We could be forgiven if we come here today completely confused about what kind of a God we really have. Who would have expected, one year ago, that we would now be looking back on a year of wars that are called holy, a year of suicide bombings and murder in the name of religion, a year when our church itself has proven, if it needed proving, that it is not the holder of all truth and good judgment. So much suffering. So little reason for it. No clear way to end it. So many people thinking God is on their side. We think that God must have turned away,…
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We know this story so well, that it has a life of its own, event follows event with a sense of inevitability, we know what’s coming next at every point. Over time, it seems to us that it couldn’t have been any other way. But Jesus’s death was the most avoidable death imaginable. At every turning point in this story, there’s an opportunity for Jesus to escape his crucifixion. He could have avoided Jerusalem entirely. He could have snuck through one of the legal loopholes that Pilate seemed, at some level, to want to offer him. He could have laid low for a year or two until things settled down.…
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I’m sure the last thing might think you want right now, after nine long scripture readings, would be yet more salvation history laid out for you. But we should be honest, and say that deep down, there’s a part of the story we do still want to hear. Jesus’ resurrection comes nearly at the end of the scriptures we have, but now here we are two thousand years later, in a very different world, and the missing reading we want to hear now is, what will happen to us, what’s the end of the story? We know the resurrection is the end of our story, too, but frankly, our imaginations…
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I don’t mean to offend anyone, I’m just reporting the research. But it appears that they have proven this scientifically. They asked ordinary people just to take a look at a series of people who walked into a room and then left again, saying nothing, all dressed pretty much the same, and just looking at the people who came in, these ordinary people were asked to estimate the annual income of the people they had just seen. And I guess you could have predicted this, the short people were estimated to earn on average $30,000 less per year than the people who were taller. And not only has this turned…
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Tonight, I’m having people over for dinner, and I’m looking forward to it. In complete disregard for the last few sentences of this gospel, where the host of the dinner is advised not to invite his friends, in fact, I’m having dinner with very good friends. I couldn’t live without dinner with other people, people I love. That, really, is one of the points in this gospel reading— that none of us can live without meals, meals with others, meals where we are taken care of. They are the whole goal of life, really, they are why we are here around this table [tonight/today], for a meal like that. In…
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One of my children has a gift that I don’t think is all that unusual in this parish, but I want to tell you about it anyway. Unfortunately, this gift is only really in evidence when she wants something. She is the most charming, persistent and relentless asker I have ever seen. Her approach has everything — great timing, endless, wearing-down frequency, cheery smiles, logical and not-so-logical arguments, moving examples of injustice, a little flattery when appropriate, very occasionally, when all else fails, even PowerPoint. The things she asks for aren’t always possible, much less sensible, and she doesn’t always get what she wants, at least as best I can…
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We all know this is the age of multitasking, of trying to do many things at the same time. Many times, we look pretty funny doing it. I was once at a business meeting at a television network, where of course they have televisions in every conference room, and they’re on; and all through this so-called meeting, all the network guys kept darting their eyes over to the screen, checking whatever was on their network instead of looking at whoever was speaking in the room. I’m not sure what they were looking for, but the result of all that eye-shifting was to make people who were already reputed to be…
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I can’t hear the names Martha and Mary without thinking of my own family. I had an aunt Martha and an aunt Mary, and five other aunts besides, sisters all living in the same town. And while today’s gospel story clearly means to contrast Martha and Mary to make its point, in fact my aunts were pretty much all of a piece, and if we’re to be guided by today’s gospel, they might all just as well have been named Martha. My experience of them has always been from big family get-togethers that one or the other of them was hosting, and I don’t think I saw my aunt Martha…
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For all of the whining many of us do about getting older, there are a lot of pluses that it brings, along with the downside, like the inability to stay out late at a party without falling asleep. Just the other day, someone who had just passed a big milestone told me that she thought age brought a lot of benefits: When you’re younger, you don’t have a very good sense of yourself, you’re a lot more upset by things, you don’t know where you stand in life, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who you are, and where you belong. When you’re older, on…
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If you read the report from the September 11 Commission, I can’t blame you if you couldn’t read much more than the first chapter. It’s a very sober narrative of plane flight after plane flight leaving early that morning. The straightforward words make the sheer heartlessness of it all overwhelming. Reading that stayed with me for a few weeks, until the image of evil I was carrying around in my mind was replaced by pictures from the front page of the New York Times. The unforgettable photograph of an Iraqi militant battling Americans in Najaf, standing on the ledge of a window of a Moslem shrine, his face grotesquely distorted…