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…
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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…