Funny Homily Stories

The disciples had watched Jesus pray for years. They'd seen Him go up the mountain alone, spend whole nights in prayer, rise before dawn to find a quiet place. Finally, they came to Him and said — with what I imagine was some mix of exasperation and admiration — "Lord, teach us to pray." And He gave them the Our Father. Sixty-six words in the original Greek. Sixty-six words for a lifetime of conversation with God. Meanwhile most of us need sixty-six words just to say thank you for dinner. There's a lesson in there about prayer — and about talking less and meaning more.

G.K. Chesterton was a large man — famously, embarrassingly large, in the way only confident people can be. He once said that his doctor told him he needed to take exercise. He said, "I do take exercise. I take it every day." The doctor asked, "What exercise?" Chesterton replied: "I bang my head against brick walls trying to convince people that the Catholic faith is true." — Now Chesterton told stories like that to set something up. And what he was setting up, every time, was the same argument: that the Faith is not a comfortable thing. It is a demanding thing that claims to be the most important truth in the world. And that deserves our full weight behind it.

Someone once put up a sign outside a church that said simply: "Free. No strings attached." They were talking about the free coffee inside. But within a week, forty-seven people had walked through the door — most of whom had never been inside a church before — because they thought the sign was about something else entirely. It turns out people are starving for something free in a world where everything costs them something. — That's not a real story. But it describes a real hunger. And the Gospel we preach every Sunday is the only thing that's actually free with no strings attached. We should probably put up a better sign.