We all love the Christmas message, which is that there is a God of love who cares about this world enough to be with us. And now we find out something more, what we find out is that God doesn’t just love us. In the end, God wins. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Like at Christmas, the signs of this aren’t always spectacular. There is just an empty tomb, and the reports of people who are absolutely certain about what they saw and experienced, which is that someone they knew and loved was fully alive and present in a completely new way that no…
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Jesus’s ascension is a very hard scene for us to picture. It’s a moment of spectacular special effects, maybe, or a religious vision that most of us have never experienced anything like. But however it happened and however you picture it, this ascension is something Jesus told the disciples would happen, that after his resurrection his physical presence would only be with them for a while, and then their world would be turned upside down yet again. It must have been hard for them. On that first Easter they all found it hard to believe the story of the women, they all found it hard to accept that he was…
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We often hear it said that human beings were created in God’s image. And most days, we have no idea how that could possibly be true. Because after all God must be perfect, while here on earth, the rest of us behave in ways that don’t seem very perfect, and there are places where evil and death have their way, sometimes on a horrifying scale. How could we possibly be made in God’s image, when all of us seem so far from being anything like God? But on Good Friday, our task here today is to see God’s image differently and to see our own image differently too. Because it…
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I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who wants everything at Christmas to be perfect. You know what I mean: everything perfectly decorated, the perfect gift chosen for everyone, and above all that everyone close to you is where they should be. If you are like that, my guess is that for the second year in a row, you haven’t gotten your Christmas wish. I know I haven’t. We’re here tonight well aware that as humans we’re just not as in charge as we would like to be. For all of us it’s a source of frustration, for other it’s a source of real loss. The world turns…
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Back when I was growing up in Chicago there was an archbishop who was known to be a very autocratic and difficult personality. He didn’t take criticism from anyone, and if you were an official who questioned his authority you would quickly find yourself assigned to the outer reaches of Chicagoland where no one wanted to go. When he died, his funeral was big news, and a local priest was quoted anonymously in the newspaper about the archbishop’s career: “His only desire was to serve the Lord,” he said. And then, after a pause, “of course, in an advisory capacity.” Today’s gospel has something for all of us about what…
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Jesus is rarely angry in the gospels. But today is one of the days when he is, and it’s worth looking at exactly why. It starts with the famous passage when Peter is the only one among the disciples, who can answer correctly the question about who Jesus is: he is the messiah, the anointed one, the savior who is going to gather his scattered people together and show them the way to freedom. But then, Peter shows that he doesn’t understand everything about what that means. Jesus decides to say more about where this life of the messiah is going. He says that he won’t be living a long…
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One of the most striking things about the gospel stories is that calling disciples was one of the first things Jesus did. It was central to what he was about from the very beginning. So let’s ask ourselves today, what does it mean to be a disciple? And what I will propose is that there are two things we can learn about it. On the one hand, of course, it involves following Jesus, which means learning from him, and spending so much time with him getting to know him and the way he is that you gradually have his life in front of you all the time, and at different…
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A few weeks ago we had some online gatherings of parishioners, and one of the things everyone was asked was what they missed the most about the parish during the pandemic. And as I was thinking about how I would answer this question, I thought two things. One of course is being in the church. I mean it’s wonderful what has been accomplished here in the great hall, a million cheers for everyone who has made it possible. But you’re all so far away. Over in the church, we are facing one another, as if we’re sitting around a table at a meal, which is what we are doing after…
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The Pentecost reading we heard first today describes something that sounds hard to believe in, It is the Holy Spirit finally arriving as Jesus said it would and what it really is, is a picture of real liberation. First it seems to bring an enormous release of energy. These disciples have been locked in a room, puzzled about what is next, maybe just a little the way we’ve been locked up for more than a year, but all of a sudden they feel a tremendous readiness to get out of there. And when they do, there are suddenly no barriers of communication between them and total strangers, they find words…
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I want to start today by going back to that first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter has been approached by a Roman centurion named Cornelius, whose whole family wants to be baptized and join the Christian community. It’s hard for us to imagine how completely impossible this must have seemed to these first Christians, all of whom still saw themselves as Jewish, all of whom assumed that the point of Jesus’s life was that he had been one of them, and that the community was meant for people like them. The reading says that they were astounded to see the Holy Spirit acting this way on a…