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,…
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It’s hard to celebrate Christmas without being flooded with memories. I know every Christmas I can’t help but be brought back to Christmas the way it was when I was a kid back in Indiana, going to a big Christmas Eve party in a packed little house with my six Croatian aunts and five Croatian uncles and dozens of others, a house overloaded with food and presents and desserts. My Uncle Dan was a wiry little man, but every year at the climax of the evening he’d put on a faded and ratty Santa Claus suit, with no padding at all — really I should just summarize it by saying…
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In my professional life, I’ve worked in a lot of different places and types of organizations, large and small, but looking back on it, there’s a pattern to a lot of those places that was pretty clear to me at the time and is even clearer looking back. And it’s this: The main concern of most of the people at most of those companies was not taking a risk; and in many cases, the main concern of the whole company was making sure that the people that worked there didn’t take any risks. It’s one of the very natural but kind of negative downsides of being even a little successful,…
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Sometimes what you hear people saying that what they really need more of in life, is that they looking for balance. And it’s true that when we’re overwhelmed by all the things we feel pulling at us, that’s a very appealing concept. It’s great to think that we can get to a point of serenity, or at least sanity, by fine-tuning our commitments and interests so that no one of them takes over too much. We like to think there’s an art to dividing up our priorities and our time and the things we value, in a way that causes us as little internal conflict and discomfort as possible. I…
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Today in the gospel we have another parable about what the “kingdom of heaven” is like. And when we hear the word “heaven” we immediately think two things: first, something way off in the future, definitely not now, and second, a world operating in a very different environment, maybe in the clouds, where everyone is on their best behavior and a whole different set of rules apply. So when Jesus starts a story that says “the kingdom of heaven is like,” we think he means this is the way things will be like in heaven when things are perfect. It will be great — off there in the future, when…
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The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has 2,865 numbered sections, and in this edition it runs to at least 700 pages. In the index you’ll see that it covers topics from the Trinity to ordination to bioethics, and you can pull it down off the shelf to settle almost any argument about Catholic theology and customs and practices. If you want to know what the Catholic church teaches, a lot of it is right here. But here’s the problem with having that big a book as our catechism. It can make what you need to know and believe to be a Catholic Christian seem much more complex than it…