Deacon Mike Meyer / Monday, July 7, 2025 / Categories: Blog, Homilies Time to Get Weird Again Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C The other day, I came across an article by Theresa Civantos Barber that startled me: “Why American Catholics Need to Get Weird Again.” You’re already pretty weird, so the thought of you getting even weirder is downright frightening. Barber’s point, though, is that historically, Catholics were always considered weird and even defiant by non-Catholic society. Yet, “somewhere between those defiant, even dangerous, early days and today, American Catholics became obsessed with fitting in. We wanted so desperately to prove we were just as American as our Protestant neighbors [that] we began molding our faith to match our politics rather than the other way around.”[1] As frightening as it may be, Barber’s onto something. Maybe it is time for American Catholics to get weird again. Let’s face it—Catholics are weird. We venerate saints’ relics, have a feast day just for blessing throats, and count Saturday evening as Sunday to satisfy our Mass obligation. Most of all, we believe that Jesus Christ is really present, body, soul, and divinity, in a tiddlywink of bread that tastes like cardboard. You’d think the Son of God would merit a fragrant focaccia or crusty ciabatta in a Church seated in Rome. Why are Catholics so weird? Because our God is weird. Think about it. God is perfectly complete and happy in God’s self. God needs nothing, including us, so there’s nothing we can do for God that’ll make God’s life easier or better. Yet, God created us anyway, just to love us. That’s weird, but it gets weirder. God loves us no matter what and keeps loving us even when we outright refuse God. The Bible’s filled with stories of people who reject God over and over again, while God keeps trying to save them and reconcile them to himself. He’s done the same for us, so much so, that God “gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (John 3:16). As weird as it may sound, we find the depth and breadth of God’s love for us in a Cross. In our second reading from the Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul, a weirdo in his own right, expresses his hope that he’ll “never boast except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Boast in the Cross? Now that’s weird. It’s easy for us, today, to romanticize the Cross. In fact, I’ll bet most of us here are wearing or carrying a Cross or Crucifix right now. But we can’t forget that the Cross was a brutal instrument of torture and death. “It was . . . the most humiliating and degrading form of capital punishment, a sign of weakness and defeat.”[2] Wearing a cross on a necklace in St. Paul’s time would be the equivalent today of walking around with an electric chair or hangman’s noose around your neck. Yet, we weird Catholics “see something else in the brutality of the Cross. We see that God himself has come to stand with us – shoulder to shoulder – in the muddy waters of our dysfunction, that [he’s] absorbed into his forgiveness every single one of the deadly sins, . . . [and] that [he’s] come to be judged in our place.”[3] That’s why Saint Paul tells us that there’s no earthly accomplishment worth boasting about more than the fact that Jesus freely chose to dwell among us and suffer and die for us on the Cross to reconcile us to God. That’s really weird, but it’s also really comforting. We Catholics are supposed to cling to and even boast about all this weirdness because it’s true, and its truth gives us hope. As we hear in our passage from Isaiah, God will comfort us in Jerusalem as a mother comforts her child. And Jesus, in our Gospel, assures us that the heavenly Jerusalem Isaiah’s talking about, the Kingdom of God, is at hand. It’s right here in our midst, though there’s much more to come. Unfortunately, many choose to ignore God’s presence in no small part because we’re afraid to embrace God’s weird ways in a world that condemns them as irrational and even dangerous. We want to fit in, so we conform our lives to the world’s ways, rather than God’s. We bury our faith in the catacombs of our minds and hearts, afraid to express it or even acknowledge it publicly, and we live without hope, a sad existence, for sure. We need to reclaim our hope. We need to embrace the Kingdom of God in our midst and immerse ourselves in all its weirdness. We need to walk, run, or bike the roads of Hunterdon County with a Rosary in hand. We need to proudly bear sooty crosses on our foreheads at work and at school on Ash Wednesday. We need to tell every coach, director, and club advisor that the Eucharist takes precedence over practice. In my experience, the deeper we dive into the weirdness of our Catholic Faith, the more we find that God’s Kingdom really is at hand. After reading the article, I have to agree with Theresa Barber: “It’s time to make Catholicism weird again. Not weird in a frivolous sense, but weird in this way: authentic Christian witness always looks strange to a world obsessed with power and picking sides.”[4] We need to be authentic witnesses to our faith in the world, as weird as it is, and wear that weirdness proudly, even if it means that we won’t fit in, and we’ll be criticized for it. It’s time to let our freak flags of faith fly. It’s time to get weird again, and I know you can do it. You’re naturals. Readings: Isaiah 66:10-14c; Psalm 66; Galatians 6:14-18; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20 [1] Theresa Civantos Barber, “Why American Catholics Need to Get Weird Again,” Aleteia (July 3, 2025), https://aleteia.org/2025/07/03/why-american-catholics-need-to-get-weird-again/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendgrid&utm_campaign=EM-EN-Newsletter-Daily-&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_term=20250703. [2] Frank J. Matera, Galatians, Sacra Pagina, vol. 9, Daniel J. Harrington, ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2007), 231. [3] Robert Barron, The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002). 164-165. [4] Barber, 2. Two Rings, One Love Print 111 Please login or register to post comments.