Study after study proves something about us human beings that’s either very discouraging or just amusing, and it’s this: We are not very good at understanding how we’re doing. The research shows that people who are very good at what they do tend to be very self-critical and rate themselves lower than they should, and of course you know the opposite is true, that the worse people are at what they do, those people are more likely to be happy and quite confident about their skills. Perhaps you just thought this was the case only where you work. But no, it’s been proven to be true everywhere. This shows a…
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Jesus faced a problem in his ministry that he never really solved. If you had no credentials to speak of, but you had a message that people were going to find difficult, how would you convince people to listen? Sometimes what happened was what happened in today’s gospel. This woman at the well was enormously impressed with Jesus’ ability to tell her something about her past, to know without being told that she’d had five husbands. That got her attention, the mind-reading, and ultimately that seems to be the message that she runs off eager to tell her fellow townspeople. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever…
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Maybe you had your attention gripped last weekend by the same picture I saw on the front page of the Saturday New York Times. Those of you who were born in the past 25 years or so might not have even known the man in the picture. And in fact, even if he had been a familiar face to you years ago, as he was for me, time has been very hard on him, and you might not have recognized him. It was George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, and more notably even than that, one of the most visible opponents of the movement towards civil…
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Sometimes the scripture readings we hear don’t seem very human to us. Just for one example, there is that second reading today from the book of Revelation, angels surrounding a throne, countless creatures singing and shouting, everything in the universe all making a joyful, ecstatic noise at the same time. Perhaps that’s what resurrection will really be like, but it’s not a picture in which it’s easy to see ourselves, there dressed in white yelling our heads off, and liberated from everything. But the gospel today that we just heard is an entirely different story, it’s another resurrection story, but one with human beings in it that we ought to…
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I began a new experiment in my life this week, and I hope it’s not one I regret. I’m filling in for two months teaching 8th grade religion at the school my three daughters attend. That’s a recipe for trouble. I’m on my daughters’ territory. They each told me it was fine if I did this but I was given two instructions: First: I may never mention their names. Second: I may speak to them in the hall but only if they speak to me first. So I had trouble even before I got into the classroom and that’s when I encountered my second problem, which is what I had…
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We all like the idea of people getting “second chances.” It seems only fair, and it’s deeply ingrained in us. America is a country of second chances, a lot of times you hear it said that it’s the place where everyone can invent themselves all over again. If things don’t work out for you in one career, then just pick another one. If you need to get away from the place where you grew up, then just go somewhere else, maybe to California or Alaska, where everyone gets to start over, no questions asked. Starting over takes guts, we tell one another, and those who can pull it off deserve…
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During Advent, John the Baptist seems like the guest you’re sorry you invited to your holiday party, who has the magic gift of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to everyone. Here we are, trying to find some peace and quiet during our holiday preparations, or maybe to get some inspiration or a little of the Christmas spirit. But John the Baptist is talking about fire. And we get the impression that the fire he’s talking about is not this peaceful fire at the top of the Advent wreath, or a nice Christmas fire in the fireplace. This is a forest fire kind of fire, a fire with…
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There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last week he comes out of the desert in a spectacular way, brimming with confidence and certainty and dramatic things to predict, ready to say the Messiah is here, to proclaim a new age of liberation for everyone listening to him. This week, he is in prison, a prison that we know he will never leave alive, and his certainty has deserted him. He’s not so sure, apparently, that Jesus is the Messiah — and he sends some of his own followers to Jesus to see and hear what they can and report to him:…
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We are all very attracted to stories of people changing, maybe especially when they change dramatically. Even when these stories are pretty unlikely, like a well-known celebrity seen carrying a Bible into prison when previously it had seemed unlikely she had seen any book before in her life, much less a Bible, even those stories we’re suspicious about attract our attention. Because in our hearts we would like to believe that people can change, that people can find new directions and act on them. We might be cynical about it, but we want to believe. This gospel today is a story of Jesus suddenly changing, his transfiguration, we call it…
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There’s a wonderful novel that just came out called Lying Awake. It’s about a cloistered nun in California, who has visions, ecstatic religious visions, visions so intense that she has begun to write poetry about them. But she also has fierce headaches that attack her painfully, and seizures that leave her exhausted for days, and that are getting worse. She eventually consults a doctor, outside the cloister, who finds that she has temporal lobe epilepsy, and that an operation can cure her headaches and seizures, but it may also cure her of her visions. So she has a choice: She can stay in touch with what she believes is her…