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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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The first reading today, that famous reading from the Acts of the Apostles, takes us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back in time to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples not as these almost miraculous leaders, but in a room waiting for something to happen to them. It’s hard not to wonder what that felt like, and what they were thinking. The picture probably didn’t seem promising. These were people who had in their time abandoned Jesus, misunderstood instructions,…
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Finding words and images to describe God isn’t easy, since God isn’t like anything else that we know. For example, despite the way we talk about God sometimes, God isn’t a human being, for which we can only say, thank God, the last thing we need would be a God with as many faults as most of us human beings have. Even Jesus had to use different images to find the right words to tell people who God is, and what the relationship between God and us is actually like. He tried different things. Sometimes he said God was like a shepherd, taking care of us, which at times is…
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It’s very infrequent that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day. It makes for some inconvenient conflicts, like trying to take someone out for a romantic dinner on a day of fasting and abstinence. I hope you all found your own solution to that problem. But in one way, there is a connection. Because really, Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent we are beginning today, they are all about something that we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to, and that something is the state of our heart. That unforgettable image we heard in the first reading, tells us that the old custom in the Old Testament…
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Deacons frequently get a chance to preach on the feast of the Holy Family, and I think that is for a couple of reasons. First, it happens on a relatively quiet Sunday in between some major holidays, so if a pastor is like the manager of a baseball team, it seems like a good day to run your fourth or fifth starting pitcher out to the mound and the team won’t take too much of a hit. More seriously, since most deacons are married, it’s thought that we might know something about families, or even holy families. What people should realize, is that while that’s logical, really until there are…
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One of the reasons this story grips us is that this is the human world we know. It’s a story of everything turning bad for a person who truly did not deserve it, a life of teaching and peaceful religious work out in the countryside interrupted for no reason with something that should never have happened. We see Jesus pulled into a terrible sequence of events. We see religious leaders who are mainly concerned about keeping the system going and making sure there’s no trouble. We see friends we thought we could count on who suddenly let us down and break promises and disappear when they are most needed. We…
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The story that we’ve just heard is one that seems to show the world at its worst, all in one horrifying day. A good man is left to die alone, isolated, without support, rejected. His friend and best disciple, the one who understands him best, decides he is more worried about self-preservation than he is about telling the truth. Everything about Jesus’s life and his mission has fallen apart quickly in a day of misunderstandings and chaotic power politics; there’s an ugly crowd shouting for violence, trying to find a scapegoat they barely know to blame for their frustrations. All these things we’d say are the world at its worst,…