We could be forgiven if we come here today completely confused about what kind of a God we really have. Who would have expected, one year ago, that we would now be looking back on a year of wars that are called holy, a year of suicide bombings and murder in the name of religion, a year when our church itself has proven, if it needed proving, that it is not the holder of all truth and good judgment. So much suffering. So little reason for it. No clear way to end it. So many people thinking God is on their side. We think that God must have turned away,…
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We know this story so well, that it has a life of its own, event follows event with a sense of inevitability, we know what’s coming next at every point. Over time, it seems to us that it couldn’t have been any other way. But Jesus’s death was the most avoidable death imaginable. At every turning point in this story, there’s an opportunity for Jesus to escape his crucifixion. He could have avoided Jerusalem entirely. He could have snuck through one of the legal loopholes that Pilate seemed, at some level, to want to offer him. He could have laid low for a year or two until things settled down.…
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I’m sure the last thing might think you want right now, after nine long scripture readings, would be yet more salvation history laid out for you. But we should be honest, and say that deep down, there’s a part of the story we do still want to hear. Jesus’ resurrection comes nearly at the end of the scriptures we have, but now here we are two thousand years later, in a very different world, and the missing reading we want to hear now is, what will happen to us, what’s the end of the story? We know the resurrection is the end of our story, too, but frankly, our imaginations…
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As a deacon, I get to go to more weddings than the average person, and frankly I had gotten to the point where very few of them met my rather picky standards of excellence. But two weeks ago that changed. Two friends of mine, both of them getting married rather late in life, if you know what I mean, had a wedding I’ll never forget. It had everything. There was a Jewish ritual that brought tears to my eyes, so many words that reminded everyone about commitments and joy and sadness, and of the bittersweet taste of life even in the midst of such happiness. And then, what a party…
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It doesn’t happen as often as it used to in business but it still happens. There’s a rather senior person where I work who as far as any of us can tell does absolutely nothing. I mean, nothing. He has been seen in his office at 3:30 in the afternoon calmly running one of those little electric shoe-buffing machines over his shoes, or, in a famous incident, sorting a little bag of Skittles candies into piles based on their colors. This is not out of Dilbert. I’m not making this stuff up. I know it never happens in the church, Father Tim, but in business you do find these scandalous…
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Now’s not bad, but April or May is really the right time for this parable of the sower and the seed. That’s the time of year when you can feel the picture that’s being presented here. It’s when you go out and look at your car or your outdoor furniture and run your hand along it and you see that yellow film of millions of grains of pollen, and you may be sneezing or you may not be, but what you notice is that there are so many you can’t possibly count them. Or maybe you see the field of dandelions across the street from my house, placed there just…
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A long time ago when I was first telling my friends that I’d been accepted into the formation program for deacons, one of my particularly good friends wasn’t at all happy about it. He wasn’t impressed with the deacons he’d met up to that point, I guess, because his response was, “What do you want to do that for?” He stumped me there for a minute with that question, and I mumbled something or other in response, but he wasn’t having any of it. “What do you get to do, at the end of mass you say, ‘The mass is ended, let us go in peace’?” I said, yeah, I…
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I once took a three-day summer course from a teacher at Princeton Theological Seminary, who was a fairly intimidating figure. There was one thing he said that intimidated me much more than anything else. He said that when he taught a full-semester course on preaching, as opposed to the three-day easy one that I took, he insisted that no one could pass the course unless they could memorize the entire Sermon on the Mount and stand up in front of the class and deliver it. For those of you who haven’t checked lately, the Sermon on the Mount runs nonstop for three full chapters in the Gospel of Matthew, about…
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You may have noticed a large and dramatic photograph in the New York Times last week during the Pope’s visit. It was not a story about the Pope, but about the more than one million Catholics in the U.S. who have left to join Pentecostal churches, and in the photo, there are three members of one such church in New York, along with their pastor. They have their arms raised dramatically in the air, eyes closed, intense feeling on their faces. One man is clutching at the shoulders of another, and seems like he is about ready to fall down to the floor in tears. A picture like that is…
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A lot of people are uncomfortable reading the book of psalms. Not all of the psalms, but a lot of them. For example, everyone likes the 23rd psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” It is comforting to think of God that way, as a shepherd, and a good number of the psalms are psalms of comfort, or of quiet confidence, or of happiness, even occasionally some good advice. But many of the psalms are desperate. The largest group of them, in fact, are lamentations. They are songs about things that have been lost, about an empire that seems to have gone to pieces, of enemies that are on every side…