Before this, everything was clear. God was God. People knew where to look to find God. It was a world of stark contrasts. The way you knew God was on your side was that you prospered in life, lived long and healthy, were free from oppression, got what you deserved. Your enemy, on the other hand, was vanquished. When this happened, it was a sign that God was present. When it didn’t, it was a sign that God’s favor had been withdrawn from you, until a time when it might suit God to relent — or perhaps, it just meant that God for some reason no longer cared. Think of…
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We could be forgiven if we come here today completely confused about what kind of a God we really have. Who would have expected, one year ago, that we would now be looking back on a year of wars that are called holy, a year of suicide bombings and murder in the name of religion, a year when our church itself has proven, if it needed proving, that it is not the holder of all truth and good judgment. So much suffering. So little reason for it. No clear way to end it. So many people thinking God is on their side. We think that God must have turned away,…
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We know this story so well, that it has a life of its own, event follows event with a sense of inevitability, we know what’s coming next at every point. Over time, it seems to us that it couldn’t have been any other way. But Jesus’s death was the most avoidable death imaginable. At every turning point in this story, there’s an opportunity for Jesus to escape his crucifixion. He could have avoided Jerusalem entirely. He could have snuck through one of the legal loopholes that Pilate seemed, at some level, to want to offer him. He could have laid low for a year or two until things settled down.…
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I’m sure the last thing might think you want right now, after nine long scripture readings, would be yet more salvation history laid out for you. But we should be honest, and say that deep down, there’s a part of the story we do still want to hear. Jesus’ resurrection comes nearly at the end of the scriptures we have, but now here we are two thousand years later, in a very different world, and the missing reading we want to hear now is, what will happen to us, what’s the end of the story? We know the resurrection is the end of our story, too, but frankly, our imaginations…
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Maybe you saw the study recently in the New York Times about what Catholics believe about the eucharist. Like many surveys of Catholics, it disturbed a great many people. It reported that more than 60% of Catholics said that Jesus was not really present in the eucharist as the body of Christ, but that the bread and wine were really more like a symbolic reminder of him and his life. Many people saw this and wondered what it is that’s wrong with people in the church, with the way we teach people, or maybe about how we do liturgy, that accounts for the fact that people no longer believe that…