Jesus’s ascension is a very hard scene for us to picture. It’s a moment of spectacular special effects, maybe, or a religious vision that most of us have never experienced anything like. But however it happened and however you picture it, this ascension is something Jesus told the disciples would happen, that after his resurrection his physical presence would only be with them for a while, and then their world would be turned upside down yet again. It must have been hard for them. On that first Easter they all found it hard to believe the story of the women, they all found it hard to accept that he was…
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There is a story from the early church that the author of this gospel of John lived to be an old, old man, so old that he had to be carried around from place to place, and he said very little, and when he did speak, what he did was just repeat to the Christians around him today’s gospel passage, my little children, love one another. And he repeated it so much that it frustrated people, they wanted more than that, they asked him why he just kept repeating it, and he said that if we do this one thing, it is sufficient. It sounds simple, one commandment, but then…
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We often hear it said that human beings were created in God’s image. And most days, we have no idea how that could possibly be true. Because after all God must be perfect, while here on earth, the rest of us behave in ways that don’t seem very perfect, and there are places where evil and death have their way, sometimes on a horrifying scale. How could we possibly be made in God’s image, when all of us seem so far from being anything like God? But on Good Friday, our task here today is to see God’s image differently and to see our own image differently too. Because it…
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I have checked the records, and over my years here at St. David the King, I’ve given more than 400 different homilies. I put in the word “different” just because I realize that to many of you, some of those 400 homilies probably ended up sounding kind of similar. But really, they were at least intended to be different. And in all those years, I’ve never, I think, had anyone walk out or get angry because of a homily. I have seen a few people rush out during a homily carrying a child, so I assume it was the child who needed to leave, but it may have been an…
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So what really happens when someone is baptized? Today is the feast of Jesus’s own baptism, and sometimes people hear the gospel readings about Jesus himself being baptized and they’re puzzled. Just for example, I’ve been asked this question several times over the years: If baptism is all about protecting us from original sin, and washing us clean from it, which is what many of us came to understand, then why was baptism even necessary for Jesus, since sin was not part of his life? And that’s a good question, but maybe what it shows is that we all underestimate what is really happening with baptism. Because there was more…
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I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who wants everything at Christmas to be perfect. You know what I mean: everything perfectly decorated, the perfect gift chosen for everyone, and above all that everyone close to you is where they should be. If you are like that, my guess is that for the second year in a row, you haven’t gotten your Christmas wish. I know I haven’t. We’re here tonight well aware that as humans we’re just not as in charge as we would like to be. For all of us it’s a source of frustration, for other it’s a source of real loss. The world turns…
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Sometimes, like today, the first Sunday of Advent is on Thanksgiving weekend, and when that happens, it’s like Advent arrives even more suddenly than usual. Here we are, all distracted and maybe exhausted by the holiday, and now, the colors change, the mood changes, and something new is here, and kind of like the end of the world in this gospel reading, it takes us all by surprise. What are we supposed to do in this brief season that arrives so quickly, and that gives us just four weeks, which doesn’t give us very much time to do anything at all? Sometimes our first instinct is to think that Advent…
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The Pentecost reading we heard first today describes something that sounds hard to believe in, It is the Holy Spirit finally arriving as Jesus said it would and what it really is, is a picture of real liberation. First it seems to bring an enormous release of energy. These disciples have been locked in a room, puzzled about what is next, maybe just a little the way we’ve been locked up for more than a year, but all of a sudden they feel a tremendous readiness to get out of there. And when they do, there are suddenly no barriers of communication between them and total strangers, they find words…
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Jesus told the disciples a lot of things that they had trouble understanding, even some things they probably had a problem believing. One of those things was this, he said that after he was dead and gone from them, leaving them behind, that they would actually be better off and more fortunate then, and the reason he gave was that then, they would have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, he said, would give them everything they needed and more, not just to live, but to live in joy, to live as his followers, to be able to do the great things he told them needed to be done. So why…
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I’ve been leading this Good Friday service here for more than 20 years, but I’ve never seen the sight I’m looking at now, which is 600 empty places. It seems all wrong, but in a way, maybe it’s not. This liturgy is partly about a deep feeling of emptiness that comes upon all of us. At the end of this gospel we just heard, everyone has scattered, the entire cast of characters of the gospels has disappeared, there’s a tomb with a stone in front of it, this great city where something amazing was supposed to happen seems suddenly deserted, and night has come. On Good Friday this is where…