Today I’d like to talk for a couple of minutes about one of my favorite architectural features of this church. And I hope my choice isn’t too controversial, although I suspect that many of you don’t care for it, or haven’t given it much thought one way or the other. It’s not the cross, or the tabernacle, or the baptismal font, although I love them all, and I could go on for some time about why I do. The feature I really like, that almost no other church has, are these windows. Now some of you may not like these windows very much, because after all the view outside is…
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Let’s all be honest here, and say right up front that there are probably some hymns we sing all the time here at St. David the King, that you don’t particularly care for. I checked with Carol Sullivan over there and she said it’s OK for me to talk about this — just this once. You know the feeling I’m talking about. When the cantor announces that song of yours, your shoulders slump, you might pick up the hymnal for the sake of appearances, but your heart’s not in it, and you might just be moving your lips. Here is my embarrassing confession. For me, that song is “They’ll Know…
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Today’s readings put me in mind of a story, about a priest I knew once, and he wasn’t from around here, so don’t bother trying to figure out who he was. He was a very, very sincere person. Very sincere. So sincere, sometimes it’s fair to say that it was a little difficult to process, if you know what I mean. And it happened that one night I wound up sitting next to him at a table at a parish supper and I asked what I thought was an innocent question. He’d been away for a couple of weeks, and I said, “How was your trip?” And he looked me…
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Just to be fair, we should start any reflection on this gospel with a word in favor of rules. The fact is, rules are good. Moral laws are good. They’re good, because we need them, rules about what’s good and evil, about how we behave and how we must not. After all, God has told us clearly to live according to his law of love and justice, and that means rules. And not only that, we are asked to have confidence in our judgment. If we know something is wrong we are obligated to speak out, when we see sin, it’s sometimes necessary to come out and say so. But…
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It’s now been about four years since I stopped working inside a big company and started being self-employed. Sometimes people ask me if there’s anything I miss about my former life. And you know, there are some things. I liked how somehow, magically, every two weeks, like clockwork, money got deposited in my checking account. The same amount every time, no matter how hard I worked or didn’t work, or how bad a job I did. I liked that. I haven’t yet discovered any pattern whatsoever to the way money gets added to my checking account now, so there’s one thing I definitely miss. But if I think about it,…
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Today’s gospel shouldn’t really be separated from the gospel reading we heard last week; it’s Part Two of a story that is all one. Last week, Jesus stood up in the temple in his hometown, to read the scriptures at the liturgy, and he read from the prophet Isaiah, who told people that he’d been sent to proclaim freedom and good news to captives, and it picks up today, when Jesus tells his listeners that Isaiah’s prophecy is being fulfilled right in front of them. They clearly don’t understand that he is talking about himself, because it says that his audience is pleased at his eloquence, the same way that…
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Maybe it’s because I had a big birthday this past week, but I have been thinking a lot about the future. And I have to say that in a lot of ways, I found that except as a source of worry and anxiety I don’t think much about the future at all. Even if you haven’t been ragged on all week about age, as I have, maybe you feel the same way. We have a tendency to see the future in two ways. One is to hate the future, to regard the way the world is going as pretty much hostile and out of control, at best drifting, and probably…
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Sometimes the scripture readings we hear don’t seem very human to us. Just for one example, there is that second reading today from the book of Revelation, angels surrounding a throne, countless creatures singing and shouting, everything in the universe all making a joyful, ecstatic noise at the same time. Perhaps that’s what resurrection will really be like, but it’s not a picture in which it’s easy to see ourselves, there dressed in white yelling our heads off, and liberated from everything. But the gospel today that we just heard is an entirely different story, it’s another resurrection story, but one with human beings in it that we ought to…
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We all like the idea of people getting “second chances.” It seems only fair, and it’s deeply ingrained in us. America is a country of second chances, a lot of times you hear it said that it’s the place where everyone can invent themselves all over again. If things don’t work out for you in one career, then just pick another one. If you need to get away from the place where you grew up, then just go somewhere else, maybe to California or Alaska, where everyone gets to start over, no questions asked. Starting over takes guts, we tell one another, and those who can pull it off deserve…
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During Advent, John the Baptist seems like the guest you’re sorry you invited to your holiday party, who has the magic gift of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to everyone. Here we are, trying to find some peace and quiet during our holiday preparations, or maybe to get some inspiration or a little of the Christmas spirit. But John the Baptist is talking about fire. And we get the impression that the fire he’s talking about is not this peaceful fire at the top of the Advent wreath, or a nice Christmas fire in the fireplace. This is a forest fire kind of fire, a fire with…