or area of growth or change in my life.... Parish priests spend at least fifty percent of their time, and I think it is closer to seventy-five or eighty percent of their time, working with women. Now, where does a priest of my generation, who went into an all-boys boarding school at age twelve, and came out twelve years later, unmarried, celibate, sheltered priest, where do we get the experience and learn how to relate to women, particularly strong women? Well, I will tell you the experience I relied on.

When I was an infant and my sister was sixteen months older than I, she was happy, healthy, a delight to the family. And I was sickly, puny and crying all the time. My mother would put us both out in two cribs on the porch daily and give us each a milk bottle. After several months of this, a neighbor finally reported that my sister would finish her milk bottle, take mine, finish mine, and put the empty back in my crib, thereby starving her young brother to death. So, when I finally had to work with women, who were mature, adult, had strong recommendations and criticisms and disagreements with me, I knew exactly what was going on. They were trying to get my milk bottle.

And lots of good, strong women in my life have helped me to catch on, to grow, and to change. I name just a few. In 1979, I became pastor for the first time at St. Monica's in Moraga and met Cath McGee, who was on the staff there, strong but gentle, competent. She became associate pastor there. She has been pastor of St. Monica's now for a number of years. Another person I would have to mention as having great impact on my life would be Margo Schorno. And those of you who know Margo could realize how she could change someone's life. Happened to a lot of you. Those who don't know, she was associate pastor here for twelve years, until her death. She was co-worker, friend, teacher, and mentor to me. And I guess one other, coming in from a different angle, I would have to mention. When I arrived here in 1988, Monsignor Wade introduced a woman to me and said, "She is actually the boss around here." And that was Vi Murphy, who many of you know.

The point I am making here is I think it is worth our spiritual journey to make a list of people who have helped us to grow and change, whether it is our parents, our peers, whether it is clergy, whether it is men or women, to list those people and see where we have changed, to give thanks for them and also to look back and see where we didn't change, and maybe we should have, and where we don't change, and maybe we should think about it.

There is a harder question in today's gospel. The harder question comes from Jesus saying, "The kingdom of God will be taken away from those who do not produce fruit and given to those who do." In other words, we are not just supposed to be changed by others and give thanks for it, we are supposed to change others and be people who make a difference. I'd suggest for morning prayers, each day, we give thanks for the people in our lives who have made us better, but we also say, "What am I going to do today? Who am I going to touch today? How am I going to make the world different today?"

May we be a people who help one another change for the better, who let good folks support and challenge us to growth in our lives. May we be a people who help others to grow, and may we all be a people who make a difference. Amen.