I don’t have to commute into New York every single day, but I do it often enough that my heart goes out to those of you who do. I take an early train in several days a week, and maybe you’re among those who have encountered what I did recently. Usually people waiting for these early trains around 6:20 are extremely quiet. Maybe it’s because they enjoy listening to the morning birdsong. No, I doubt that’s it. Maybe they’re just in deep mental preparation for the ruthless grab for territory that starts once the train decides it’s going to stop and open the doors. But recently this scene of quiet…

Perhaps because it’s an election year, but after reading this gospel I found myself remembering the presidential race twelve years ago, and one of the indelible images from the failed campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. As part of his image-building effort, his handlers at one point convinced him to be photographed standing up in an army tank as it zipped around in exercises. Now Governor Dukakis was not a tall man, and he was wearing a little round helmet, with his arms glued to his sides, and he wound up looking not like a president, not like a tank commander, but like the old cartoon character Atom Ant. Along…

Taking one of the four gospels and reading it all the way through, from beginning to end, is a valuable thing to do every now and then. And one of things you might notice when you read a gospel, is how much of Jesus’s time was spent not preaching, not recruiting disciples, but healing, finding some of the sick and the troubled in every town either because they seek him out or he seems to seek them out, and touching them, and relieving their pain. Today we have two stories in the gospel. Story number 1: this man called Jairus, whom this translation calls an official of the synagogue. He…

There are a few phrases about God that people use all the time that sometimes we should slow down and think about more closely. Today I would like to draw your attention to one of them, a little phrase from an 18th-century poem that actually has always driven me a little crazy: The Lord works in mysterious ways. Let’s be honest: You know when you last heard this phrase, or when you said it yourself: I’ll bet it was the last time you heard of something bad, but not too bad, happening to someone, or even more likely I’ll bet it was the last time you heard of someone succeeding…

Recently I’ve had the experience of moving my parents from a big house into a smaller apartment. And if you’ve never done anything like this in your family, when it does comes up, take my advice, and do whatever you have to do to be out of town on urgent business the weekend it happens. It’s not the physical labor of doing it. It’s not even the challenge of trying to sort through years’ worth of accumulated stuff, trying to make decisions about what you’re going to get rid of to fit a whole houseful of things into a small apartment. No, it’s the resistance that you meet at every…

I have never drunk wine out of a wineskin, and if anyone here has, I’d like to know the circumstances and your condition at the time, so please stop and tell me about it after mass. But here is what I have found out about traditional wineskins: When they’re new, they’re flexible and can hold anything. The point is that when they get older, as you might expect, they get dried out and brittle and inflexible. So that when you take an old skin and fill it with new wine, something that’s still fermenting and fizzing and bubbling, because it’s so new, an old, brittle container with a stopper in…

You may have noticed that the most controversial ad on the Super Bowl this year wasn’t, as everyone was expecting, some incredibly gross ad from an internet company. The ad that shocked everybody was one involving a sort of miracle. The actor Christopher Reeve appeared in an ad where, through the miracles that they can work with computer graphics, they made it appear that he could stand up from the wheelchair in which he has been almost completely paralyzed for the past ten years. Some people thought it was creepy, partly, I think, because the ad was for a stockbroker, but also because they knew it wasn’t true, and couldn’t…