In that first reading we heard from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard that the early church community in Jerusalem felt so close to one another that they did something amazing, they shared all their property as if it were all common property, the idea being that if anyone needed anything, they would be taken care of. The question is, where did they get this idea? It’s not as if Jesus told them that private property had been abolished, or really said anything at all about how his followers were supposed to organize themselves, or even if they were going to be very organized at all. But the resurrection…
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I’m sure you all remember the past when people used to attend sporting events in person. And in the end zones at football games you’d often see someone holding up a sign that said John 3:16. And of course that’s scriptural shorthand for one of the sentences in today’s gospel, the one that tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son to bring us eternal life. I imagine that the people in the end zones with those signs think that if you were going to see only one sentence from the gospel, only remember one thing, that this is the one. Are they right?…
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Almost every Lent, we hear this story of the man born blind. And it’s one of the essential stories for Lent because it’s about transformation — someone experiencing dramatic change and even liberation. And during Lent, that is what we are all after, a sense that something new is possible for us, something that frees us from whatever we need to leave behind. But what we also see in this story is that transformation isn’t easy. We can’t rise to something new without giving up the old. Even this story of the blind man, who is healed by Jesus without even asking for it, shows that change has unintended consequences.…
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As I was preparing to stand up here and preach on the Second Sunday of Lent I was struck by the fact that all the things the church usually says about what to do during Lent seem all wrong this year. I mean, I feel like Lent has already been going on for a year — didn’t Lent start last March and just never stop? We didn’t have Easter last year, we didn’t really have summer, I don’t think there was Christmas really. The mood for all of us has been subdued at best, and for many people it has been worse than that, a time of real loss and…
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If you ever read any of the gospels all the way through, every time you do it, something new will strike you that you have never noticed before. And I’ll bet that one thing you would notice sooner rather than later is how much of Jesus’s life was spent healing people. We tend to imagine a great deal of his life was spent talking, because so much care was taken to record some of the things he repeatedly said. But really, when he went from place to place, he must have spent more time healing people than preaching, and it’s that, more than his words, that drew enormous crowds to…
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We just heard two stories today, in that first reading and in the gospel, about God speaking to people very directly. So I think the question for today is, does God speak to people, and does he ever speak to us? The first problem we face trying to answer that question is this. We all have seen people who seem very sure God speaks to them all the time, and is it possible they’re delusional or confused? Unfortunately the answer is yes, it is quite possible. We’re human and we can all deceive ourselves or be deceived by others. Plenty of people manage to convince themselves they’re on God’s side…
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So if Advent is our season of waiting and expectation, what are we really waiting for in these last few days before Christmas? I think in today’s gospel we find out: We are waiting for someone to speak to us, with words about what is next — and not just generally, but next for us. We sometimes think those words are impossible. The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Advent waiting is like miners who are trapped in a coal mine, waiting for any noise off in the distance as a sign that someone, anyone, is coming to rescue them. Maybe especially we feel that way this year, we have all…
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Sometimes people say that we don’t know very much about what kind of a life awaits us after this life here on earth is over. And of course on the one hand that’s true, because no one here has ever seen it. But we do actually know something about what it’s going to feel like. There’s one consistent image that God has given us over and over in the scriptures, and it’s the image of a wedding feast. It’s a real disadvantage to be up here preaching about wedding feasts at a time like this, because right now it’s hard to remember what’s it’s like to be at a celebration…
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There are a few things in the gospel that Jesus was extraordinarily clear about, and one of them was that it is very, very dangerous any time we think we are in a position to judge the sins or the faith of other people. You can think immediately of Jesus telling the people who were ready to stone the woman taken in adultery that only if they were without sin themselves should they be throwing a stone. You can also remember he pointed out how eager we are to point out the speck in someone else’s eye when we can’t see the log in our own. He was pretty clear…
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I grew up in a big extended family that had only recently arrived in the United States, and like a lot of people with that kind of a history, my world growing up was divided into two parts. There were the people who were in my extended family and the people who weren’t. The people who were in the family were the people you were told you could trust, they were the people you helped before anyone else who might need helping, they were the people you spent all your time with, whether you wanted to or not. And as I got older, some of them definitely fell into the…