Every few years, when the feast of Saints Peter and St. Paul happens to fall on a Sunday, it takes over the usual Sunday feast we would be celebrating. Peter and Paul are linked together like this because tradition says they both died as martyrs in Rome, at just about the same time in the first century. But despite the fact that in so many early Christian drawings they are often shown in an embrace, like brothers, in fact they are two very different people, and very real people. So today let’s think about them as people, and we’ll take three things about them as people that matter to lives…
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This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also…
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This is a gospel we wish we could have been there for, to see someone being raised from the dead. If you were directing a film, you couldn’t have set it up better: the crowd gathered around the tomb, the stone being rolled back, the dead man staggering out in his burial garments, maybe squinting at the sunlight. Even in Jesus’ own resurrection, we don’t have anything like this: so dramatic that John’s gospel says this was what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus had gone too far. Someone who could create a scene like this could do anything. But as for what happens before this great moment in the…
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I don’t know if this is as popular an act as it used to be, but I’m sure you’ve all seen someone who gets up in front of a crowd of people and at least pretends to be able to read people’s minds. They pick a volunteer out of the audience, and then the mind-reader, who supposedly has never seen this person before, tells him or her all sorts of things that it would be impossible for a stranger to know. Sometime it’s pretty vague — for example, the mind-reader says that the volunteer has a troubled relationship. And of course that’s an easy one — who doesn’t have at…
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There are endless jokes about the scene that confronts people after they die. Most of them involve St. Peter, and a gate, and a large book in which records of their lives are kept. These stories might also involve three priests, or a priest, a minister and a rabbi. Many of the funniest ones, for some reason, involve lawyers. You’ve all heard them. They all tend to hinge on what you have to do to get through the gate into heaven, and there’s usually a lot of confusion and strange loopholes, or cases of mistaken identity or complicated questions you get asked. Maybe we tell so many jokes because the…
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Sometimes the Bible gives us a break, and there’s a story with some images that are actually familiar to us from everyday life. Today instead of sheep, and fig trees, and jars of oil, we have an image of something we have around us everywhere: taxes and money. But I hate to tell you, even with money, things were very complicated around this time in Jesus’s life, so there’s a little explanation that might be helpful in understanding the scene we’ve just heard. There were actually two kinds of money circulating in Jerusalem. First there were the Roman coins that were issued by the occupying power, which some Jews felt…
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For people in public life, there are a lot of embarrassing things you can do these days. You can steal money, or have a secret romantic relationship, or tell an obvious lie. But it seems these days that one of the most embarrassing things you can do is to change your mind. I’m not talking about a little talking out of both sides of your mouth, where you tell one group of people one thing they want to hear and another group something slightly different that they want to hear. That’s still acceptable – in fact it’s almost a job requirement to be in politics, I guess. What I’m talking…
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If you ever visit Rome and go to the basilica of St. Peter’s, the first time you see it, no matter how jaded you are, you’ll be overwhelmed by its size and scale. In the midst of all the spectacle, you may not even notice that in the center, carved around the bottom of the dome in what seem like ten-foot letters, are the words Jesus speaks in today’s gospel: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. All this, because Peter answered the question from Jesus in today’s gospel: Who do you say that I am? I hear, by the way, they have made it…
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There’s a portrait of Jesus you’ve probably seen that a lot of people like. It shows Jesus laughing, and it’s true that over the centuries we have seen so many images of Jesus showing him as some otherworldly being, that it’s good sometimes to picture him as human, someone like us. Because he was. If that is your main picture of Jesus, though, today you have to make a change in the way you picture him. Because today in this gospel we see another side of Jesus, a Jesus we don’t often seek out, the Jesus who turns our lives completely upside down. I don’t know if we can avoid…
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St. Paul says something disagreeable to us in that second reading: He says that we do not know how to pray. On the surface, it’s a harsh judgment, because many of us are here every week trying to pray, after all. But the fact is, it can be very hard to feel like we do know how. and many of us would find it hard to tell someone that we know how to pray, with the same confidence we would tell them we know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Prayer can be hard; everyone who prays struggles with distractions, everyone wonders if they are using the…