No matter how many times we hear this story, something in it grips us. We know how it ends, we know it is a tragedy, but something in us wants to hear it anyway, the familiar details of how Pilate was too cowardly to follow his better instincts, and all the sad details of this death that was so avoidable. The reason why this story draws us in like few other stories isn’t always clear to us, but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, after years of hearing it, we find out why. We see someone we love, suffering for days or weeks from a painful final illness, or someone dying too young…
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This year I have heard more people talk about Jesus’ death than I can ever remember, even people I previously couldn’t imagine giving much thought to Jesus at all. This familiar story of his trial and death still touches people so deeply, because more than any other part of Jesus’ life, we know the world works just this way. Random events, political jockeying, all seemingly preventable, all unreasonable, but no one can stop it. What happened to Jesus could happen to anyone. So many words to explain why this story moves us. And yet I heard one set of words that seemed wrong to me. I read in a local…
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Before this, everything was clear. God was God. People knew where to look to find God. It was a world of stark contrasts. The way you knew God was on your side was that you prospered in life, lived long and healthy, were free from oppression, got what you deserved. Your enemy, on the other hand, was vanquished. When this happened, it was a sign that God was present. When it didn’t, it was a sign that God’s favor had been withdrawn from you, until a time when it might suit God to relent — or perhaps, it just meant that God for some reason no longer cared. Think of…
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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…