Sometimes we tend to think we have a religion that’s about the past. People come up here to this lectern and read from scriptures that are thousands of years old, so we could be forgiven if we conclude that the primary focus of our faith is believing what happened back then. But today we find out that we also have a religion of the future. Our gospel has something just as important to say about what God will do in the future as it does about the things God did long ago. I think for many of us, this looking towards the future is harder for us. There are a…
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The first reading today, that famous reading from the Acts of the Apostles, takes us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back in time to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples not as these almost miraculous leaders, but in a room waiting for something to happen to them. It’s hard not to wonder what that felt like, and what they were thinking. The picture probably didn’t seem promising. These were people who had in their time abandoned Jesus, misunderstood instructions,…
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It’s very infrequent that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day. It makes for some inconvenient conflicts, like trying to take someone out for a romantic dinner on a day of fasting and abstinence. I hope you all found your own solution to that problem. But in one way, there is a connection. Because really, Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent we are beginning today, they are all about something that we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to, and that something is the state of our heart. That unforgettable image we heard in the first reading, tells us that the old custom in the Old Testament…
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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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I think I speak for many Catholics when I say that gospel readings like the one we just heard really aren’t our style. All this talk about end-time persecutions, and wars that mean the world is just about over. This sounds like the kind of talk we usually leave to what we think of as more fringe-y Christians who think the end of the world is coming very quickly, and they are often people who seem to want it sooner rather than later, because it’ll be so great to be proved right about the winners and losers. But for the rest of us, we usually think something more like, I’ve…
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We hardly need a homily to give us the secret meaning of a gospel like this one. It’s not very subtle. It’s an unforgettable image, what the reading describes as a great chasm after death, a chasm between all the people we could have helped and us, but with the roles now reversed, the poor rewarded, the rich with nothing. It’s a nightmare of eternal life that we’d like to think would shake us up, give us enough of a cold sweat to change some priorities, like when the ghost of Christmas yet to come finally put the fear of God into Ebenezer Scrooge. And yet the point of this…
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Jesus was asked a lot of questions as he walked from town to town during his life, and he answered all of them, but he answered them in his own way. At first, it might seem like he always avoided the questions, because he rarely answered the question people thought they wanted answered. But he had his own way of doing this. He wasn’t like a politician who says “I’m glad you asked that question” and then proceeds to answer a totally different one. What Jesus does is answer the real question, the important life or death question, not the nitpicky religious question that frankly are usually the ones that…
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Like many people as they get older, I tend to think of myself in my mind as much younger than I am, but the reality all comes out now and then and it’s usually when I mention an entertainer or a politician who was active when I was young and I of course know all about, whereas everyone under 30 in the room looks at me like I just mentioned that I know someone from ancient Rome. Today I’m going to give you just that experience, since I want to start with a brief story about the old 20th-century comedian Jack Benny. Jack’s character throughout his career was that he…
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About a week ago I had what I thought was a terrific party at my house. It was celebrating a happy occasion and a great person, and over the course of an evening there were dozens of people there, everyone someone I really liked. It was a celebration of how much we all had in common, and it made me feel pretty good about the world. Today in the gospel we have a different sort of dinner party, but unlike mine there’s a sudden drama that gets acted out in the middle of this one. A person comes in who doesn’t act like anyone else. It takes place in the…
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In Jesus’s last few days before his passion and death, and again when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, he seemingly said one word more than any other: peace. “Peace I leave with you,” he says today, “my peace I give to you.” And to a group of tense and frightened disciples who were confused about what the next day was going to bring, they must have been welcome words. A sense of peace was what they wanted and needed. And yet, after these beautiful and reassuring words, the disciples didn’t get very much peace. Immediately after this passage, Jesus says, “Arise, let us leave this place,” and…