Fr. Thom's Homilies

          “Who do you say that I am?”  This is the question that Jesus asks His disciples.  And I want to get to this question of who Jesus is very shortly, but before I do that, it occurs to me that perhaps many of you are still wondering who I am.   I certainly don’t want to make this homily about me (frankly, I’m not that interesting), but being that this is the first “regular” weekend of the school year, I think this might be as good a time as any to more formally introduce myself.  For those who don’t yet know me, my name is Fr. Thom Hennen.  Everyone has been asking me what I would like to be called, just “Thom” or “Father Thom” or “Father Hennen.”  For most of my priesthood I’ve just been “Father Thom,” so that works for me.   I am originally from Ottumwa, Iowa, where my parents still live, as well as a sister and brother-in-law, and a niece and her husband and their two children.  I am the youngest of...

          Okay, so the Gospel passage we just heard is probably not in any preacher’s top five favorite passages to preach about – probably not even in the top ten or even twenty.  It’s more than a little shocking and confusing.  It’s certainly not what I would have picked for the weekend we are welcoming our students to campus.  And I will admit that my first instinct as a homilist when faced with this reading is to punt – to pick one of the other readings to preach about and pretend that Jesus never said this, that this didn’t happen, and that we didn’t just hear this.  “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  It just sounds too close to some of the hateful rhetoric that, sadly, we are all too accustomed to hearing in recent days.  What is going on here?  Why would Jesus say this?  While it may be easier to dodge the issue, I think we just have to tackle it head on.   ...

           If you’re like me, when you hear this familiar story of Jesus walking on the water and beckoning Peter to join him, you are transfixed just by that: by the mere fact that Our Lord was walking on the water , and more than this, that Peter was also able to do the same – something we know to be physically impossible .  I think we are captivated by the miracle of this even, but sometimes we stop there.  We say, “Okay, Jesus is God; He can walk on water; got it.  Peter has faith, so he can walk on water too; got it.”  We tie it up with a nice little bow and put it back on the shelf until the next time this passage comes around in the cycle of readings.           But there is something more.  Upon deeper reflection on this familiar passage, the really captivating thing for me is not that Jesus walked on the water, or even that Peter did, but that Peter stepped out of the boat at...