I don’t know if you follow football, but last week there was a brief story that might help us think about today’s Gospel. A player for what everyone agrees is a bad NFL team dropped several important passes that apparently he clearly should have caught, and he single-handedly turned a losing effort into a disastrous one. After the game, on his Twitter feed, he sent a message to God, to whom he apparently prays very devotedly, and who, apparently, is also on Twitter, which of course makes sense if you think about it. And this player wasn’t happy. Unfortunately I have to leave out all the exclamation points and question…
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During Advent, John the Baptist seems like the guest you’re sorry you invited to your holiday party, who has the magic gift of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to everyone. Here we are, trying to find some peace and quiet during our holiday preparations, or maybe to get some inspiration or a little of the Christmas spirit. But John the Baptist is talking about fire. And we get the impression that the fire he’s talking about is not this peaceful fire at the top of the Advent wreath, or a nice Christmas fire in the fireplace. This is a forest fire kind of fire, a fire with…
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There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last week he comes out of the desert in a spectacular way, brimming with confidence and certainty and dramatic things to predict, ready to say the Messiah is here, to proclaim a new age of liberation for everyone listening to him. This week, he is in prison, a prison that we know he will never leave alive, and his certainty has deserted him. He’s not so sure, apparently, that Jesus is the Messiah — and he sends some of his own followers to Jesus to see and hear what they can and report to him:…