You probably already know this, but we have a parish of very intelligent people here, which of course is generally a good thing, but it makes for a tough audience for any preacher, and maybe even for today’s preacher in the gospel, Jesus. The week before last I was around the parish one evening, and I happened to mention to one particular parishioner that I’d be preaching this weekend. “What readings?” he asked, and I told him, “You know, that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells us that if our eye causes us to sin we should tear it out, and if it’s the hand, cut…
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I don’t know if you follow football, but last week there was a brief story that might help us think about today’s Gospel. A player for what everyone agrees is a bad NFL team dropped several important passes that apparently he clearly should have caught, and he single-handedly turned a losing effort into a disastrous one. After the game, on his Twitter feed, he sent a message to God, to whom he apparently prays very devotedly, and who, apparently, is also on Twitter, which of course makes sense if you think about it. And this player wasn’t happy. Unfortunately I have to leave out all the exclamation points and question…
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It’s the campaign season, and that means there are some time-honored rituals that are being re-enacted every day. One of them is the supposedly informal campaign meal, where the candidate, accompanied by plenty of cameras, eats and chats at a diner, or the food tent at a state fair, or even an ordinary home. It’s meant to show that the candidate is a regular person, like us, even though sometimes all this backfires just a little, like the candidate a few years ago whose staff told him that in Philadelphia he had better be seen eating a cheesesteak, even though in the pictures it was clear he had never seen…
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Psychologists have a video that they use in experiments to illustrate something about how humans observe things. They assemble a group of people to watch this video, but before they show it, they tell the group that the point of their watching is to notice people in the video throwing a ball to one another, and their assignment is to count the number of times this happens, the ball changing hands. After the video, they ask people what number they counted, and most people have a pretty accurate number. Then, the person showing the video asks everyone, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” People inevitably think he’s crazy —…
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The gospels are filled with things that Jesus said that we sometimes wish he had never said. About taking up the cross and following him. About the difficulties of being concerned about money and success. About how treatment of the poor is how we are measured as Christians. All those difficult phrases that stay with us, and bother us, and help us understand him better, difficult as they are. But today, on this feast of Christ the King, in the gospel we hear something that I wonder if Jesus himself regrets having said. Not because it isn’t true, but because it has long been so easy to misinterpret him, and…
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Today is Trinity Sunday, early June, a day when everybody’s ready for something upbeat and short, and instead the homilist, and you, face the Trinity. Let’s take the issue head on. Pick up a first-class theological textbook, and you’ll find sentences like this, and this is from the idiot’s summary at the end of the chapter on the Trinity. There are four relations among the Persons of the Trinity: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. Ah, but then we are told, there are only three subsistent relations, since active spiration is not really distinct from paternity or from filiation. Again, I don’t mean to go over old ground, since…
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Many years ago now, right after this church was built, I brought an old friend of mine over to see it. When he came in and looked at the setup of the place, he said, “This is the perfect arrangement for a Catholic church.” When I asked him why, he said, “More seats in the back than the front.” I don’t mean to put any heat on anyone in the back today, since I see some pillars of the church sitting back there even as I speak, but here is my question: If you had to place yourself on a map in terms of how close a relationship you have…
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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,…
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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…
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Picture for a moment a wild campaign party in a hotel ballroom on the night the polls close. Red, white and blue balloons, confetti, crowds of people waving signs, loud upbeat music, wild cheering every time the TV cameras cut live to the scene. But then gradually, the mood changes as the numbers come in, and those wildly high expectations begin to fade quickly. A concession speech from the would-be hero, and a little cheering, a few tears maybe, but after a few last drinks the crowd begins to trickle away, and the next morning we’re left with nothing but an empty ballroom with the depressing signs of celebration scattered…