So if Advent is our season of waiting and expectation, what are we really waiting for in these last few days before Christmas? I think in today’s gospel we find out: We are waiting for someone to speak to us, with words about what is next — and not just generally, but next for us. We sometimes think those words are impossible. The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Advent waiting is like miners who are trapped in a coal mine, waiting for any noise off in the distance as a sign that someone, anyone, is coming to rescue them. Maybe especially we feel that way this year, we have all…
-
-
Jesus told the disciples a lot of things that they had trouble understanding, even some things they probably had a problem believing. One of those things was this, he said that after he was dead and gone from them, leaving them behind, that they would actually be better off and more fortunate then, and the reason he gave was that then, they would have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, he said, would give them everything they needed and more, not just to live, but to live in joy, to live as his followers, to be able to do the great things he told them needed to be done. So why…
-
I’ve been leading this Good Friday service here for more than 20 years, but I’ve never seen the sight I’m looking at now, which is 600 empty places. It seems all wrong, but in a way, maybe it’s not. This liturgy is partly about a deep feeling of emptiness that comes upon all of us. At the end of this gospel we just heard, everyone has scattered, the entire cast of characters of the gospels has disappeared, there’s a tomb with a stone in front of it, this great city where something amazing was supposed to happen seems suddenly deserted, and night has come. On Good Friday this is where…
-
When we hear this story, it’s hard not to think we are hearing the world saying no as loudly as it could to everything Jesus lived for. It was a no to all his teaching in the countryside, gathering the poor to be encouraged and healed, going from place to place doing no apparent harm, there was something about it that led to today, it all had to be stopped, both religious and civil leaders saw it as easier to just put him to death. And he was subjected to the worst kind of death they could think of, not just execution but degradation, a way of saying that he…
-
At times in the gospel, we have to be grateful to Jesus, because he had a marvelous instinct for simplifying things. In his time, we are told that there were more than 600 laws that devout Jews were supposed to know and follow, dietary rules, rules about behavior, more than half were things that you were simply never to do. So it might seem like it was something of a relief for Jesus to say that really, not to throw out the other 600 laws, but if you could get two of them right, love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and to be told that if you do…
-
What God has joined together no human being may separate. I say these words at every wedding I do. They were probably said at your wedding. Like many words we hear all the time, we tend to take them for granted. Today, we get the context of where they come from, though, and it’s possible that hearing the context they will make us a little uncomfortable. Because today we are back in touch with a Jesus we don’t know how to deal with — the uncompromising Jesus. He is asked a question about whether divorce is possible, since under the law of Moses it was very possible, especially for a…
-
When we picture someone being healed in the gospels, I think it’s inevitable that what we picture is a crowd scene. Because in many of these healing stories, that’s exactly what it is. There are spectators, sometimes a large crowd, and they see a miracle, but really they see it from a distance, their perspective is a little bit like you out there, watching what’s going on up here. And when we hear these stories, that’s a little the way we can feel about them, too, they’re distant, something happening to someone else, with us more as an audience than as an active participant. But today, the scene and the…
-
We modern people like to think that back hundreds or even thousands of years ago, it was a lot easier for people to believe in God. You know, we tend to think they were a little primitive, they didn’t know very much about science, they thought the world was flat. You can name a wide variety of things they believed that we now know are wrong. They attributed to God all sorts of things that happen that we now don’t see God as particularly involved with at all. So they must have been more open than we are to various ideas about the way God is and what God does.…
-
Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to interest one or two people around the parish in the idea of becoming a deacon. I’m thinking ahead here, since down the road, the parish will really need this. But so far I haven’t been very successful, and maybe one reason is that not long into the conversation, it comes out that the preparation process to be a deacon adds up to about five years. It sounds especially long since unlike when I was in the program 25 years ago, those five years now involve much more actual work than they ever had us do. Five years part-time to be a…
-
I don’t think it’s news to point out to you all something about life, that sometimes all the things we work for, all the things we hope for, get excited about, even dedicate ourselves to, often just don’t seem to pay off in the way we expect. On Father’s Day today I think of someone like my father, who worked for the same big company for more than 40 years, dedicated and working hard his whole life for one place, and about two years after he retired the company filed for bankruptcy, and now it’s long gone. I’m not sure there’s a recognizable bit of it left anywhere, and most…