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…
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Last week, I was at a meeting of some clergy. There’s a lot I’m not going to tell you about this meeting, because I feel the need of protecting the identities of the people involved. One thing I will assure you is that no one else here today was at this meeting. In fact, they weren’t all Catholic, so what I’m going to say isn’t singling out any particular denomination. It was depressing. The energy level was low, people drifted in, it took forever to get started, even the few things that needed to get settled took forever, people weren’t even all that friendly. Worst of all for me, they’d…
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Something clearly happened out there, something like a transfiguration, because this story is so important to the early church that it’s heard in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and every single year, on the Second Sunday of Lent, we hear about this ultimate religious experience. Surely if anything was going to change your life forever, it would be this. Jesus with just a few of his disciples, three to be exact, on the top of a high mountain, and an experience of light, and sounds, blinding visions and clouds. It revealed to this handful of disciples a secret, a powerful secret, who Jesus really was,…
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Three weeks ago, when Cardinal Bernardin died of cancer in Chicago, his death grabbed people’s attention, and made them stop and think. There were a lot of reasons for that: one was how he seemed so full of courage in the face of a painful illness, another was how many friends and admirers he seemed to have from every walk of life and every faith. But there was also simply how much he seemed to be able to accomplish in what turned out to be a very brief final act in his life. He knew that he was dying, of course, but instead of turning to privacy and withdrawing from…