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…
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I think sometimes that the Easter Season has a marketing and promotion problem, and let me explain a little about why. Think back to the season of Lent a few weeks ago; we might all have a slightly different way of expressing it, but after 2,000 years we all have successfully learned what Lent is, that Lent is a time for regrouping, for taking stock, for prayer and fasting and deciding what changes and forms of reconversion might be good for us. That has been very successful. And then the Easter comes, and in these seven weeks we’re supposed to now feel and do — what exactly? I don’t think…
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In that first reading we heard from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard that the early church community in Jerusalem felt so close to one another that they did something amazing, they shared all their property as if it were all common property, the idea being that if anyone needed anything, they would be taken care of. The question is, where did they get this idea? It’s not as if Jesus told them that private property had been abolished, or really said anything at all about how his followers were supposed to organize themselves, or even if they were going to be very organized at all. But the resurrection…