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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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…
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Please don’t take offense at what I’m going to say, because I mean it as a compliment — but most of us here in our parish would describe ourselves as practical, down-to-earth people. We’re serious and realistic about life, and we are hard workers once we set ourselves on a path. So when we hear advice that we’re supposed to follow our dreams, we think, well sure, that sounds very appealing, it’s certainly something we should tell young people, but for the rest of us, it seems very unlikely that we’d face that kind of a moment in life when a dream would change something. Because most of us, when…
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When we hear this story, it’s hard not to think we are hearing the world saying no as loudly as it could to everything Jesus lived for. It was a no to all his teaching in the countryside, gathering the poor to be encouraged and healed, going from place to place doing no apparent harm, there was something about it that led to today, it all had to be stopped, both religious and civil leaders saw it as easier to just put him to death. And he was subjected to the worst kind of death they could think of, not just execution but degradation, a way of saying that he…
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The first reading today, that famous reading from the Acts of the Apostles, takes us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back in time to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples not as these almost miraculous leaders, but in a room waiting for something to happen to them. It’s hard not to wonder what that felt like, and what they were thinking. The picture probably didn’t seem promising. These were people who had in their time abandoned Jesus, misunderstood instructions,…
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It’s very infrequent that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day. It makes for some inconvenient conflicts, like trying to take someone out for a romantic dinner on a day of fasting and abstinence. I hope you all found your own solution to that problem. But in one way, there is a connection. Because really, Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent we are beginning today, they are all about something that we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to, and that something is the state of our heart. That unforgettable image we heard in the first reading, tells us that the old custom in the Old Testament…