One of the most striking things about the gospel stories is that calling disciples was one of the first things Jesus did. It was central to what he was about from the very beginning. So let’s ask ourselves today, what does it mean to be a disciple? And what I will propose is that there are two things we can learn about it. On the one hand, of course, it involves following Jesus, which means learning from him, and spending so much time with him getting to know him and the way he is that you gradually have his life in front of you all the time, and at different…
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to interest one or two people around the parish in the idea of becoming a deacon. I’m thinking ahead here, since down the road, the parish will really need this. But so far I haven’t been very successful, and maybe one reason is that not long into the conversation, it comes out that the preparation process to be a deacon adds up to about five years. It sounds especially long since unlike when I was in the program 25 years ago, those five years now involve much more actual work than they ever had us do. Five years part-time to be a…
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Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve lived around Princeton Junction now for more than 30 years, and I’ve been part of this parish for almost all that time, almost 20 of them as a deacon. And on the one hand I wonder of course what’s happened to my life so quickly, it wasn’t at all what I had planned, at one point I was hoping for a lot more excitement than you get in West Windsor. But on the other hand the fact is that being around a place and a group of people for so long is a tremendous pleasure in life. No matter where I…
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For all of the whining many of us do about getting older, there are a lot of pluses that it brings, along with the downside, like the inability to stay out late at a party without falling asleep. Just the other day, someone who had just passed a big milestone told me that she thought age brought a lot of benefits: When you’re younger, you don’t have a very good sense of yourself, you’re a lot more upset by things, you don’t know where you stand in life, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who you are, and where you belong. When you’re older, on…
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Perhaps because it’s an election year, but after reading this gospel I found myself remembering the presidential race twelve years ago, and one of the indelible images from the failed campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. As part of his image-building effort, his handlers at one point convinced him to be photographed standing up in an army tank as it zipped around in exercises. Now Governor Dukakis was not a tall man, and he was wearing a little round helmet, with his arms glued to his sides, and he wound up looking not like a president, not like a tank commander, but like the old cartoon character Atom Ant. Along…
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Now’s not bad, but April or May is really the right time for this parable of the sower and the seed. That’s the time of year when you can feel the picture that’s being presented here. It’s when you go out and look at your car or your outdoor furniture and run your hand along it and you see that yellow film of millions of grains of pollen, and you may be sneezing or you may not be, but what you notice is that there are so many you can’t possibly count them. Or maybe you see the field of dandelions across the street from my house, placed there just…