John the Baptist is one of the saints that everyone knows, but I think it’s fair to say that he is not anyone’s favorite saint, and it isn’t hard to see why. He seems primitive, coming from the desert looking like someone who has lost his connection with civilization. He seems threatening, talking about fire and wrath. And here in December, he really doesn’t seem very positive or upbeat or Christmassy. That’s because every year, he is trying to tell us something that is hard to believe and hard to focus on. John is the saint who tells us both that something is coming but also that something is wrong.…
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I think I speak for many Catholics when I say that gospel readings like the one we just heard really aren’t our style. All this talk about end-time persecutions, and wars that mean the world is just about over. This sounds like the kind of talk we usually leave to what we think of as more fringe-y Christians who think the end of the world is coming very quickly, and they are often people who seem to want it sooner rather than later, because it’ll be so great to be proved right about the winners and losers. But for the rest of us, we usually think something more like, I’ve…
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We hardly need a homily to give us the secret meaning of a gospel like this one. It’s not very subtle. It’s an unforgettable image, what the reading describes as a great chasm after death, a chasm between all the people we could have helped and us, but with the roles now reversed, the poor rewarded, the rich with nothing. It’s a nightmare of eternal life that we’d like to think would shake us up, give us enough of a cold sweat to change some priorities, like when the ghost of Christmas yet to come finally put the fear of God into Ebenezer Scrooge. And yet the point of this…
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Jesus was asked a lot of questions as he walked from town to town during his life, and he answered all of them, but he answered them in his own way. At first, it might seem like he always avoided the questions, because he rarely answered the question people thought they wanted answered. But he had his own way of doing this. He wasn’t like a politician who says “I’m glad you asked that question” and then proceeds to answer a totally different one. What Jesus does is answer the real question, the important life or death question, not the nitpicky religious question that frankly are usually the ones that…
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Like many people as they get older, I tend to think of myself in my mind as much younger than I am, but the reality all comes out now and then and it’s usually when I mention an entertainer or a politician who was active when I was young and I of course know all about, whereas everyone under 30 in the room looks at me like I just mentioned that I know someone from ancient Rome. Today I’m going to give you just that experience, since I want to start with a brief story about the old 20th-century comedian Jack Benny. Jack’s character throughout his career was that he…
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About a week ago I had what I thought was a terrific party at my house. It was celebrating a happy occasion and a great person, and over the course of an evening there were dozens of people there, everyone someone I really liked. It was a celebration of how much we all had in common, and it made me feel pretty good about the world. Today in the gospel we have a different sort of dinner party, but unlike mine there’s a sudden drama that gets acted out in the middle of this one. A person comes in who doesn’t act like anyone else. It takes place in the…
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In Jesus’s last few days before his passion and death, and again when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, he seemingly said one word more than any other: peace. “Peace I leave with you,” he says today, “my peace I give to you.” And to a group of tense and frightened disciples who were confused about what the next day was going to bring, they must have been welcome words. A sense of peace was what they wanted and needed. And yet, after these beautiful and reassuring words, the disciples didn’t get very much peace. Immediately after this passage, Jesus says, “Arise, let us leave this place,” and…
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There are a lot of things about Jesus it’s relatively easy to believe. For example, we can believe that of all good people, he was the best. We can believe that no one else in history embodied the love of God so completely. We can believe that of all the great saints the world has produced, he is the one most worth following. But what is hard to believe is this: When Thomas the disciple says that he can’t believe Jesus is alive unless he sees him with his own eyes, I think we all know in our hearts the frustration he is talking about. We wish we could see…
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The story that we’ve just heard is one that seems to show the world at its worst, all in one horrifying day. A good man is left to die alone, isolated, without support, rejected. His friend and best disciple, the one who understands him best, decides he is more worried about self-preservation than he is about telling the truth. Everything about Jesus’s life and his mission has fallen apart quickly in a day of misunderstandings and chaotic power politics; there’s an ugly crowd shouting for violence, trying to find a scapegoat they barely know to blame for their frustrations. All these things we’d say are the world at its worst,…
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This gospel comes at the end of a sequence of three stories Jesus tells about how we are supposed to feel about those who are lost. First it’s a lost sheep, where the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep who aren’t lost to find the one that is; then a lost coin, where a woman sweeps the house until she finds the one she lost, even though she has nine others; and now finally a much longer and more complicated story of a lost son, or maybe, given the end of the story, it should be the story of two lost sons, since it turns out that there are different ways…