God brings us exiles home – Isa 40:1-5,9-11, Mark 1:1-8

2nd Sunday of Advent, Year B; Holy Infant parish

To exiles, comfort is spoken, comfort is tenderly spoken.  The Israelites heard this comfort after living for well over a generation in Babylon, after the Babylonians had razed Jerusalem and brought them captive to Babylon.  So many had grown up with talk of their Land, their own king, their own Temple being foreign to them, being something almost unimaginable, something they had never known, something that they know engenders a sparkle in the grandparents’ eyes, but not something they had ever touched or seen for themselves.  They were Israelites who had not known Israel, but only Babylonian captivity.  They had only known lush gardens they were shut out of.  They had only known themselves as foreign, as alien, as unwanted except as cheap labor.  They tried to sing their people’s songs in a strange land, but the melodies had never been wrapped around their tongues in their homeland.

Christ meets us in our offering – Isa 63:16b-17, 19; 64:2-7; Advent I collect

Advent I, Year B; Holy Infant church

Our readings today began without could have been understood as a formulaic profession of faith, “You, God, are our Father.” But it’s not just a statement of fact. Actually, in the Hebrew that verb “are” isn’t there, the reading would just begin with a list of titles for God: “You… God… our Father! Redeemer! (so named for ever)… Why do you make us stray from you, God?” It’s a long introduction to a question, a long crying out to God, to God whose absence is felt very keenly.

Jesus hungers for us – Matt 25:31-46, Ezek 34:11-17

Christ the King, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

What is it to be glorious?  I ask, because I don’t think we use that word a lot.  Words we use to say that something’s very good tend to suffer deflation over their history and new words need to be coined.  Something can be awesome without actually causing anyone much awe anymore, or brilliant without really make much of anything shine, or amazing without anyone being all that amazed.  But, glorious, that word seems to have kept a mystique, a value all of its own.  Our gospel tells us that at the end of time, the Son of Man will come in his glory, that he will be glorious, but we kind of have to hunt through the text to find what glory really means.

God gives us the oil to light up the world – Matt 25:1-13, Wis 6:12-16

32nd Sunday in OT, Year C; Holy Infant.

Ever have the experience of looking for something that’s right under your nose? Like going searching for your glasses when you’re wearing them (which I guess would make them on your nose, not under it, but the point stands). Or, my personal favorite, the time recently when I noticed that my trouser pocket seemed a little light, reached down to check what was in it, thought “Oh no! Where are my car keys,” then realized… I was driving. Well, both our first reading and our gospel are about that kind of possibility, only not with glasses and keys, but with Wisdom, and Wisdom incarnate, Christ at his coming.

God loves us over-flowingly – Matt 22:34-40, Exod 22:20-26

Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A, Mass with baptism; Holy Infant parish.

When I was in college, our student apartments where heated by storage heaters. For those who’ve never had the misfortune to live somewhere heated like this, let me explain how they work. They’re electric heaters that only turn on overnight, when the electricity’s cheaper. Inside them are bricks that absorb the heat and slowly release it over the day. At night, it works great. You get great heat throughout the morning too from the bricks. But, I remember some pretty chilly early evenings, as we sat around the stove after dinner, waiting for the magic time (9pm I think?) when the heaters would turn back on and warm both us, and the now cold bricks.

God makes us gift – Matt 22:15-21

OT, Year A, Week 28; Holy Infant parish.

When I was a child, I collected coins.  Growing up in England in the pre-Euro zone days, it was pretty easy to travel around Europe collecting different coins from different countries and, when my dad would travel for business, he’d bring back coins from more far-flung places.  I was fascinated at first by the different sizes, shapes and colors, by the different ways value was shown, and finally by the different values projected by the coins in a deeper sense: how did each nation make a statement about who they were by how they decorated their coins?  Now, I soon came to realize that coin-designers did not tend to be especially imbued with the virtue of national humility, but none that I can remember made as bold a claim as that coin the Pharisees probably produced from their own purse at Jesus’ request.

