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…
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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…