At Carnegie Mellon University, near Pittsburgh, they have a tradition of inviting professors to give what’s sometimes called “The Last Lecture.” Teachers are asked to think about what matters to them, and sum up their philosophy, as if it’s the last lecture they will ever give. It’s a very popular series and usually attracts hundreds of students and faculty.

Last Tuesday, the professor invited to speak was a computer science teacher, Dr. Randy Pausch.

Randy is 46-years-old, married, with three small children, ages 5, 3 and 1.

And as everyone in that lecture hall knew: he is also dying. Randy Pausch has pancreatic cancer.

Chances are, by Christmas, he will not be alive.

Which made what he had to say this week all the more remarkable and important.

I ended up reading about his lecture in the Wall Street Journal. It was also covered on Good Morning America. The full video is getting thousands of hits on YouTube, and it’s also available at the Carnegie Mellon website, where I watched it the other day.

Watching this man’s lecture, I realized: Randy Pausch is the best homily I could give this weekend.

Randy is a very charming, youthful, funny guy. He doesn’t look sick. In fact, at one point during the lecture, he dropped to the floor and did one-handed push-ups and almost got a standing ovation for it. You would never have imagined he was dying.

But for about an hour, in a hushed lecture hall, he looked back on a life that is about to end, and talked about what he wanted others to know.

First of all, he wanted people to know about joy. At the beginning, he said that if anyone was expecting the talk to be depressing, they’d be disappointed. He showed slides of himself as a little boy, and pointed out, proudly, that he couldn’t find any pictures where he wasn’t smiling.

Watching this remarkable lecture, it was hard not to smile with him. And it was even harder, at times, not to cry.

Because Randy’s joy came from being forever young. His theme was about how to achieve your childhood dreams. Growing up, Randy had three big dreams: he wanted to design rides for Disneyland, write for the World Book Encyclopedia, and fly in zero gravity. He was a very imaginative little boy — a mathematical whiz kid who used to scrawl formulas on the walls of his room. His parents never painted over them, even though it hurt the resale value of their house home. And he told his listeners: “If your kids want to paint on the walls, do me a favor. Let them.”

He talked about other kinds of walls, too. After he graduated from college, he sent his resume to the Walt Disney Company, and got back a rejection letter. He was crushed. But he learned something: the barriers of life aren’t there to stop us, but to challenge us. “Brick walls,” he said, “are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want something.” He eventually did get to work for Disney – and achieved all his other childhood dreams, too.

But Randy said that in many ways helping his students fulfill THEIR dreams was more satisfying than achieving his own. And he offered this bit of wisdom – something so important, he repeated it to Diane Sawyer the other morning. Be patient, he said. Even with people who annoy you and make you angry.

“Wait long enough,” he said, “and people will surprise you and impress you.” Because everyone has good in them, he said. Just wait and you will find it. You may have to wait years. But it is there.

In Luke’s gospel today, Jesus tells us you can’t serve two masters, God and money. You have to choose what is important to you – the here and now, or what comes after.

Randy Pausch made his choice.

He chose to shake hands with death, instead of running from it. He chose to live his life, instead of waiting for it to end.

He chose to do something meaningful, designing software programs that would live on after he was gone – and giving this final talk that will be seen by people around the world.

Instead of grief, he chose grace.

The simple fact is: every moment, for each of us, is a moment of choosing.

The story of that last lecture has made me ask myself: if I were given the chance to do a “last lecture,” to sum up my life and what I’d learned, what would I say?

It’s worth asking ourselves that question.

What have we learned?

What are the walls that we’ve met in the course of our journey? And what did they teach us? What are the choices we’ve made? And why?

They are questions most of us don’t think about much. I suspect Randy Pausch didn’t think about them much, either, until he realized he didn’t have much time left.

Another lesson from his talk, I think, is very simple: don’t wait that long. Don’t wait until the end of your life to think about how you spent it. It’s been said the unexamined life is not worth living. Part of Randy’s message is: examine your life. Hold it up to the light. See the colors it reflects.

Randy didn’t speak explicitly about religion or God in his lecture. But I think God was IN that lecture. The God who takes joy in His creation. The God who marvels at what His creation is able to do.

Near the end, Randy said that there were things that were actually misleading about his talk. He used a sports term and called them “head fakes.” The first, he said, was that the lecture wasn’t really about how to achieve your dreams…but how to live your life. He said if you live your life the right way, the dreams will follow.

And the second “head fake,” he said, was that the lecture wasn’t really for all the students and academics sitting in that lecture hall. It was really, he said, for his three kids. It was his gift to them.

And what a beautiful gift it was.

What Dr. Randy Pausch offered in his talk was an enduring memory – a way for others to recall who he was and what he stood for.

But so is what we are about to do here, and now.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” Christ said. The Eucharist is His legacy to all those who came after him. It is the greatest of gifts, because it is Himself. It says: I am still with you. Remember that. Remember who I was, and what I stood for. And do this in remembrance of me.

And the scripture today asks us to do something else, too: to remember others. St. Paul, in his letter to Timothy, asks that we offer “supplications, prayers, petitions and thanksgiving for everyone.”

That includes Randy Pausch.

My friends, this weekend, I ask that you remember him in a special way. Pray for him and his family. And pray in thanksgiving for what he has given not only his children, but the rest of us.

He saw a blank wall and wrote on it. And he saw a brick wall and climbed over it.

What a beautiful way to live.

Because, when you think about it: it is also how Jesus lived.

I said earlier that I considered Randy Pausch’s life a homily. Maybe that, too, is another lesson from his lecture. Each of our lives can be a homily – preached with our actions and choices.

Think of that. And pray about that. Maybe the ultimate question isn’t “What would I say in my last lecture?”

But: “What am I saying…every day?”