Sometimes, like today, the first Sunday of Advent is on Thanksgiving weekend, and when that happens, it’s like Advent arrives even more suddenly than usual. Here we are, all distracted and maybe exhausted by the holiday, and now, the colors change, the mood changes, and something new is here, and kind of like the end of the world in this gospel reading, it takes us all by surprise. What are we supposed to do in this brief season that arrives so quickly, and that gives us just four weeks, which doesn’t give us very much time to do anything at all? Sometimes our first instinct is to think that Advent…
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Sometimes we tend to think we have a religion that’s about the past. People come up here to this lectern and read from scriptures that are thousands of years old, so we could be forgiven if we conclude that the primary focus of our faith is believing what happened back then. But today we find out that we also have a religion of the future. Our gospel has something just as important to say about what God will do in the future as it does about the things God did long ago. I think for many of us, this looking towards the future is harder for us. There are a…
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Three weeks ago, when Cardinal Bernardin died of cancer in Chicago, his death grabbed people’s attention, and made them stop and think. There were a lot of reasons for that: one was how he seemed so full of courage in the face of a painful illness, another was how many friends and admirers he seemed to have from every walk of life and every faith. But there was also simply how much he seemed to be able to accomplish in what turned out to be a very brief final act in his life. He knew that he was dying, of course, but instead of turning to privacy and withdrawing from…
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When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a science fiction show called The Time Tunnel. If you remember it, please come see me after mass and we can reminisce. The premise of the show was pretty simple, as I recall it. Some inventors had come up with a way to travel in time, but once they’d started traveling they couldn’t control the machine very well, so for each week’s episode they were randomly landed in the past or the future, one week on board the Titanic, one week in the future space age, then the next week all the way back to the dinosaurs. So…
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Every family tree has a few branches that have some people on them that you aren’t eager to have it generally known that you’re related to. My spouse will confirm from experience that I have more than a few branches like that, and this week I found myself remembering one of my cousins back in the Midwest. A few years ago this cousin went to the doctor and reported to him that she seemed to have pulled a muscle in her lower back while doing some heavy lifting in the garden. After examining her, the doctor informed her that she was expecting. In fact, he estimated that she was expecting…