The Ambo: Homilies for the Faithful

note: a few months ago, my father passed away. It took more than 6 months to be able to have a burial service at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, due to reasons I will never understand fully. I was asked by my mother to deliver the eulogy at that occasion, December 10, 2014.   Welcome family and friends. We meet here today at this hallowed place of national memory to honor and celebrate Charles Joseph Bauer—father, husband, man of faith, soldier, and rags-to-riches American success story—indeed, his a life well-lived and full. We have only hurried moments now to reflect upon this life, but any of us can share a personal observance during the reception that follows our services. Charlie (many of us knew him affectionately as “Pia”) was a man with a deep sense of FAMILY . Perhaps this strong sense of family was due to his own early life experiences of being orphaned and separated from his siblings in foster care. Along with his dearly departed sister and brothers, he fought

Gospel  MT 16:13-20 Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  They replied, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”  He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”  Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.  For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.  And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. Background…Jesus takes his disciples to Caesarea Philippi, where we have the confession of Christ. Interesting who the people that are re

by Deacon Rick Bauer I was baptized and confirmed in a nominally Catholic home. My dad’s 33-year career in the U.S. military and the diplomatic service led us overseas among many moves as our 6-child family grew up, spending years in Panama, Cuba, and Colombia. Despite a Jesuit education into high school, by the time we returned to Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s, I was a high school student growing rapidly disillusioned with my faith and with the Catholic Church. If you remember, the American Church was in what I now understand as its “post-Vatican II phase”, and our parish in suburban Washington, DC was particularly “loopy”; on one memorable Easter Sunday, the pastor drove a VW bug up the main aisle of the church, dressed in a bunny suit. By the time I was a cadet at West Point, I had come to describe myself as an agnostic, but perhaps more for the fact that I enjoyed sleeping in on Sunday mornings instead of attending mandatory religious services. The Church of Christ A

In the summer of 1893, a thirty-six year-old English professor at   Wellesley College in Massachusetts, had taken a train trip to   Colorado Springs , Colorado, to teach a short summer school session at   Colorado College . Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, and they found their way into a poem, including the   World's Fair   in Chicago, the "White City" with its promise of the future contained within its alabaster buildings; the wheat fields of America's heartland   Kansas , through which her train was riding on July 16; and the majestic view of the   Great Plains   from high atop Zebulon's   Pikes Peak . On the pinnacle of that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel in downtown Colorado Springs. The poem was initially published two years later in   The Congregationalist , to commemorate the Fourth of July. It quickly caught the public's f

June 22, 2014--The Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) Today the church universal celebrates and underscores one of the three great mysteries. The first is the nature of God as three in one, a trinity. The second is the incarnation, the Word became flesh and lived for a while among us as Jesus Christ. The third is the mystery of the Eucharist, that by the words of blessing of our priest, bread and wine become transformed in substance, not in form, into the body and blood of Christ. A lot of times, when we think of the word “mystery”, we are really thinking that there is no answer, or its some kind of dodge. Something like we just heard of in Washington by the IRS, “ I don’t know how those 7 pc systems all crashed at the same time, and the e-mails were all destroyed….it’s a mystery! Well, that’s not it at all…the New Testament writers gave the name “mystery” to revealed truths that surpass the powers of natural reason. Mystery in its strict

Mashed Potato Love 2/23/2014 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time (note: today, the homily lasted about two minutes. following the homily, Deacon Rick, dressed in a chefs hat and apron, gave a live demonstration about love and unity using potatoes and his grandmother's cooking. It loses a lot in the translation, but areas in yellow are an attempt to describe what was going on) The original idea for this homily came from pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz, who preached a sermon on unity using the illustration of mashed potatoes. I have expanded the idea greatly, but wanted to give credit to my brother Juan Carlos Ortiz.  Today our readings have the theme of love and unity. In the first reading from the Book of Leviticus we read: “You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart. Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Right there, in the book of Leviticus, we see a standard of love, tolerance,