A homily for the fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
I’m gonna ask my phone a series of questions. Hey, Siri, tell me a joke. If you get heartburn every time you eat a birthday cake. Try taking the candles off. Hey, Siri, tell me a joke. I love playing tricks on vampires. They’re such suckers. In today’s gospel, we have Jesus saying you are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world. What is this? And you know it. Interesting. If the salt, loses its flavor, it’s good for nothing to be thrown up. What is this? Salt? That adds to life that we’re supposed to be. I think it’s humor. Humor makes life so much better. Humor makes life enjoyable. Humor makes the day short and wonderful.
I think the the. We’re supposed to be people of humor. And evidence of this is. Oh, this is a few years ago. The Carmelites called a meeting of their vocation directors. The recruiters and former vocation directors and people they thought would be vocation directors, recruiters in the future. That’s how I got involved. And there was one question. The moderator began with pencils on a piece of paper to everybody and said, write the ten qualities you want in a prospect you know vocation candidate, the ten top qualities you put on some music, mural thinking and writing down our ten qualities.
At the end of that, he had each person read what they wrote. You know, qualities of prayerful nuance or faithfulness or generosity or kindness. And he’d rate their qualities what they said on the board whiteboard. And if there was a repeat, he put a checkmark after that one. And then when it was all done, everybody had read their pieces of paper, he said, now let’s look at.
He turned to the whiteboard. He says, let’s look to see which is the top quality. The Carmelites are looking for the prospect. And he said, wow, you guys. The top quality was really interesting was sense of humor. That’s the quality most of the guys wrote, and I think he said, that’s a very good quality. You’d never had that before in this kind of workshop.
And he thought it was a really good sign. And so it’s what I think sense of humor is important. They say Saint Teresa of Avila had a great sense of humor one time. She’s a and a carriage going from place to place, and it’s raining and the carriage is crossing a stream. It gets stuck in the mud, so she has to get out.
And when she gets out, she slips and falls into the mud. And she looks up to heaven and says, Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few that just one of the example of many of her jokes. I won’t go into them, but I think that the zest, the salt, the light of the world we’re called to be. Not to take ourselves too seriously, not to take the world too seriously, not to take the neighbor too seriously, but to have a joyful heart, a rejoicing heart, a mirth filled heart, a humor filled heart.