God extends mercy to those we'd least suspect to show us the way – Matt 21:28-32

Twenty-sixth Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

“Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  What would be your reaction to that?  Imagine you’re a chief priest, you’re standing in the Temple, your home base, the place you feel most grounded in the presence of the God who called you into his service, into leadership in his service, and this odd, homeless, wandering preaching who had just shown up in Jerusalem to great acclaim from the people has the nerve to say to you: “Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  I’m sure we can imagine various responses, and, knowing how the story ends, we know that their reaction culminated in plotting to have this wandering preacher killed.  I think the first thing we should notice is that if someone else is entering the kingdom before us, then we’re entering the kingdom! And maybe if I was a better person, I’d be entirely fine with that. But, I do have to admit that I think in their shoes, I’d feel a little stung by Jesus’ throwing shade. I think there’s somewhere that sting is meant to lead us. I don’t think we’re meant to just concentrate on the fact that we’re en route to the kingdom of heaven and ignore the tax collectors and prostitutes ahead of us that cause that sting. But the response to them is to convert that sting into gratitude.  Gratitude followed by conversion of heart.

God invites all to join the work and receive the reward – Matt 20:1-16

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish

We don’t know why those men were standing around the market place at the eleventh hour, about five o’clock in the afternoon.  The vineyard owner doesn’t know either, so he asks them, and they give almost a non-response, “because no-one has hired us.”  I call it almost a non-response, because it’s patently obvious: if anyone had hired them, they’d be at work in someone’s field or someone’s barn and not standing around a market place!  Maybe a more probing question might have been, “and why has no-one hired you?”  But the master doesn’t ask this, and so we can’t get to know.  We don’t know if they were seen as too old to be able to labor, or too young to know what they were doing, or too odd to be able to get on with the other workers, or if they looked sickly, or threatening, or if they slept in and showed up to the market place late, or if they were just unlucky.  All we know is that the master called, and they followed.

God clears away what keeps us distant – Matt 18:21-35

Year A, Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Infant

This gospel passage is powerful, capable of communicating something wondrous and awesome (in the true sense). But, like anything powerful, it’s also dangerous. Powerful things are rarely safe. One of the dangers is, in using this financial imagery for sin and forgiveness, it can encourage us to think of sin in those terms, in a kind of mechanical accounting – “Well, I gossiped four times today, and I was kind of judgmental, so five Hail Marys in this other column will offset that, and one good deed to round them off will put me in the black!” And if that kind of thinking leads people to do good, then great, as a first step. But, its danger is that it prevents us from seeing what sin is holding us back from.

God appoints us as watchmen to bring us forgiveness – Ezek 33:7-9, Matt 18:15-20

Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

Ezekiel was an exile, a displaced person.  He was an Israelite living in Babylon, because the Babylonians had come to Jerusalem, destroyed it, destroyed God’s house, the Temple, in its midst and forced them on the long march East to Babylon.  The people were bereft of the only ways they’d known God: the Temple, the kingship, the Land.  But, God did not desert them.  The people would discover that in their exile, God was in their midst too.  Just as, centuries later, the Church, bereft of Christ’s humane presence, would discover that wherever two or three gathered in his name, he was there. 

Christ leads us through suffering to eternal life – Matt 16:21-27, Rom 12:1-2

22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

One year at Notre Dame’s baccalaureate Mass, I was the person tasked with purifying the vessels after communion. As I was purifying the main, celebrants’ chalice, I noticed whose it was.  It was Fr. Sorin’s chalice, the chalice of the priest who my community’s founder had sent on the arduous trip across the ocean from France to the mission territory of Indiana to found a school.  It wasn’t the chalice he’d received at his ordination, but one he’d been given on one of his ordination anniversaries by a benefactor.  The precious metal alone must have been worth a pretty penny, the craftsmanship and artistry more, and the history behind it probably made it the most expensive thing I’d ever held, and certainly the most expensive thing I’d ever swilled water around in and drunk out of.  The most expensive thing I’d ever held, but not the most valuable: for a little while before I’d embraced fellow Christians in the sign of peace, and a shortly after that I’d held the body of my Lord briefly in my hand, before I consumed it.  “What could we give in exchange for our life, or the life of anyone?”  Jesus asked.  Nothing, we could give nothing so valuable as a life.  What would he give for our life?  Everything.  He would give his clothing, his blood, his body, his very life, to lead us into eternal life.

Jesus welcomes us in earth-shattering embrace – Luke 1:39-56 (Assumption)

Feast of the Assumption; Holy Infant parish.

