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A freshman in college in 1970, a Catholic college, looked up from his desk as a visitor walked in and the freshman was writing a paper on the letters of St. Paul, such as we hear every Sunday, "...a reading from the letter to the Thessalonians...." He looked up to the visitor, and the freshman in college said, "This Paul! He's heavy, man.....heavy!" And then later, he wrote a letter to the visitor, who had gone back to New York and, in the letter, he said, "I got my paper back, on St. Paul. I got a good mark. He is heavy, man .... heavy, but he's got some good stuff."

It's about that "good stuff" that I want to think with you this morning, Paul.... Paul's letters that we read almost every Sunday, second reading, first reading. Now, priests, we had to study St. Paul for six years. So, when we hear one of his letters, we kind of...."That's good stuff!" And we look out over you and "He's heavy!" And some of you, and I, can kind of go into a little trance until it is over. Thessalonians.... Smeshalonians.... Who cares? All that Old Testament stuff.... But he's got some good stuff and the acronym today is "Paul, P - A - U - L" .... Power, Argument, Unity, Loyalty. Now, those are four abstract nouns, and nothing is as boring as abstract nouns. They float away into the ether.... power, argument, unity, loyalty.

So, what I want us to do today, is I want you to pretend that there are four people. (I am just making this up.) There is somebody sitting over there named "Shirley." And over there is "Curley." And over here is "Flo." And over here is "Moe." Silly names, but we can read what they are thinking. We can read their thoughts, like balloons in cartoons, where you can see what is written above the head. Now, they are loyal, good Catholics. They came to Mass on a kind of unpleasant day. They are here, but they are human. So, the first thing we are going to read in their heads is the distraction, because human beings get distracted at Mass, especially during Paul's letters. And then they have all been listening to stuff about Paul since they were kids, going to Church. So, they get little bits and pieces of Paul's life. That's the second thing. The third thing is they remember some of his great, good stuff, some of the good stuff he wrote.

So, over here, is Shirley, somewhere over there. Shirley is thinking about meatloaf. "Tonight.... or tomorrow?" And then she looks up and she hears, "Ugh! Another acronym! ...P, oh the P is for POWER." And then she thinks about Paul's life. She had heard bits and pieces about St. Paul, going to Mass for years. She remembers that Paul had power. He was "pow-ed" by God to start off with. He was pow-ed down on his derriere because he was on the road to Damascas to wipe out some Christians. You know, Paul lived at the same time as Christ. And after Christ left this planet, Paul found out that there were a bunch of people teaching about Jesus who died on a cross. Paul was a very smart, feisty, edgy, angry Jew. And he went out to slaughter Christians. In fact, we read in the Acts of the Apostles.... (By the way, I don't know why they don't make a movie of the Acts of the Apostles. It is better than any James Bond flick ever made. It's got shipwrecks and flogging and prisons and letters and love sto... and it's all true.) But, anyhow, we read in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul was dumped on his derriere and a voice spoke to him. And the voice said, as Paul was getting ready to wipe out some Christians, "Why are you persecuting Me?" He was blind, Paul, for a few days, but he heard the voice, "Why are you persecuting Me?" The voice didn't say, "Why are you persecuting my good little Christians?".... "Why are you persecuting ME?"

So, he was blind for a couple of days and he became a convert. Then he went to the Apostles and said, "I want to join you guys!" They were backing up like people in a dracula movie! It was like Adolph Hitler announcing, "I want to be a Rabbi!" But Paul did have some power. He had the power of sincerity. All that energy and brains he had used to kill Christians he now used for Christ, a powerful, wonderful human being.

