Here's some hints about today's gospel question.  We've seen dancing monkeys, talking frogs, the running of the squirrels.  We've been presented with geese in formation drinking mountain dew; a guy blow drying beer sprayed hair, a pepsi vendor surrounded by coke cans.  In just a few hours, they will unveil the next round of superbowl commercials.  For those whose teams are not in the big game, (go Rams) the commercials are a bigger attraction than the game is.  This year, advertisers will spend a minimum of 63,333 dollars a SECOND for each of those commercials.  63,333 a second to get their message out to as many people as possible.  Think tanks work all year for this day, working on the images that will impact our mind and hearts and pocketbooks as quickly and effectively as possible. 

It is called product placement, and there is a whole science that supports it. Trying to get you to associate a product with a value or a goal or desire. S.U.V.'s and adventure.  Cell phones and security.  Diamonds and faithfulness.  Trying to create within you the yearning for the product that will make you whole and entire, complete and full.  Ford dependability.  Ram tough.  BMW precision.  Different products, yet the same pitch.  "You need me to be complete.  Without me, your life will not have fulfillment and meaning.  With me, you will know happiness."  All at 63,333 dollars a second. 

And coming in at 2.73 x10-3 dollars per second- (or .273 cents per second) is a different message.   One that tells us that we are truly happy when we mourn, when we are hungry, when we are poor, when we lack power.  One that tells us life is not about possessions or products or having, but about being so empty that there is room for God.  On that tells us when we live that kind of vulnerability, it will spill out into mercy and compassion and peacemaking.  One that says to cap it all, we will know suffering and persecution.  All at .273 cents per second - which is the Newman Center's budget divided by seconds in a year...  "Blessed are the poor, the meek, the lowly, the hungry.  Blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers, those persecuted.  And I wonder how a superbowl commercial would handle this one? 

I can tell you how I would.  I would pan a camera around this room at the sign of peace.  I would do a close up of the choir in the midst of singing D. Mike's alleluia.   I would snap a picture of the Eucharistic ministers passing the cup. All with a voice over from people's journals during the service trip to Nazareth farms -about how they experienced life in the giving of the self away.  In the serving of others.  In the hungering and thirsting for others to know the blessedness that you know. 

It is the sermon on the mount, and it is all about Jesus' product placement. To put into our hearts a deeper truth about who we are as people and how we are to live.  To let God's vision be what moves within our hearts.   It is what Jesus reveals not in a superbowl moment, but in a simple message delivered on a mountainside.  It is what you and I know that gathers us here this morning. That we are about different stuff and a different vision than the world.  A truth which says we do not determine what makes us happy - but that there is a truth written deep within us that we can discover if we but look at this world with the eyes of Jesus.  Happiness happens as we hunger and thirst for wholeness.  Happiness is ours when we live in mercy and humility and peacemaking.  That happiness is ours when we allow Jesus' experience of humanity to be our experience.  That it is all about the trying and striving and loving, not about the having and possessing and taking. 

This is not the stuff of the 63,333 dollar a second commercials we will see in a few hours.  But it is the deepest truth, proclaimed on the mountainside, lived in a life of service, culminated in the emptiness of the cross and vindicated on Easter Sunday morning.  And I would take one life lived like that over all the money they spend on all the commercials.  One life lived in the spirit of the beatitudes is so much more effective than any commercial we will ever see...