Today is a feast of embrace. What the feast centrally is about is Jesus’ embrace of Mary, but our Gospel speaks to us of Mary’s embrace of Jesus. What we celebrate today is Jesus’ assumption, taking up, embracing, his Mother, lifting her, body and soul, directly into heaven at the moment of her death. We celebrate Christ’s embrace. We celebrate that Jesus, who came to show us what love looks like, showed a fully human love, a love that includes children’s love for their mother, without thereby excluding anyone else from that. But, Christ’s love being divine love doesn’t make it any less human, and fully human love isn’t impersonal, generalized beneficence, but full-hearted fully-particular affection. And, in this feast, we celebrate one way Christ loved his mother.

God gives us good news to proclaim – Rom 5:12-15, Matt 10:20-33

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A; Mission Appeal at St. Augusta's, Lake Village, IN

When St. Paul talks about a gift over-flowing, he doesn’t just mean a benign trickle. He knew what it was like to be bawled over by a torrent of over-flowing gift, Jesus Christ’s gift of self, an act of love that changes the world. The gift of the resurrection is that Jesus gives everything to show us that God’s love for us is so intense that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us. It’s a gift that finds its first installment in God’s own Spirit, dwelling to closer to us than we are to ourselves, praying in us; a gift that will find its perfect fulfillment when it leads us to live forever lives of such love ourselves, standing shoulder to shoulder with the saints in heaven. It’s a gift, as we heard Jesus say, that’s spoken into the darkest parts of our world, and of ourselves, daring to go to places we’d balk to reveal, and lovingly transforming them. It’s a gift that compels us to speak of it, wherever there is light, Jesus says. And God has bathed his whole world in light.

God meets us with the poor – Acts 6:1-7

5th Sunday of Easter, Year A; Holy Infant parish

The most curious thing about the first reading we heard today isn’t anything in the reading, or what precedes or follows the reading, but what doesn’t follow it. Let me back up and talk about how we don’t get to where we might think we might get to. The story is about the earliest days of the church in Jerusalem. This happens after Pentecost, but before Paul becoming Christian, for instance, before the church has started expanding outside Jerusalem. The Hellenists we hear about are Jews who grew up in Greek-speaking communities but have since moved to Jerusalem and have joined this nascent Christian community, all of whose leaders are Aramaic speaking Jews (“the Hebrews”). They’re insiders… to some extent. But, they’re also immigrants. And while there’s no debate about them being welcome, as there’ll be debate later about quite on what terms Gentiles are welcome, being welcome isn’t quite the same as being fully integrated, isn’t the same as being always remembered, even. And the complaint comes that their widows are being ignored in the daily distribution of food. The apostles both realize the problem, and realize that they can’t solve it. So, they recruit seven men from among this Hellenist group and put them in charge of ensuring that Hellenist widows are better included.

God calls us by name – Jn 10:1-10, 1 Pet 2:20b-25

Easter, Week 4, Year A; Holy Infant.

Many of you know that before I entered seminary I worked as a prison teacher.  When I first started working there, a lot of the other helping professionals in the prison recognized that there was something about the culture of that place, the marbled unity of grotesque beauty and darkness in search of light, that I needed to understand to be fruitful there, and the only way they could explain it was through stories.  This story’s from a prison chaplain.  I never knew the inmate the story’s about, but it’s a pithy way of getting across in one short graced conversation what I saw so many times, on a much slower scale.  He was young, but a hulk of a man, apparently, intimidating.  By which, I learnt, the chaplain meant both that he looked intimidating, and that he often went out of his way to intimidate people.  He’d stand at the back of the chapel throughout Mass, defiant.  After several weeks of this, the chaplain approached him and asked: “What’s your name?”  “Striker,” came back the answer.  “That’s not a name, that’s a committal offense, a claim, a front.  What’s your name?”  “González.”  “OK, but I’m not going to call you by your last name. That’s not how you were baptized.  What’s your name?  What does your momma call you?”  The next answer, I won’t repeat in church.  That’s what his mother called him, something I won’t repeat in church.  “She’s mad with you a lot, huh?”  “Yeah.  I’m bad.”  It wasn’t a confession, it wasn’t a boast; it was just a flat statement of fact.  “But, I bet that wasn’t what she called you when you were a baby, huh?  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  “OK, my first name is Napoleón.”  “Nice name.  But that’s not what I asked.  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  Out of a face, I came to know so well that was about to erupt in something, you just didn’t know what, came: “Well, sometimes… she’d call me Napito.”  “Napito.  Can I call you that?”  I wonder how long since he’d heard that. He didn’t say. He just replied, “Sure, padre.  That would be chido.” 