And Shirley is thinking. Her mind is drifting back to meatloaf. Then she brings it back because she remembers some words from St. Paul that are usually read at weddings, a famous Pauline passage, one of the letters that he wrote. (Most of the letters that Paul wrote were from jail, not from some safe little podium where I'm standing, from jail to people who were suffering persecution and torture. So, it was written, in a sense, in blood.) And one of the things that is always read at weddings is from Paul. He wrote about love. And that is what Shirley was thinking about, love. "The day I was married I heard those words from Paul: 'Love is patient. Love is kind. Love endures all things, suffers all things. Love doesn't hold onto grudges.' "

"Heh, heh, heh! We don't read HE was married," Shirley thinks to herself. "And if the first word in this acronym is 'Power,' I need some power. At Christmas, when his relatives come trooping over, and I never can do anything right, so far as they are concerned, although they are very polite in their little acid smiles, I need some power not to poke him in the noggin when he raises that supercilious eyebrow because he doesn't think I am saying just the right thing.... Oh, St. Paul," says Shirley, "give me the power to put up like a grownup love puts up with routine and irritation and boredom. Help me to be his friend as well as his wife. Give me that kind of grownup love I heard about on my wedding day. And give me the power to drop some of those grudges."

Over here is Curley. Curley is a gentleman and he is distracted because you get distracted at Mass. Curley is thinking about Christmas presents: "Oh, God, do I have to match, buck for buck, the presents the in-laws bring? Well, we had to get a gift just as nice as theirs last year. Why? Silly old thing. I am so sick of Christmas gifts. I can't afford it this year. I don't know why.... What's he babbling about? Oh, uh, uh.... We are up to 'A' in the acronyms, ARGUMENTS. Paul was a great arguer. Yeah. I remember that in Catholic school."

Paul had a terrific brain. He could really argue. He once went to a pagan temple in Athens, with all the Greek intellectuals. And he saw statues all around the temple, of pagan gods. The intellectuals wanted to cover their bases. So they had one empty space, and the empty space said, "To the unknown god," so nobody would get mad at them. When Paul spotted that he said, "Hey, folks, come over here. You see that space where, with all these other pagan god statues, you have one over there that is empty to the unknown god. I am here to argue good stuff. I am going to tell you about the unknown god, that you don't know about yet. And when you hear about him, you can get rid of all the others."

Paul could argue. He argued with Peter, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, Peter, whom we call the first Pope. We talk about liberals and conservatives fighting in the Church today. They always have, right from the beginning. Peter, the leader of the Church, said, "We have to teach these new Christians, you know, Gentiles, we have to teach them a lot of our Jewish laws about diet and washing...." And Paul said, "Forget about it. We don't have to impose all those old, little Jewish laws on these new Gentile Christians. Forget about it." And they had quite a battle. Read about it in the Acts of the Apostles. And Paul won! Peter said, "OK. You are right."

He could argue, Paul, in his letters. And this is what convinces many scholars that Paul was an athlete. He wasn't very big because we read in one place that they lowered him and helped him escape from jail in a laundry basket. So he couldn't have been very tall, to get over the wall in a laundry basket. But he was an athlete. He uses a lot of athletic metaphors like "running a race" and "greasing your body" as in those days they did with oil for wrestling. "Run the race" and "Finish the match" and "Don't lose your courage." Yeah. He could argue. And one day he wrote, "We preach Christ, and we preach Christ crucified, and risen, but crucified." And to the Gentiles, that is ridiculous. It is pathetic, a crucified god. And to the Jews, who wanted a different kind of a Messiah, many of them, to have a Messiah who died naked on a cross, that is a stumbling block. But we go on arguing that Jesus was crucified, to give us courage in life. And he rose again.

And so Curley says, "Help me to keep that argument in mind, about Christ, when people are sniping about 'This is wrong with the Church and that is wrong with the Church...' In Christ... We preach Christ."

