Being a tenant farmer back in the first century looks like a bad deal, when you take a close look at it. Because here’s how this relationship worked, the relationship that in this gospel parable goes so very, very badly. You, the tenant farmer, are in charge of a vineyard you don’t own. You do all the work, you plant the grapes, you fend off the vermin, you worry about the rain, you pick the weeds, you do all the backbreaking manual labor that goes along with running a vineyard. If something breaks, you fix it, even though it’s not yours. And then, at the end of the season, when…
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My father had a lot of wonderful qualities, and he passed some of them on to me, I guess. And one of them is the old Benjamin Franklin saying, neither a borrower nor a lender be. He didn’t think you should owe money to anyone, that borrowing money was never a situation you wanted to be in, it made you vulnerable. You should stand on your own. And even though yes, I at one time had a mortgage, I have kind of always tried to live this way, feeling pretty independent, very upright in a way, even if not very adventurous. Maybe your parents brought you up the same way.…
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Maybe you have heard about a theory that scientists have called the butterfly effect. It’s just a theory, but here is how it came into being. You’re going to have to use your imagination here, so pay attention. Let’s take something really complicated like what causes weather. And let’s say there are two situations where the weather conditions are identical, but in one situation a hurricane comes into being from these weather conditions and becomes a powerful storm, and in the second situation it turns out there’s no hurricane, even though there could have been, the conditions were the same. So, what scientists theorize is there is something that happened…
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Catholics, I think, have what you might call an ambivalent relationship with the Holy Spirit. We might know the definition, if we were paying attention in PREP class years ago, but at a personal level, it’s not part of our day to day vocabulary. And when we hear people start talking about being “moved by the Spirit,” we get nervous, because we worry this is all going to get very emotional and exotic. But on a day like today, we can’t avoid it. because we hear in the Scriptures that “receiving the Holy Spirit” was completely central to what Jesus promised to the disciples, the “advocate” who would be present…
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What’s important about these two disciples on the road to Emmaus, is that when you look closely, they are heading in the wrong direction. They are on the road out of town, going back home. Everything that happened to them, everything that drew them into Jerusalem, has all ended in a great letdown. There was going to be a revolution, and the whole world would be different. But, nothing worked out the way everyone thought. It all ended in Jesus being victimized by the powerful, and then confusion and disappointment and friends scattered to the four winds. They did hear unconfirmed reports that Jesus is missing, maybe risen from the…
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One of the reasons this story grips us is that this is the human world we know. It’s a story of everything turning bad for a person who truly did not deserve it, a life of teaching and peaceful religious work out in the countryside interrupted for no reason with something that should never have happened. We see Jesus pulled into a terrible sequence of events. We see religious leaders who are mainly concerned about keeping the system going and making sure there’s no trouble. We see friends we thought we could count on who suddenly let us down and break promises and disappear when they are most needed. We…
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This Sunday is the third in a series of five Sundays where we’re hearing some parts of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s gospel, and I think it was going pretty smoothly until today. Here’s a brief refresher. First we heard the Beatitudes, about how the meek and peacemakers and mourners are the blessed ones, that’s how God is, all wonderful. Then in last week’s gospel, we were told we are the salt of the earth, we are the light of the world that shouldn’t be hidden. Also wonderful. But then there’s this week, when after these beautiful words about how God sees us and where we’re going we’re…
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I’m going to ask you to take a moment and think back before Christmas, if you can, and think about the last time we heard about John the Baptist here in the gospel readings. That was back in Advent, and there was a lot about John the Baptist. We hear about him then because he was someone who felt called by God to be on the lookout for God alive and active in this world. He believed that God was sending someone to us, someone who would change everything. And John had attracted huge crowds and gotten them very excited, telling them that he, John, was not that person, but…
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John the Baptist is one of the saints that everyone knows, but I think it’s fair to say that he is not anyone’s favorite saint, and it isn’t hard to see why. He seems primitive, coming from the desert looking like someone who has lost his connection with civilization. He seems threatening, talking about fire and wrath. And here in December, he really doesn’t seem very positive or upbeat or Christmassy. That’s because every year, he is trying to tell us something that is hard to believe and hard to focus on. John is the saint who tells us both that something is coming but also that something is wrong.…
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The story that we’ve just heard is one that seems to show the world at its worst, all in one horrifying day. A good man is left to die alone, isolated, without support, rejected. His friend and best disciple, the one who understands him best, decides he is more worried about self-preservation than he is about telling the truth. Everything about Jesus’s life and his mission has fallen apart quickly in a day of misunderstandings and chaotic power politics; there’s an ugly crowd shouting for violence, trying to find a scapegoat they barely know to blame for their frustrations. All these things we’d say are the world at its worst,…