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,…
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It’s hard to celebrate Christmas without being flooded with memories. I know every Christmas I can’t help but be brought back to Christmas the way it was when I was a kid back in Indiana, going to a big Christmas Eve party in a packed little house with my six Croatian aunts and five Croatian uncles and dozens of others, a house overloaded with food and presents and desserts. My Uncle Dan was a wiry little man, but every year at the climax of the evening he’d put on a faded and ratty Santa Claus suit, with no padding at all — really I should just summarize it by saying…
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This gospel about the poor widow who gives everything she has to the temple has probably been the most popular scripture for fund-raising in the history of church fund-raising, no matter what denomination you’re a part of. After all, how could you not use a gospel where the message seems to be, even if you think you don’t have a lot to give, dig down, and make a real sacrifice with what you have. And it’s paired with yet another reading from the Old Testament, about yet another widow, who serves the prophet Elijah with her last scrap of flour and oil. The question of how much to give away,…
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This is always called the gospel of the rich young man, but I think just as good a name for it would be the gospel of the stuck young man. He’s at a point in his life where something is working inside him, something about his current life is not fulfilling, isn’t right, and he is looking for where to turn. So he asks Jesus what he thinks he should do next. He gets an answer that’s not at all what he was expecting: Jesus says, turn your life upside down completely, give it all up, start again. And as a result, here he is, stuck, Jesus has given him…
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This gospel today has such extreme language that of course we have to conclude that we can’t really take it literally. As one great preacher pointed out about this reading, it’s not like any of us have ever seen a congregation with even a few one-eyed or one-handed Christians who clearly took Jesus’s guidance about how to deal with their sinful tendencies. And as far the idea about people who discourage people from following Jesus being better off drowned, well, I can think of several such people who drive people away from the church, and as far as I know they are unfortunately not tied to a rock at the…
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I reach a point every year when I clearly start to lose it. By losing it, I mean that all the things that I do each week, week after week, really begin to wear me down. I get annoyed with everyone I work with, and with the whole idea of what I do for a living. Really, nothing’s working out right, there are just too many problems that come back repeatedly and can’t be solved, and I seem to see nothing but a series of bad decisions I’ve made leading right up to where I find myself. And come to think of it, I said that I start to lose…
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Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living. Believe it or not, it’s not this. Being a deacon is great, especially here in this parish, but it isn’t a living. What I actually do, I’ve realized, isn’t what I’ve always told people I do, I usually say I’m in the publishing business. But what I actually have been doing for years is try to get people to change. You may know that the newspaper and magazine business isn’t what it used to be; in fact, it’s been going downhill so fast ever since I got into it 35 years ago that I sometimes think I must be personally…
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For the past weeks after Easter we have been hearing gospel readings from one long scene in the gospel of John that on the surface are all about a long goodbye. All these gospels, including today’s, take place on the last night that the disciples and Jesus had together, the night before Good Friday. They are still in the same room, on the same evening, when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet as an example of how they should live. But they are still up late into the night talking, and there’s unspoken tension in the air, because everyone knows that the next night Jesus will be dead, and nothing will…
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Advent is supposed to be about waiting, but I think that turns out to be a terrible word to describe what it is we’re supposed to feel like as Christmas approaches. Think about what could possibly be more discouraging and pointless than a waiting room, the uncomfortable silence that we have to somehow drown out with TV or some phone time, the frustration about why whatever it is is taking so long, killing time reviewing in our mind the other more important things we have to do. To us, that’s waiting. But today with just a few days left before Christmas let’s redefine just for a minute what waiting looks…