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…
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Today I’d like to talk for a couple of minutes about one of my favorite architectural features of this church. And I hope my choice isn’t too controversial, although I suspect that many of you don’t care for it, or haven’t given it much thought one way or the other. It’s not the cross, or the tabernacle, or the baptismal font, although I love them all, and I could go on for some time about why I do. The feature I really like, that almost no other church has, are these windows. Now some of you may not like these windows very much, because after all the view outside is…
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Recently I’ve had the experience of moving my parents from a big house into a smaller apartment. And if you’ve never done anything like this in your family, when it does comes up, take my advice, and do whatever you have to do to be out of town on urgent business the weekend it happens. It’s not the physical labor of doing it. It’s not even the challenge of trying to sort through years’ worth of accumulated stuff, trying to make decisions about what you’re going to get rid of to fit a whole houseful of things into a small apartment. No, it’s the resistance that you meet at every…