There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last weekend we heard that he came 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 seems to have 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…
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So you might be wondering why today, instead of the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are celebrating the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome. The church observes this feast every November 9, and when it falls on a Sunday it outranks an Ordinary Time Sunday, so here we are. Now my initial plan was to take some time telling you something about this basilica of St. John Lateran since we are devoting a whole Sunday to it. I was even going to put some pictures up on the screen. But I decided against it for two reasons. First is that I have a terrible fear…
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If you are a little puzzled hearing that today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and wondering where you have been that you missed this being a regular Sunday thing, you could be excused. In the Roman church this feast is celebrated on September 14, and when that’s a Sunday, as it is every now and then, it takes precedence over the usual Sunday of Ordinary Time. One feature of this feast is that we hear a scripture reading that we don’t otherwise hear on any Sunday, and it’s that first reading from the Book of Numbers. The people of Israel are in the desert, and…
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There was a man named Peter Maurin who was a friend and colleague of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement whose cause for sainthood is ongoing. Peter Maurin was an eccentric philosopher and a little disheveled and completely impractical, and yet he was Dorothy Day’s inspiration. And one of the impractical things he said was this: We should always remember that when the Holy Spirit first came to the church, it came to a meeting, somewhere people were gathered together. And he said what that meant was that anytime anyone invites you to any meeting about anything, you should always go. Because you simply never know what…
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That first reading tonight reminds us that while we think of Passover as a feast for our Jewish brothers and sisters, it has a deep meaning for us too. Because it reminds us, as it does them, that God wants our freedom from captivity, that in fact God wants to give freedom over and over from whatever keeps us from being closer to God, and whatever holds us back from being the people he created out of love. On this feast of Holy Thursday we have to remember that that also is what the eucharist does for us. It offers us the presence of the risen Christ, this liberated Christ…
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The ritual we are going to see in just a couple of minutes I would say that most Catholics have never seen in their lifetimes. I can say that with some confidence because we only see this ritual on Holy Thursday, when we read John’s gospel of the last supper, the only gospel where we hear about Christ washing the disciples’ feet. And so the only people who get to see this are you, who are among the elite who have figured out that this next three days, no offense meant to anything else, but this three days are really the best thing the Catholic Church has to offer all…
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There’s an idea about God that we are all used to, which is that God loves and embraces us just as we are. There are plenty of scripture readings that tell us that, from the Prodigal Son to all those meals Jesus ate with sinners, they tell us there is nothing we need to do on this earth to merit God’s love, we have it without asking for it or earning it. And we should believe it, because it tells us that we have a relationship with God that can’t be broken, no matter how many times we fail in our end of that relationship. But there are a few…
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There are times when Jesus had a great instinct for simplifying things. In his time, we are told that there were more than 600 laws that devout Jews were supposed to know and follow, dietary rules, rules about behavior, more than half were things that you were simply never to do. Sometimes it seems like Catholics have also been extremely good at lists like this, prayers to say, activities to avoid, attendance requirements. There are almost 3,000 numbered paragraphs in our catechism explaining what we believe and how we should live. So it might seem like it is something of a relief for Jesus to say in today’s gospel that…
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So here’s the way God works. God assigned this gospel reading for me to preach on right when I’m in the middle of really finding it hard to forgive someone. I don’t want to give you the details, it’s no one around here, but all I’ll say is that of course I’m in the right. He’s a hard person to love right now, he acts like a jerk, and I’ve really had it with trying to help him out. I’m done. But the consolation for me is that I’m probably not alone. Jesus would not have made forgiveness the center of everything he did if he hadn’t known that lack…
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Some of the great Catholic theologians of the Middle Ages had a strong opinion about why God couldn’t ever change. And here was roughly the way their reasoning went. God, by definition, is greater than any category of anything we can think of. Therefore God is so vast, that it’s really impossible for us to say that there’s anything that God is not. And if there’s nothing that God is not, then how could God ever change? Because by definition, if you change, you become something you weren’t before. That would mean God wasn’t complete to start with. So therefore, by logic, God can’t change. QED, as they said in…