So you might be wondering why today, instead of the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are celebrating the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome. The church observes this feast every November 9, and when it falls on a Sunday it outranks an Ordinary Time Sunday, so here we are. Now my initial plan was to take some time telling you something about this basilica of St. John Lateran since we are devoting a whole Sunday to it. I was even going to put some pictures up on the screen. But I decided against it for two reasons. First is that I have a terrible fear…
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If you come to mass on Thanksgiving Day, you’ll hear this gospel every year, the one about the ten lepers who are healed of their illness, but only one returns to thank Jesus for what he was given. The message we usually take from this gospel, and it’s definitely one of the messages you could and should take from it, is that we are supposed to be grateful for what we have been given. It’s a message we could all do with hearing now and then. It’s a reminder that in our prayer and in our lives generally, we should say thanks a lot more than we often do. If…
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If you are a little puzzled hearing that today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and wondering where you have been that you missed this being a regular Sunday thing, you could be excused. In the Roman church this feast is celebrated on September 14, and when that’s a Sunday, as it is every now and then, it takes precedence over the usual Sunday of Ordinary Time. One feature of this feast is that we hear a scripture reading that we don’t otherwise hear on any Sunday, and it’s that first reading from the Book of Numbers. The people of Israel are in the desert, and…
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There is an old story about Pope John XXIII, now a saint, who of course was pope for five incredibly eventful years for the church in the middle of the last century. He was asked once in an interview what he would tell all the people who worked in the Vatican if he suddenly got the news that Jesus’s second coming was at hand and he was making his triumphal return to the earth. The pope said what he would tell people was: Look busy. And in a way that is also the message of today’s gospel. This time of waiting we are in between Christ’s resurrection and the end…
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I love the passage in that first reading from Deuteronomy where Moses reminds everyone that our faith is not reallyvery mysterious. I mean yes, there are things about God, and his plans, and about eternal life, that we will never know, at least in this life. But when it comes to what we really need to know to understand God’s love, and about how to live lives pleasing to God, it’s not that mysterious. In fact, Jesus was able to summarize a lot of it in just a handful of simple stories that we should all know by heart. And today’s gospel of the Good Samaritan is one of them.…
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There was a man named Peter Maurin who was a friend and colleague of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement whose cause for sainthood is ongoing. Peter Maurin was an eccentric philosopher and a little disheveled and completely impractical, and yet he was Dorothy Day’s inspiration. And one of the impractical things he said was this: We should always remember that when the Holy Spirit first came to the church, it came to a meeting, somewhere people were gathered together. And he said what that meant was that anytime anyone invites you to any meeting about anything, you should always go. Because you simply never know what…
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That first reading tonight reminds us that while we think of Passover as a feast for our Jewish brothers and sisters, it has a deep meaning for us too. Because it reminds us, as it does them, that God wants our freedom from captivity, that in fact God wants to give freedom over and over from whatever keeps us from being closer to God, and whatever holds us back from being the people he created out of love. On this feast of Holy Thursday we have to remember that that also is what the eucharist does for us. It offers us the presence of the risen Christ, this liberated Christ…
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Let’s start today with a little imaginative exercise. Let’s picture Jesus’s condition after he spent 40 days in the desert, Or if you think that’s too hard to do, start by picturing just a little about how you might have felt. First we can imagine that Jesus was physically drained. He had probably been chronically hungry for weeks. Maybe he was more than just a bit uncertain about where this life he was now to begin was going to take him. He went to the desert to prepare for something, to have something revealed to him. And it is possible that the path he saw ahead was a lonely one,…
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I have to begin with something that I don’t tell very many people because even now at my age it’s too embarrassing. I can’t swim. Never been able to and still can’t. It was a source of traumatic embarrassment in middle school and high school and even college, and it’s a little embarrassing even now. I had lessons at a variety of ages and still had the unmistakable feeling of sinking like a rock. It’s amazing how vividly you can remember being humiliated in 7th grade gym almost 60 years after the fact, although of course most of the time I successfully push all that down under the surface, and…
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All the gospels have some important turning points in them, some moments where the story begins an important new direction, when new things start to happen. And today, when we celebrate Jesus’s baptism is definitely one of those days, it is a day filled with a sense of something coming to life. Like so many of those gospel turning points, it begins with a journey, and the place Jesus journeys to means something. Jesus made a trip of several days’ duration to the River Jordan, to the place where the people of Israel first got a glimpse of the promised land, that place where they believed all of God’s promises…