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…
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King Solomon in our first reading told God that he wanted to be wise, and apparently God granted this wish. If you continue reading the story of Solomon, you’ll read the part where Solomon judges between two women arguing over possession of a baby. Solomon proposes to split the baby in two as a way of settling the argument, and the reaction of the two women reveals who the real mother is. It’s supposed to show how wise he was. But the fact is, Solomon was not always wise. He was a king, and the powerful especially lose sight of wisdom all the time. It turned out his kingdom started…
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Jesus told the disciples a lot of things that they had trouble understanding, even some things they probably had a problem believing. One of those things was this, he said that after he was dead and gone from them, leaving them behind, that they would actually be better off and more fortunate then, and the reason he gave was that then, they would have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, he said, would give them everything they needed and more, not just to live, but to live in joy, to live as his followers, to be able to do the great things he told them needed to be done. So why…
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Most people who know me find out very quickly that I am a dog person. And not only am I completely crazy about my own dog, I’m nuts about dogs in general. So one thing I have been doing these past few weeks of isolation is spending way too much time watching dog videos. (I’m not ashamed, we’re all doing what we need to do to cope.) What I’ve become particularly addicted to is watching a couple of sheep farms in England that each have a pack of working sheepdogs, and not only have I learned things about dogs, my picture of sheep has been turned upside down. Most of…
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The writers of our gospels did a brilliant job portraying Jesus’ death, and we can see it and feel it so intensely since we know death, and a world in desolation and disappointment isn’t so hard to imagine. But when it comes to the resurrection, the gospel’s descriptions seem unlike anything we know. They present us with a hint of the future, our future, that it is hard to hold onto. Unexpectedly, Jesus has returned, not the way he was before, but reborn into something new. His body is still a body, people can touch it and hear it and see it, but at the same time, he is much…
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I’ve been leading this Good Friday service here for more than 20 years, but I’ve never seen the sight I’m looking at now, which is 600 empty places. It seems all wrong, but in a way, maybe it’s not. This liturgy is partly about a deep feeling of emptiness that comes upon all of us. At the end of this gospel we just heard, everyone has scattered, the entire cast of characters of the gospels has disappeared, there’s a tomb with a stone in front of it, this great city where something amazing was supposed to happen seems suddenly deserted, and night has come. On Good Friday this is where…
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In a normal year, we would have palm fronds in our hands at the beginning of mass this Sunday. We’d hear a gospel account of Jesus’ “triumphant” entrance into Jerusalem, with a cheering crowd waving palms and spreading them on the road in front of him. But one of the ironies of Palm Sunday is that just a half hour later in that same Sunday mass, the palms have become something else. It turns out this wasn’t a triumphant procession at all — in fact, in the end it was a rather hollow moment. At the end of today’s passion reading from Matthew, we don’t see Jesus victorious, but deserted…
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We hear all the time that what we want as Christians is a personal relationship with Jesus. And when people say that, if you’re like me, it makes you feel uncomfortable. For the cynical, it can sound like having an imaginary friend, someone you make up conversations with as if you were really talking. At a deeper level, though, maybe the barrier is even more difficult to overcome: We don’t imagine that God could take an individual interest in us and our manifest imperfections. At best, God might be a benevolent employer who loves all of us equally, at an appropriate and necessary distance. But an intense love for us…
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Today, if we were all in the parish gathered together, you’d be hearing the second of three great gospels of John that are read this time of year: last week, the woman at the well (John chapter 4); this week, the healing of the man born blind (John chapter 9); and next week, the raising of Jesus’s friend Lazarus from the dead (John chapter 11). If you are looking for scripture passages to spend time with during these difficult days, you couldn’t do much better than these. We read these stories during Lent because they are all stories about transformation — people experiencing dramatic change and even liberation. And during…