The Real Deal

It was too broad.
It was the parable of the unjust steward, so I opened with an illustration of integrity and claimed that Jesus is promoting integrity in his disciples. But I also layered the theme of dedication on top of it. I also backed up further and tried to give them the context of the parable.
In the end I found myself having bit off way more than I could chew, so I switched to an exhortation to the faithful fulfillment of the Sunday obligation as an example of how to live Christian integrity. The early version took 15 minutes, I cut the evening version down to 12. 9 minutes of it would still have been too long. I had too many points again.
I think I saw myself with 2 of the most popular mass times and got psyched into trying to hit a home run.
Some parts of the homily were fine and valuable. But on the whole, I needed to clean it up.
Not fun.

The Prodigal Son, of course.

It's amazing how quickly our sorrow turns to joy with God.
I started with a visual of the recovery of a lost two-year-old at the school picnic.
This sorrow-to-joy sequence happens in the parable, it happens through Christ, it happens the sacraments of Penance and Communion.

How do you hate your mother?

I received a helpful critique from a gentleman after the homily.
He said I posed the question, but failed to answer it.
That was helpful, because I think he's right.
I didn't address fully what Jesus meant by the particular word "hate."
I think I moved too quickly from that to the main point of my homily.
Either that or I gave too much emphasis to the word, built it up too much and transitioned away from it to a more important point without resolving the problem.

Anyway.

I didn't really preach on the 'hate' we're supposed to have so much as our innate ability to give everything away for our pursuit of holiness, happiness.