Jesus rejoices with us – Acts 2:22-33, Luke 24:13-35

3rd Sunday of Easter, Year A; Holy Infant

Have you ever wondered when we sing or hear a psalm, whose voice it is we’re hearing? I don’t mean, “Who’s the cantor?,” as important of a question as that might be. I don’t even mean, historically who wrote each psalm, though as a scholar of scripture, that’s the kind of question that exercises me in my day job. No, I mean to ask it on a level and in a way that respects and values and cherishes through whom the psalm came to us – the Ancient Israelite composers, the scribes who copied them out, the modern composers who wrote our settings, the musicians here who lead us in song – but asks a question that’s a level deeper than that. Whose voice is it really that we’re hearing?

Jesus refuses goodbye – John 20:1-9

Easter Sunday; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t really like goodbyes.  I’m generally one of those people who tends to quietly slip away from a party, rather than going round bidding farewell to everyone I know.  And with casual acquaintances, or good friends we’ll only briefly be separated from, that’s OK (even if it verges on unconscionable for some of my more extroverted friends).  But the dearer the friend and the more remote the absence or uncertain the possibility of renewed contact, the more important the goodbye is.  And the harder it is.  So, I really don’t like those goodbyes, as much as I still cling to them as precious.

Jesus restores us to life – John 17:1-18:42

Good Friday; Holy Infant.

John’s Passion is full of people making exchanges, swapping something heart-breakingly brilliant, fragile in its tenderness for something dull, insubstantial and ridiculous. Friends, sin is dull, insubstantial and ridiculous. And Jesus dreams more daring dreams than that for us.

Holy Thursday reflections

My first time presiding at the Holy Thursday Mass tonight. My pastor preached, so no homily to share, but two reactions to walking through this sacred night as presider.

First the footwashing: It's ridiculously simple. Scandalously simple. It's also tender, earthy, loving, but what struck me most was how simple it is. I just concentrated on one pair of feet at a time. Yet its simplicity can in no way belittle it; it's what God calls us to, and it's what God did for us. We're all called to this kind of service, but these feet were the ones the Church entrusted to me, not through my merit, but through the anointing of my hands which expressed itself by placing in them towel and pitcher, and simple old feet. Why do I make this all so complicated, when Love is scandalously simple?

Next, the procession to the altar of repose. It's hard to hold two ciboria while wearing a cope and humeral veil. To do that without dropping anything required me to clutch them close to my chest. God asks me to hold Him! The intimacy and frailty of Eucharist struck me anew.

God shakes us out of death – Matt 26:14-27:66

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

The death of Jesus shakes everything up. And he knew it would. He even warned his disciples, telling them, “all of you will have your faith shaken.” But more is shaken than just their faith. The whole earth shakes, in an earthquake that shows that earth itself seismically gets what’s going on here, gets that what is happening in earth-shattering, creation-shattering: the God of all creation suffers and dies at the hands of creatures, out of love for them.

Jesus commands life – Jn 11:1-45

Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

What’s behind your stone?  What’s in your cave, shut up behind a stone?  What are you afraid to smell?  What can you think of… something you wouldn’t want to tell everyone here, or maybe anyone here?  What is there that you don’t want to carry, because you know how terribly it would weigh you down?  Dead weight… weigh that leads the death.  Roll the stone over it, try to forget.  Because most of us have something that threatens to weigh us down.  A memory, a fear, an injustice suffered or inflicted, an incompetence or a deception.  Something which threatens to reek of the absence of God.  But to try to live our lives with part of us siloed off and shut up behind a rock is not to live, it’s to tacitly consent to a slow-fade to death.  And Jesus commands Life.

God sees us – 1 Sam 16:1-13, John 9:1-41

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A; Holy Infant Parish.

