Sometimes what you hear people saying that what they really need more of in life, is that they looking for balance. And it’s true that when we’re overwhelmed by all the things we feel pulling at us, that’s a very appealing concept. It’s great to think that we can get to a point of serenity, or at least sanity, by fine-tuning our commitments and interests so that no one of them takes over too much. We like to think there’s an art to dividing up our priorities and our time and the things we value, in a way that causes us as little internal conflict and discomfort as possible. I…
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Today in the gospel we have another parable about what the “kingdom of heaven” is like. And when we hear the word “heaven” we immediately think two things: first, something way off in the future, definitely not now, and second, a world operating in a very different environment, maybe in the clouds, where everyone is on their best behavior and a whole different set of rules apply. So when Jesus starts a story that says “the kingdom of heaven is like,” we think he means this is the way things will be like in heaven when things are perfect. It will be great — off there in the future, when…
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The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has 2,865 numbered sections, and in this edition it runs to at least 700 pages. In the index you’ll see that it covers topics from the Trinity to ordination to bioethics, and you can pull it down off the shelf to settle almost any argument about Catholic theology and customs and practices. If you want to know what the Catholic church teaches, a lot of it is right here. But here’s the problem with having that big a book as our catechism. It can make what you need to know and believe to be a Catholic Christian seem much more complex than it…
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Every few years, when the feast of Saints Peter and St. Paul happens to fall on a Sunday, it takes over the usual Sunday feast we would be celebrating. Peter and Paul are linked together like this because tradition says they both died as martyrs in Rome, at just about the same time in the first century. But despite the fact that in so many early Christian drawings they are often shown in an embrace, like brothers, in fact they are two very different people, and very real people. So today let’s think about them as people, and we’ll take three things about them as people that matter to lives…
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This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also…
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This is a gospel we wish we could have been there for, to see someone being raised from the dead. If you were directing a film, you couldn’t have set it up better: the crowd gathered around the tomb, the stone being rolled back, the dead man staggering out in his burial garments, maybe squinting at the sunlight. Even in Jesus’ own resurrection, we don’t have anything like this: so dramatic that John’s gospel says this was what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus had gone too far. Someone who could create a scene like this could do anything. But as for what happens before this great moment in the…
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I don’t know if this is as popular an act as it used to be, but I’m sure you’ve all seen someone who gets up in front of a crowd of people and at least pretends to be able to read people’s minds. They pick a volunteer out of the audience, and then the mind-reader, who supposedly has never seen this person before, tells him or her all sorts of things that it would be impossible for a stranger to know. Sometime it’s pretty vague — for example, the mind-reader says that the volunteer has a troubled relationship. And of course that’s an easy one — who doesn’t have at…
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We know Jesus was a great teacher, but in one area at least he left his disciples and the early church very confused. And it’s this nagging question about the end of the world, when it would happen, and exactly what would happen when it did. That particular question is almost entirely off of our radar in real life today, because our view of the end of the world is entirely different from the one we heard in today’s gospel. For us, that end is something that’s so far off in the future it’s not worth planning for, it’s a misty future time when planetary forces we barely understand gradually…
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Most of us think we aren’t very good at praying, or at least, that we could do a lot better in both the frequency and the content departments. But no matter how little we know about prayer one thing we do all know, that in this gospel the Pharisee shows us exactly how not to do it. “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity.” In a way, it’s an encouragement for the rest of us to get back to prayer, since really, almost anything incoherent we might decide to blurt out has to be better than this. It’s easy to laugh at this caricature…
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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…