We all know this is the age of multitasking, of trying to do many things at the same time. Many times, we look pretty funny doing it. I was once at a business meeting at a television network, where of course they have televisions in every conference room, and they’re on; and all through this so-called meeting, all the network guys kept darting their eyes over to the screen, checking whatever was on their network instead of looking at whoever was speaking in the room. I’m not sure what they were looking for, but the result of all that eye-shifting was to make people who were already reputed to be…
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I can’t hear the names Martha and Mary without thinking of my own family. I had an aunt Martha and an aunt Mary, and five other aunts besides, sisters all living in the same town. And while today’s gospel story clearly means to contrast Martha and Mary to make its point, in fact my aunts were pretty much all of a piece, and if we’re to be guided by today’s gospel, they might all just as well have been named Martha. My experience of them has always been from big family get-togethers that one or the other of them was hosting, and I don’t think I saw my aunt Martha…
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For all of the whining many of us do about getting older, there are a lot of pluses that it brings, along with the downside, like the inability to stay out late at a party without falling asleep. Just the other day, someone who had just passed a big milestone told me that she thought age brought a lot of benefits: When you’re younger, you don’t have a very good sense of yourself, you’re a lot more upset by things, you don’t know where you stand in life, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who you are, and where you belong. When you’re older, on…
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Perhaps because it’s an election year, but after reading this gospel I found myself remembering the presidential race twelve years ago, and one of the indelible images from the failed campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. As part of his image-building effort, his handlers at one point convinced him to be photographed standing up in an army tank as it zipped around in exercises. Now Governor Dukakis was not a tall man, and he was wearing a little round helmet, with his arms glued to his sides, and he wound up looking not like a president, not like a tank commander, but like the old cartoon character Atom Ant. Along…
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Now’s not bad, but April or May is really the right time for this parable of the sower and the seed. That’s the time of year when you can feel the picture that’s being presented here. It’s when you go out and look at your car or your outdoor furniture and run your hand along it and you see that yellow film of millions of grains of pollen, and you may be sneezing or you may not be, but what you notice is that there are so many you can’t possibly count them. Or maybe you see the field of dandelions across the street from my house, placed there just…
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Taking one of the four gospels and reading it all the way through, from beginning to end, is a valuable thing to do every now and then. And one of things you might notice when you read a gospel, is how much of Jesus’s time was spent not preaching, not recruiting disciples, but healing, finding some of the sick and the troubled in every town either because they seek him out or he seems to seek them out, and touching them, and relieving their pain. Today we have two stories in the gospel. Story number 1: this man called Jairus, whom this translation calls an official of the synagogue. He…
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There are a few phrases about God that people use all the time that sometimes we should slow down and think about more closely. Today I would like to draw your attention to one of them, a little phrase from an 18th-century poem that actually has always driven me a little crazy: The Lord works in mysterious ways. Let’s be honest: You know when you last heard this phrase, or when you said it yourself: I’ll bet it was the last time you heard of something bad, but not too bad, happening to someone, or even more likely I’ll bet it was the last time you heard of someone succeeding…
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A long time ago when I was first telling my friends that I’d been accepted into the formation program for deacons, one of my particularly good friends wasn’t at all happy about it. He wasn’t impressed with the deacons he’d met up to that point, I guess, because his response was, “What do you want to do that for?” He stumped me there for a minute with that question, and I mumbled something or other in response, but he wasn’t having any of it. “What do you get to do, at the end of mass you say, ‘The mass is ended, let us go in peace’?” I said, yeah, I…
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I once took a three-day summer course from a teacher at Princeton Theological Seminary, who was a fairly intimidating figure. There was one thing he said that intimidated me much more than anything else. He said that when he taught a full-semester course on preaching, as opposed to the three-day easy one that I took, he insisted that no one could pass the course unless they could memorize the entire Sermon on the Mount and stand up in front of the class and deliver it. For those of you who haven’t checked lately, the Sermon on the Mount runs nonstop for three full chapters in the Gospel of Matthew, about…
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If you read the report from the September 11 Commission, I can’t blame you if you couldn’t read much more than the first chapter. It’s a very sober narrative of plane flight after plane flight leaving early that morning. The straightforward words make the sheer heartlessness of it all overwhelming. Reading that stayed with me for a few weeks, until the image of evil I was carrying around in my mind was replaced by pictures from the front page of the New York Times. The unforgettable photograph of an Iraqi militant battling Americans in Najaf, standing on the ledge of a window of a Moslem shrine, his face grotesquely distorted…