Humans don’t see as God sees. Yet. As we put our first reading and gospel together, I think that’s what we’re left with. We have the negative confession: the humans don’t see as God sees. We have the good news that God sees in a world-changing way. And we have what excites us to hope: that God will transform how we see.

Christ brings the heavenly down the mountain for us – Matt 17:1-9; Gen 12:1-4a

2nd Sunday of Lent, Year A; Holy Infant.

“Luke, I am your father;” the de-masking at the close of the Marriage of Figaro; the transformation of the Beast into Belle’s prince; the quite frankly bizarre moment in more than one Shakespeare play when a woman lets down her hair and only then do the rest of the dramatis personae realize she’s not a boy: we’re fascinated by these kinds of scenes, where a character’s true identity, hidden from other characters or even from the reader, gets made visible, when the dramatic x-ray machine cuts through flesh and marrow and discloses bone.  This is the vision God granted these three disciples, a disclosure of the glorious light Christ was in their midst, in contrast to the hiddenness and homelessness with which he was more normally clothed.  But this is not just a revelation about Jesus with no relevance for the rest of humanity; this is a preview of the glory of resurrection that awaits us. It’s a re-echoing of the heavenly voice from Christ’s baptism, the unwavering assertion of his beloved sonship, and another invitation to hear that voice speaking to us.

Christ raises us to be who were created to be – Gen 2:7-9, Matt 4:1-11

1st Sunday of Lent, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

I have to admit that whenever I’m bored, one of my go-to “this’ll-distract-me” instincts is to pull out my phone. Of course, it doesn’t always work, and I have at times caught myself looking at something on my phone, still being bored at it, or frustrated at how slowly something’s loading, and realizing that my left hand is instinctively reaching down to my pocket to take out my phone. Forgetting what I’m doing makes me think that something’s going to satisfy me that isn’t, in this case that isn’t even there.  What’s much more dangerous though than forgetting what you’re doing is forgetting who you are.

God beautifully and painfully re-members us – Isa 49:14-15

8th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A -- Holy Infant parish, on the occasion of reception of a catechumen and candidate for reception into full communion.

Can a mother forget her child? That’s the tender comforting word God has for his people in the reading we heard from Isaiah. The passage continues of course, after the point we stopped reading, and maybe as much as we read is enough. It certainly is a rich banquet of word, of Gospel in the deep sense of good news, to just sit and reflect on and marvel at God’s love for us, as the love of mother for child. But, the passage continues and lets us in to God’s emotional attachment to humanity. Just after these verses, God tells us, “I have engraved you in the palms of my hands.” I did a little research on palm tattoos this week (I dread to think what kind of ads I’ll start getting online soon…), and consistently sites I went to made three points about hand tattoos: they’re painful, they’re very hard to hide, and they fade quicker than other tattoos so need regular retouching to look good. God has engraved us in the palms of his hand. God’s etching of our memory into God’s hands is public, is bold, is extravagant, is regularly re-inscribed, and is painful.

God has changed the world that we might love like Him – Matt 5:17-48

Ordinary Time, Year A, Week 6; Holy Infant parish.

Suppose we were all good law-observant Jews, and you heard these words of Jesus’ and decided to follow them. The next day I have to go out of town, and I ask you if can look after my ox while I’m gone. You’re a decent sort, and pretty well set up for ox-tending, so you say, “sure!” Unfortunately, while I’m away, the ox catches what you think is a bad case of flu. It gets sicker and sicker and then dies. I come back, and I’m pretty upset about my dead ox, who wasn’t a cute pet, but really essential to my ability to provide for my family (let’s say we’re all subsistence farmers here too). I demand you pay me the price of an ox, something you definitely do not have the resources to do, not without ruining yourself. “Hold on,” you say, “that’s not fair, it wasn’t my fault, the ox just got sick and died.” You remember that the law of Moses actually deals explicitly with this situation, and you’d just heard Jesus say that he hadn’t come to abolish the law. The law says that in this exact situation, all you have to do is swear an oath that the ox’s death wasn’t your fault, and I would have no claim against you. But, Jesus just said no oaths. None at all. And the law of Moses doesn’t say you can swear an oath if you like, it says, Exod 22:10-11, in this situation, you must. The debt-collectors are at your door, and they’re telling you, “follow the law, the law God gave on Sinai, if what you’re saying about the illness is true, and swear the oath. If not, cough up.”

