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…
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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,…