There are a lot of things about Jesus it’s relatively easy to believe. For example, we can believe that of all good people, he was the best. We can believe that no one else in history embodied the love of God so completely. We can believe that of all the great saints the world has produced, he is the one most worth following. But what is hard to believe is this: When Thomas the disciple says that he can’t believe Jesus is alive unless he sees him with his own eyes, I think we all know in our hearts the frustration he is talking about. We wish we could see…
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The story that we’ve just heard is one that seems to show the world at its worst, all in one horrifying day. A good man is left to die alone, isolated, without support, rejected. His friend and best disciple, the one who understands him best, decides he is more worried about self-preservation than he is about telling the truth. Everything about Jesus’s life and his mission has fallen apart quickly in a day of misunderstandings and chaotic power politics; there’s an ugly crowd shouting for violence, trying to find a scapegoat they barely know to blame for their frustrations. All these things we’d say are the world at its worst,…
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This gospel comes at the end of a sequence of three stories Jesus tells about how we are supposed to feel about those who are lost. First it’s a lost sheep, where the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep who aren’t lost to find the one that is; then a lost coin, where a woman sweeps the house until she finds the one she lost, even though she has nine others; and now finally a much longer and more complicated story of a lost son, or maybe, given the end of the story, it should be the story of two lost sons, since it turns out that there are different ways…
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It’s hard to celebrate Christmas without being flooded with memories. I know every Christmas I can’t help but be brought back to Christmas the way it was when I was a kid back in Indiana, going to a big Christmas Eve party in a packed little house with my six Croatian aunts and five Croatian uncles and dozens of others, a house overloaded with food and presents and desserts. My Uncle Dan was a wiry little man, but every year at the climax of the evening he’d put on a faded and ratty Santa Claus suit, with no padding at all — really I should just summarize it by saying…
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This first reading is one of the most beautiful and ecstatic passages in Scripture. Put on the splendor of glory from God forever… Stand upon the heights, look to the east and see your children gathered from the east and from the west, rejoicing that they are remembered by God. But we should remember that it’s a vision that is being offered by the author of this reading so many years ago to people who think that this will never be possible. They have been exiled, refugees, scattered around their world, held prisoner in countries that are not theirs, blocked on the road that leads to safety and to home.…
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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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We know Jesus was a great teacher, but in one area at least he left his disciples and the early church very confused. And it’s this nagging question about the end of the world, when it would happen, and exactly what would happen when it did. That particular question is almost entirely off of our radar in real life today, because our view of the end of the world is entirely different from the one we heard in today’s gospel. For us, that end is something that’s so far off in the future it’s not worth planning for, it’s a misty future time when planetary forces we barely understand gradually…
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Most of us think we aren’t very good at praying, or at least, that we could do a lot better in both the frequency and the content departments. But no matter how little we know about prayer one thing we do all know, that in this gospel the Pharisee shows us exactly how not to do it. “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity.” In a way, it’s an encouragement for the rest of us to get back to prayer, since really, almost anything incoherent we might decide to blurt out has to be better than this. It’s easy to laugh at this caricature…
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Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve lived around Princeton Junction now for more than 30 years, and I’ve been part of this parish for almost all that time, almost 20 of them as a deacon. And on the one hand I wonder of course what’s happened to my life so quickly, it wasn’t at all what I had planned, at one point I was hoping for a lot more excitement than you get in West Windsor. But on the other hand the fact is that being around a place and a group of people for so long is a tremendous pleasure in life. No matter where I…