And over here is Flo. And Flo is thinking about what she is going to say Monday to that co-worker who dropped that blistering insult on her head Friday at two o'clock. And Flo is thinking, "Oh, if I just had a few more minutes to think of something to slam her back! Well, I have a nice cozy time here at Mass while he goes on babbling and I will think of something... I can tell her off. I have enough wit. Sometimes, when you are insulted it happens so fast you can't fight back because.... Oh, what are we up to now?.... 'U!' That's right, UNITY. I remember reading about St. Paul. He was all for unity. 'You Jews and you Gentiles, let's get together. Let's unite. It's not just for the Jews. Jesus was a Jew, but his message was for everybody. Come on, you Gentiles. Let's unite.' "

When you read Paul's letters, there were little cliques in those days, fighting with each other. There were. It's hilarious. The Church hasn't changed because human nature hasn't changed. And Paul often, in his letters, says, "Will you guys knock it off, fighting about this one and that one and I'm more important than you, she's more important than.... Let's stay together. Let's unite." Unity, unity, unity, the union of soul and body.

Then Flo starts thinking about something Paul wrote, which is her favorite quote, about uniting things, about uniting good intentions with weak will, about uniting spiritual stuff with fleshy stuff. And the quote that Paul wrote in jail was, "You know, the things I should do and would like to do, often those are the things I don't do; and the things I should not do, those are the things I wind up doing." And Flo thinks, "Wow! St. Paul can say that! He had his failures and disappointments." (No one is quite sure what it refers to but Flo likes to apply it to herself, about unity.) If I could unite my good intentions and all the nice spiritual stuff I hear around me, and all the squeaky clean people I see up and down the aisles.... If some people could lift the top of my skull off, Flo says to herself, they would see a triple X-rated movie! (No one suspects because of this nice, sweet, kind of mousey, nice Catholic lady.) But my mind should be in an adult video store.... And what I would like to say to her Monday when I get.... "Please, please, hey Paul. You are in heaven. I believe you existed. Help me to unite my good intentions with my weak will. Will you give me a hand?"

And the last.... Over here is Moe. And Moe is thinking about LOYALTY, the "L." He is a baseball fan and he is in his late 60's. He moved here a few years ago, and he remembers, because you get distracted at Mass... He thinks of the old days when he was a kid and went to Yankee Stadium, and how loyal he was to the Philadelphia Athletics, who were always, always in last place. And you go to Yankee Stadium where Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and all those were whacking the Philadelphia Athletics and wiping up the mound with them, and he would wave his little pennant flag, Philadelphia A's.... Why did the A's ever leave Philly? They should have stayed there, even though they were always losing. He's thinking of baseball. He is thinking of sports, and then.... "At least we are up to the last thing in the acronym," he snaps back.

LOYALTY... Paul was loyal. He was loyal to Christ. He had a terrible tough time. And people were loyal to Paul. He had a harsh temper. It wasn't easy to be Paul's friend. And he might have been, according to some scholars Moe remembers hearing, he might have been epileptic. He might have had a terrible stutter. In one of Paul's letters he writes, he says, "I know when I first came, you said, 'This is Paul? This thing?' " People were loyal, even with his harsh temper. And he died loyal, with his head chopped off by Nero in Rome. This is all solid history. "I'll be loyal. I'll be loyal to the Church," says Moe. "It's tough being loyal now though, Lord. In the sixties when I was a kid, we had a nice, loveable, fat Pope. The whole world loved Pope John XXIII, even Communists. And we had a handsome Catholic as President with his beautiful wife and two beautiful children. It was easy to be a Catholic then. It's not easy to be loyal now. I'll stick it out. I remember how Paul wrote before he died, from jail, to early Christians that he had been given a split-second picture of heaven. And Paul wrote, in one of his final letters, 'The eye has never seen and the ear has never heard and the imagination has never imagined the wonderful things God has prepared for us who are loyal and love Him.' Which means," says Moe, scratching his head, "that I will see my Mom, who died when I was six, and I will see Grandpa and I'll see Paul and Jesus in the face. I can be loyal to that."

The freshman boy wrote, years back, saying, "Paul is heavy, man, heavy." But he wrote a few weeks later and he said, "Yeah. He's heavy, but he's got some good stuff."