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…
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Every few years, when the feast of Saints Peter and St. Paul happens to fall on a Sunday, it takes over the usual Sunday feast we would be celebrating. Peter and Paul are linked together like this because tradition says they both died as martyrs in Rome, at just about the same time in the first century. But despite the fact that in so many early Christian drawings they are often shown in an embrace, like brothers, in fact they are two very different people, and very real people. So today let’s think about them as people, and we’ll take three things about them as people that matter to lives…
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This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also…
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You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he learned in this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me”. Instead, what he probably came away thinking was a more familiar lesson we all know: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” We feel sorry for him, a basically good man who asks what he ought to do and can’t bring himself to do it, and is then told that it will be very, very hard for him to ever see the kingdom of God. Let’s leave aside the image of the camel and…
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If you have an iPhone, maybe you have used the virtual assistant it comes with, Siri. If not, I’m sure you have seen friends of yours who are now accustomed to speaking to their phones like they are human beings, giving Siri all sorts of assignments. My sister-in-law had gotten very accustomed to this, until one day when she asked Siri a fairly routine question, and she swears, Siri answered, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you right now.” I never really thought Siri was anything like a human assistant until I heard about that moment. It seems that even virtual assistants can drop the ball, and lose track…
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Back when I was growing up, I had six aunts who all lived in the same town, and of course they were in charge of pulling together the food for every sort of family gathering, from Christmas to the 4th of July to the occasional funeral. And a special fear had clearly been passed down to my aunts: the fear was, that at a gathering you were in charge of, you’d run out of food. We don’t know where this fear came from, whether it was something they got growing up during the depression of the 1920s, or whether it went back much further to pre-history in the mountains of…
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My mother was a very perceptive person with strong opinions about a lot of things. And she could be very quotable, in fact, some of her quotable quotes are still part of my interior life. At various times, when she saw someone getting out of line, doing or saying something that showed that the perpetrator didn’t understand his appropriate position in the universe, whether it was someone close by or even someone on the national scene, you’d hear her say, “Who does he think he is?” Or, if you were way out of line yourself, you might be unlucky enough to hear her say, with a penetrating look, “Who do…
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In these last weeks of the Easter season, we always hear some very famous and sometimes very difficult to understand passages from the Gospel of John, like the one we just heard about the vine and the vine grower. This is from what is often called the final discourse, that takes up four whole chapters in the gospel of John, a long monologue from Jesus to his disciples late in the night before his passion and death. And what he seems to be most concerned to give them in their last moments together is image after image of what their relationship with Jesus will be in the future. Partly, this…
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When you settled into your seats to listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, I wonder how many of you were immediately discouraged when the first thing you heard was about scabs and pustules. This is not what we want to hear about when we come here for a little inspiration. But, for better or for worse, the fact is, our ancestors in the faith thought that things like this were a serious issue for their community, and in those parts of the Old Testament that people skip through really fast when they decide one day they want to try to read the whole thing, there are many…