In this last week before Pentecost Sunday, we’re hearing the last of a series of readings from John’s gospel, all taken from a monologue by Jesus that goes on for several chapters, the words that he spoke to the disciples on the night he was betrayed. Our gospels during the Easter Season every year are all from this long farewell message. Some of Jesus’s words are directed to the disciples themselves, emotional and beautiful words, although sometimes hard for us to understand. But today we reach a kind of climax, since now Jesus is addressing not the disciples but his father, God the father, and now what he says is…
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For the past weeks after Easter we have been hearing gospel readings from one long scene in the gospel of John that on the surface are all about a long goodbye. All these gospels, including today’s, take place on the last night that the disciples and Jesus had together, the night before Good Friday. They are still in the same room, on the same evening, when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet as an example of how they should live. But they are still up late into the night talking, and there’s unspoken tension in the air, because everyone knows that the next night Jesus will be dead, and nothing will…
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Let’s all be honest here, and say right up front that there are probably some hymns we sing all the time here at St. David the King, that you don’t particularly care for. I checked with Carol Sullivan over there and she said it’s OK for me to talk about this — just this once. You know the feeling I’m talking about. When the cantor announces that song of yours, your shoulders slump, you might pick up the hymnal for the sake of appearances, but your heart’s not in it, and you might just be moving your lips. Here is my embarrassing confession. For me, that song is “They’ll Know…
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Those of you who experienced Catholic education as it was a number of years ago will be glad to know that many of its features are alive and well in the training program for deacons in our diocese. One of those features is that there are certain phrases and things they say that you hear so often that the words become a part of you, whether you want them to or not. One of those things I heard often over the past 3½ years is that deacons have the mission of doing their ministry “in the world,” that that is where their special work is to be done. But there…