The Pentecost reading we heard first today describes something that sounds hard to believe in, It is the Holy Spirit finally arriving as Jesus said it would and what it really is, is a picture of real liberation. First it seems to bring an enormous release of energy. These disciples have been locked in a room, puzzled about what is next, maybe just a little the way we’ve been locked up for more than a year, but all of a sudden they feel a tremendous readiness to get out of there. And when they do, there are suddenly no barriers of communication between them and total strangers, they find words…
-
-
Jesus told the disciples a lot of things that they had trouble understanding, even some things they probably had a problem believing. One of those things was this, he said that after he was dead and gone from them, leaving them behind, that they would actually be better off and more fortunate then, and the reason he gave was that then, they would have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, he said, would give them everything they needed and more, not just to live, but to live in joy, to live as his followers, to be able to do the great things he told them needed to be done. So why…
-
The first reading today, that famous reading from the Acts of the Apostles, takes us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back in time to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples not as these almost miraculous leaders, but in a room waiting for something to happen to them. It’s hard not to wonder what that felt like, and what they were thinking. The picture probably didn’t seem promising. These were people who had in their time abandoned Jesus, misunderstood instructions,…
-
On Patriots Day, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, there was a man who had been through a lot in life. He’d been through more than any of us, we hope, will ever have to face. One of his sons had been killed in Iraq about ten years before, and when this man heard the news, he became despondent, and ultimately set himself on fire with a can of gasoline and a propane torch. He survived, but five years later he lost another son, who himself committed suicide, never having recovered from the family’s loss. When the bombs went off that day at the finish line, in the…
-
Sometimes when you’re a kid, things seem normal to you just because you don’t know any better. It’s only later you find out that something everyone else seemed to accept wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. For example, I had an aunt when I was growing up who once stayed in her room for six years. You could visit her there, if you wanted to, and we did when we came over. People in my family said she just needed a “breather.” But it was only years later that thinking back, I could realize how depressed and unhappy she must have been to lock herself up like that,…
-
Lately, where I work, I’ve been on a project that hasn’t been going so well. Actually, it’s not going all that badly, but we seem to have a need to get a lot of people together and pick at the topic of how things are. So what’s happened is that a big group sits together, every day at 4:00, and talks about “the problem.” We sit in a room where someone always closes the door; and there are windows into the hallway with those little venetian blinds, and they’re always shut. I’m not sure if it’s so we’re not distracted by what’s outside, or so that people can’t look in…