If this gospel scene we just heard were a Hollywood movie, with these first two apostles suddenly dropping everything and knowing they just had to follow Jesus, we know how it would look. Jesus would appear on the scene and immediately we’d know who he was, there would be something mesmerizing about Jesus, probably very handsome, certainly more handsome than anyone else in the movie. You’d be able to tell from hundreds of feet away that there was something powerful about him, he’d look like he was calm and composed and somehow not of this world, with a far-away look. His eyes would lock onto these two followers of John…
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There are endless jokes about the scene that confronts people after they die. Most of them involve St. Peter, and a gate, and a large book in which records of their lives are kept. These stories might also involve three priests, or a priest, a minister and a rabbi. Many of the funniest ones, for some reason, involve lawyers. You’ve all heard them. They all tend to hinge on what you have to do to get through the gate into heaven, and there’s usually a lot of confusion and strange loopholes, or cases of mistaken identity or complicated questions you get asked. Maybe we tell so many jokes because the…
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Sometimes the Bible gives us a break, and there’s a story with some images that are actually familiar to us from everyday life. Today instead of sheep, and fig trees, and jars of oil, we have an image of something we have around us everywhere: taxes and money. But I hate to tell you, even with money, things were very complicated around this time in Jesus’s life, so there’s a little explanation that might be helpful in understanding the scene we’ve just heard. There were actually two kinds of money circulating in Jerusalem. First there were the Roman coins that were issued by the occupying power, which some Jews felt…
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For people in public life, there are a lot of embarrassing things you can do these days. You can steal money, or have a secret romantic relationship, or tell an obvious lie. But it seems these days that one of the most embarrassing things you can do is to change your mind. I’m not talking about a little talking out of both sides of your mouth, where you tell one group of people one thing they want to hear and another group something slightly different that they want to hear. That’s still acceptable – in fact it’s almost a job requirement to be in politics, I guess. What I’m talking…
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If you ever visit Rome and go to the basilica of St. Peter’s, the first time you see it, no matter how jaded you are, you’ll be overwhelmed by its size and scale. In the midst of all the spectacle, you may not even notice that in the center, carved around the bottom of the dome in what seem like ten-foot letters, are the words Jesus speaks in today’s gospel: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. All this, because Peter answered the question from Jesus in today’s gospel: Who do you say that I am? I hear, by the way, they have made it…
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There’s a portrait of Jesus you’ve probably seen that a lot of people like. It shows Jesus laughing, and it’s true that over the centuries we have seen so many images of Jesus showing him as some otherworldly being, that it’s good sometimes to picture him as human, someone like us. Because he was. If that is your main picture of Jesus, though, today you have to make a change in the way you picture him. Because today in this gospel we see another side of Jesus, a Jesus we don’t often seek out, the Jesus who turns our lives completely upside down. I don’t know if we can avoid…
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St. Paul says something disagreeable to us in that second reading: He says that we do not know how to pray. On the surface, it’s a harsh judgment, because many of us are here every week trying to pray, after all. But the fact is, it can be very hard to feel like we do know how. and many of us would find it hard to tell someone that we know how to pray, with the same confidence we would tell them we know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Prayer can be hard; everyone who prays struggles with distractions, everyone wonders if they are using the…
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I am not a morning person. Usually, my best times for work and concentration do not have the letters “a.m.” associated with any of them, and if I’m ever up at 5:00 in the morning, it usually means I’ve made a horrible decision about scheduling a flight out of town. But this past week I was down at the shore, and we were staying right on some tidal wetlands that extended out our back window. One morning last week, well before sunrise, I was completely overwhelmed by what it’s like in a place like that right before the sun comes up. In the midst of darkness, the noise of hundreds,…
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Suppose you flipped past the Discovery Channel some evening and you saw a documentary about a primitive tribe, just rediscovered by some anthropologists, who made their promises in a ritual where they slaughtered animals, smeared the blood on themselves, and on everything, and on the altar they set up to their god? If you didn’t change the channel immediately, it would be hard not to have a reaction that says: Thank God we’ve moved beyond that stage of evolution. Then, of course, you’d come here, and today, on this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are presented with the same problem. Readings with covenants of blood everywhere,…
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The experience of being excluded, on the outside looking in, is a painful part of life. Maybe you have a memory of being the last kid chosen for a baseball team, or not chosen at all. OK, I confess, that was me in grade school, and I vividly remember the coach’s name. Or, maybe you have at one time or another found yourself suddenly fired from a job, an outsider after years of being an insider. But exclusion can get much uglier. Any week, you can read the stories of Christians in parts of the world who find themselves hated and persecuted and the targets of violence, or gay teenagers…