If you are a deacon, then today’s first reading is clearly the one that you have to address: It’s the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, part 2 of Luke’s gospel, and in it the 12 apostles decide that their many duties are leading them to neglect the service of some of the widows and the other needy in the early church. So they asked the community to choose 7 others who would take over some of the apostles’ duties in these works of charity and administration. By long tradition, these 7 – Stephen, Philip and the others – we regard as the first deacons. So there is your…
-
-
Study after study proves something about us human beings that’s either very discouraging or just amusing, and it’s this: We are not very good at understanding how we’re doing. The research shows that people who are very good at what they do tend to be very self-critical and rate themselves lower than they should, and of course you know the opposite is true, that the worse people are at what they do, those people are more likely to be happy and quite confident about their skills. Perhaps you just thought this was the case only where you work. But no, it’s been proven to be true everywhere. This shows a…
-
Jesus faced a problem in his ministry that he never really solved. If you had no credentials to speak of, but you had a message that people were going to find difficult, how would you convince people to listen? Sometimes what happened was what happened in today’s gospel. This woman at the well was enormously impressed with Jesus’ ability to tell her something about her past, to know without being told that she’d had five husbands. That got her attention, the mind-reading, and ultimately that seems to be the message that she runs off eager to tell her fellow townspeople. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever…
-
Maybe you had your attention gripped last weekend by the same picture I saw on the front page of the Saturday New York Times. Those of you who were born in the past 25 years or so might not have even known the man in the picture. And in fact, even if he had been a familiar face to you years ago, as he was for me, time has been very hard on him, and you might not have recognized him. It was George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, and more notably even than that, one of the most visible opponents of the movement towards civil…
-
I began a new experiment in my life this week, and I hope it’s not one I regret. I’m filling in for two months teaching 8th grade religion at the school my three daughters attend. That’s a recipe for trouble. I’m on my daughters’ territory. They each told me it was fine if I did this but I was given two instructions: First: I may never mention their names. Second: I may speak to them in the hall but only if they speak to me first. So I had trouble even before I got into the classroom and that’s when I encountered my second problem, which is what I had…
-
There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last week he comes out of the desert in a spectacular way, brimming with confidence and certainty and dramatic things to predict, ready to say the Messiah is here, to proclaim a new age of liberation for everyone listening to him. This week, he is in prison, a prison that we know he will never leave alive, and his certainty has deserted him. He’s not so sure, apparently, that Jesus is the Messiah — and he sends some of his own followers to Jesus to see and hear what they can and report to him:…
-
Something clearly happened out there, something like a transfiguration, because this story is so important to the early church that it’s heard in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and every single year, on the Second Sunday of Lent, we hear about this ultimate religious experience. Surely if anything was going to change your life forever, it would be this. Jesus with just a few of his disciples, three to be exact, on the top of a high mountain, and an experience of light, and sounds, blinding visions and clouds. It revealed to this handful of disciples a secret, a powerful secret, who Jesus really was,…
-
When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a science fiction show called The Time Tunnel. If you remember it, please come see me after mass and we can reminisce. The premise of the show was pretty simple, as I recall it. Some inventors had come up with a way to travel in time, but once they’d started traveling they couldn’t control the machine very well, so for each week’s episode they were randomly landed in the past or the future, one week on board the Titanic, one week in the future space age, then the next week all the way back to the dinosaurs. So…
-
Every family tree has a few branches that have some people on them that you aren’t eager to have it generally known that you’re related to. My spouse will confirm from experience that I have more than a few branches like that, and this week I found myself remembering one of my cousins back in the Midwest. A few years ago this cousin went to the doctor and reported to him that she seemed to have pulled a muscle in her lower back while doing some heavy lifting in the garden. After examining her, the doctor informed her that she was expecting. In fact, he estimated that she was expecting…