We all love the Christmas message, which is that there is a God of love who cares about this world enough to be with us. And now we find out something more, what we find out is that God doesn’t just love us. In the end, God wins. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Like at Christmas, the signs of this aren’t always spectacular. There is just an empty tomb, and the reports of people who are absolutely certain about what they saw and experienced, which is that someone they knew and loved was fully alive and present in a completely new way that no…
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My mom was not a mean person at all, but she had a few phrases that she would use whenever she saw something in this world that really irritated her, and what often irritated her was people who put themselves forward in what she thought was a big-headed or pushy way. And when that happened, the phrase you’d hear was, “Who does he (or she) think he is?” I grew up in the Midwest, where traditionally people who put on airs are regarded with great suspicion, but I don’t think this is just a midwestern thing. I suspect that many of us have grown up with this phrase or something…
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So let’s take a moment and think back before Christmas, if you can, back when we heard about John the Baptist here in the gospel readings. We heard about him back in Advent because he was someone who felt called by God to be on the lookout for God alive and active in this world. He believed that God was sending someone to us, someone who would change everything. John attracted huge crowds and gotten them very excited, telling them that he, John, was not that person, but that when that person came, you’d know him. And yet, when Jesus came, John did not know him. He says twice in…
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What is the hardest thing to understand about this faith we try to follow? You might say that maybe it’s the Trinity, after all, that is sometimes described as a mystery. Sometimes, the more it’s explained to you, the worse it gets, so I suspect that would be a typically Catholic answer to this question. But I think maybe the thing that most of us struggle with the most to believe, maybe without realizing it, is what we hear in that first reading from the book of Wisdom. It’s that God loves everything God has created. That means every single individual thing, including you as an individual, and not only…
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We somehow imagine that the disciples, living with Jesus each day as they did, had some clear advantages over us in the faith department. But the disciples have the same reaction to hearing Jesus’s view of the world that we do, they say, “Give me more faith.”
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If someone asked you what Jesus’s story of the prodigal son was all about, you’d probably say that it was about forgiveness, that it’s about God’s willingness to welcome almost anyone back to his heart no matter how far they had left God behind. And of course if you gave that answer you wouldn’t be at all wrong. If we take anything away from this story it’s that image of a son on the way home from far away, and the father running out to welcome him before he even got there. That is the way God is, always more eager to embrace us than we have any reason to…
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In the gospel of Luke, meals are important. In fact, Jesus’ life in that gospel is punctuated with at least ten different meals. But they are more than just scenes in a play, a good way to bring people together and have them interact. Because all these meals, to Luke, are also an image of the future. Here’s something important to take away from this gospel. Luke believes not only that the eucharist is a meal, but that our whole life, eternal life with God, is like a meal. It is his vision of the future that awaits us. Whatever heaven is, what it’s most going to be like is…
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This is one of those difficult gospel readings that has a way of catching us by surprise here on a quiet summer weekend, when out of nowhere, probably when we are hoping for some lighter content, we hear from a frustrated Jesus that we barely recognize. Jesus is clearly upset today that people around him are not hearing what he is really saying, maybe even his closest disciples don’t get it, he is telling them that his message is stronger medicine than everyone seems to think. And as a result we get Jesus saying some things that just don’t fit with the way we like to picture him. The man…
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We are all immediately attracted to a story where it looks like there is a clear hero and a clear loser, someone who gets it and someone who doesn’t. There are plenty of great gospel stories that fit into that pattern, starting with the story of the good Samaritan we heard last week coming to the aid of the stranger at the side of the road. That wouldn’t be as good a story if we didn’t first see the priest and the levite walk right by not noticing and not caring, and then the Samaritan, the only one whose eyes and heart are actually open. It’s very tempting to see…
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You all may or may not be aware of this, but our church in the United States is beginning today on this feast of Corpus Christi a period of several years when our bishops are hoping that we will focus on Christ’s presence in the eucharist. And there’s a story behind why they want to do this. It all started a few years ago when a survey was conducted among American Catholics that suggested that most Catholics don’t believe that Christ is truly present in the eucharist, that it is “just a symbol” of his presence with us. And not only don’t most Catholics say they believe it, the survey…