God’s work in us lights up the world – Matt 5:13-16

5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Now, I know that in this congregation we have quite a few scientists, engineers, physicians, etc., and people whose gifts lie in different areas. But, I’m pretty sure that everyone here knows the First Law of Thermodynamics.  Now, I don’t mean that you can necessarily recite it, but you know it.  The first law of thermodynamics states that work is heat and heat is work.  Knowing the first law of thermodynamics really just amounts to knowing that when you run your car engine, it gets hot.  Now, that’s not really its function (its function is to spin the gears and thus wheels and move your car forward), but a side-effect (a pleasant one during those chilly morning commutes we’ve been enjoying recently) is that doing that work creates heat.  You know the first law of thermodynamics if you know that when you exercise, you’ll start to warm up.  Doing the work of contracting and extending your muscles to move around creates heat.  A room full of children running around won’t just be noisy, it’ll warm up.  And when things get hot enough, they start to give off light.  Think of sparks on a bandsaw.  Or, think of those light bulbs, which are designed to give off light and, incidentally give off heat.  The work there is the electrons in the metal of the filament moving backwards and forwards, changing direction over a hundred times a second.  These tiny particles buzzing around do enough work to heat those coils and produce enough light to light up this Church.

                      

God lifts us up, so we should dare to fall – Matt 5:1-12a (Celebration of St. Francis de Sales)

Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A, parish celebration of St. Francis de Sales; Holy Infant parish.

When I was teaching confirmation class, this passage we just heard from Matthew, the beatitudes, was in our textbook. But, rather confusingly, it was in the section on Christian morality, on a right hand page, right next to the Ten Commandments on the left. I, at least, was confused by this, because the beatitudes aren’t primarily about what we’re meant to do at all. We have beautiful Christian teaching about what we are to do and not do; the Ten Commandments, inherited from our Jewish roots, work great as a to-do list (along with a not-to-do-list). I could tell the kids, make sure you honor father and mother this week, careful of that coveting. But the beatitudes? How could I tell them, go out and be poor this week, or go mourn?

Jesus enlightens the darkness – Matt 4:12-23, Isa 8:23-9:3

Ordinary Time, Year A, Wk 3; Holy Infant parish.

“When Jesus heard that John had been arrested…”  That’s how Jesus’ earthly ministry starts in Matthew. Jesus’ earthly ministry starts with tragedy, the arrest of John the Baptist. Jesus gets baptized by John, then he goes through his forty days in the desert (our lectionary moves that reading out of sequence, so we read it at the start of Lent), then he waits an unknown amount of time, until this moment, “John had been arrested.” Matthew doesn’t tell us how Jesus felt. Was his reaction something like frustration? – John was meant to be preparing his way, and he wasn’t done yet (we’ll see throughout the gospel how unprepared his way is!), but now he’s gone and got himself arrested so Jesus will just have to start ministry anyway. Maybe it’s fear? – if they arrested John, what will they do to him? Maybe there’s some grief, pre-emptive grief knowing what’ll likely come next for John, with all the weird mix of sadness and anger that entails.

Jesus baptizes us – John 1:29-34, Isa 49:3, 5-6

Second Sunday of OT, Year A; Holy Infant Parish.

Normally, the Church celebrates the feast of the Baptism of Christ on the Sunday after Epiphany. This year is strange, in that with Christmas being on a Sunday, the Baptism of Christ got moved to last Monday (when the local Church here was celebrating the feast of ‘not dying on icy roads’) and this is the first Sunday of Ordinary Time, which (confusingly) is the Sunday of the Second Week of Ordinary Time (which started with a half week last Tuesday). Confused yet?  All of those arcane calendrical calculations aside, in a coincidence, or probably act of Providence, this week we’re assigned a reading which is about the Baptism of Christ, albeit in a rather different sense than the Feast we observed on Monday. That feast is about the Baptism of Christ, as in, the time when Christ got baptized. This reading from John is about the Baptism of Christ, in the sense of the Baptism with which Christ baptizes. This reading is the kernel of the gospel, that God acts in Christ for us. In this case, the promise that Jesus will baptize us.