God raises us – Matt 2:13-15

Holy Family, Year A; St. Joe parish.

Sometimes, the origins of a word have little or nothing to do with what the word means now. “Malaria,” for instance, means “bad air,” because people thought the disease was airborne, and we’ve kept the word even though we now know that’s not how it spreads. But other times, the origin of a word is really worth sitting with and wondering if it can actually illuminate the concept for us. I think that a good example of this is the word “educate.” Our English word “educate” comes from the Latin “to lead out,” ex + dūcere. And I think that that’s actually a rather beautiful image of what education is, the idea that education consists not of stuffing people’s brains full of as many facts as possible (the so-called “banking model” of education), but of leading them out of somewhere. The image, I think, is of leading people out of somewhere that is narrow and confining. An educator walks with students, equips them to walk on their own two feet, but keeps on guiding them, not abandoning them, and leads them from a place of narrowness, of being shut in, into a world that is suddenly larger, a world they can now navigate.

God feeds us – Luke 2:1-14

Christmas; St. Joseph parish, Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

The image of the baby in a manger. It’s on a huge number of Christmas cards, it’s part of our nativity set here in church that we blessed at the beginning of Mass, it’s popular among artists, it’s just part of Christmas for us. Which maybe means that we never stop to think about quite how odd it is. I think that maybe one thing that obscures that is that we use the word “manger,” which we pretty much only ever use in relation to Jesus, rather than a more prosaic, but equally accurate, term like “feeding trough.” I mean, I’m not going to claim to be the expert here on neonatal care, but I don’t know how many of you ever put your babies in your dogs’ food dish.

God is with us – Matt 1:18-24

4th Sunday of Advent, Year A; St. Joe parish.

I used to be associate pastor at Holy Cross parish, and while I was there, I taught the confirmation class for the grade school kids. The first mini-essay I’d assign each year would be to ask them to explain which virtue they most wanted to grow in over the course of their confirmation prep. Each time I assigned that essay prompt, a full half of them would choose courage. The rest, by the way, would be split roughly evenly between faith, hope, and love. I was somewhat disappointed that none of them ever chose prudence, which I think is something many twelve to fourteen-year-olds could probably do with growing in… But, courage, that was the most popular choice for virtue they most wanted to grow in. And they were able, in general, to write about big bold displays of courage, but they concentrated in their responses on little things, on resisting peer pressure, standing up for someone being picked up, or defending what they believed was right.

God makes the deserted bloom – Matt 11:2-11, Isa 35:1-6a, 10

Advent, 3rd Sunday, Year A; St. Joseph parish.

“Here is your God.”  Behold, your God.  These are some of the words we heard from the Isaiah.  He has more to say about God: that He comes with vindication, with divine recompense, he comes to save you.  It goes on, talking of all the miraculous healing that will happen, all great cause for rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing.  Advent is a lot about waiting for the future. It’s also about remembering the past, building up our trust and hope that Christ will come again by remembering that he came. But the readings we heard today shift our focus from both past and future to present. “Here Is your God.”  Not, here’s the spot where he will be, just hang on; certainly not, there’s where he will be, but he’s distant now, so don’t bother Him.  No. Behold Him.  Here is your God.  The cry might go up… “where?”

God gives us the gift of being givers –Isa 11:1-10

2nd Sunday of Advent, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

We use cute kittens for praising friends. If you were to ask anyone who prepared for the sacrament of confirmation through Holy Cross grade school, South Bend, IN in 2014 or 2015 what the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are, I’d hazard a guess that, before answering, at least a few of them would recite in their heads: “We use cute kittens for praising friends.” The reason is that in those two years, I was teaching the confirmation prep class for the kids in our parish grade school, and I knew that, as part of Bishop’s homily at their confirmation Mass, he would ask the confirmandi to provide for him each of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. So, I made up that mnemonic, in which the first letter of each word in the sentence matches the first letter of the gift, to help them remember. We, wisdom; use, understanding; cute, counsel; kittens, knowledge; for, fortitude; praising, piety; friends, fear of the Lord. Only once on a quiz did I have a kid claim that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit were wisdom, understanding, counsel, kittens, fortitude, piety, fear of the Lord. And that list of gifts is important, because it’s a long-standing way of naming what it is God strengthens in a Christian when they receive the sacrament of confirmation. The -firm- part in the middle of the word “confirmation” means “strengthens,” and it’s not primarily about the recipient of the sacrament strengthening their commitment (though, if they do that, that’s wonderful); the sacraments are all about God’s action, not ours, about God’s strengthening of God’s gifts to God’s people.

God stirs up our longing to run to Christ – Adv I collect, Isa 2:1-5, Rom 13:11-14

Advent I, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Collect:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

The resolve to run forth to meet your Christ

With righteous deeds at his coming,

So that, gathered at his right hand,

They may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

One God, for ever and ever.

--

Advent is for waiting – if people know one thing about Advent, it’s probably that.  We’re waiting for Christmas, which isn’t very long to wait and we’re waiting for Christ to come again, without knowing how long that will be.  Regardless, we’re waiting.  So why did our opening prayer, our collect, talk about running?  “Grant us the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ.”  That’s what we prayed at the start of Mass.  Running: it’s a fascinating and compelling characterization of what Christian waiting looks like.

God brings us into the light of day – Mal 3:19-20

33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the sun. Not the Son of God, Jesus, I mean the big fiery thing in the sky, the sun with a ‘u.’ Most pragmatically, like all life on this planet, of course, we’re totally dependent on it, both for warmth and so that plants can grow and give us things to eat and oxygen to breath. It also feels good. There’s just something about a sunny day that just feels better. This time of year, the sun gets up right up when I do, which makes getting up a lot easier. “Feeling the sun on your back” is a common expression for the pleasantness of being out, being active, on a sunny day. But, given that there is not a lot of a sun in the land of my people, my skin is pretty terribly adapted to sun. I burn really easily. I have so little pigment in my eyes that it’s actually really hard for me to see well on a very sunny day, without shades for my glasses. Actually, in one place I lived, the place I went for my eye exams was an optometry school, and the students and instructors would always get excited when they started examining me because I’m so low on eye pigment that, apparently, you can see various features of ocular anatomy on me that you can’t easily in most people, because of the greater amount of pigment, and they’d generally start calling people over to look at my eyes. Less personally, I know what increased exposure to the sun’s rays is doing to our planet, and its capacity to be hospitable to human life. Heat and light and the sun play ambiguous roles in our lives: necessary, often pleasant, sometimes onerous, potentially dangerous.

God gives us windows to holiness, and will open them fully – Luke 20:27-38, 2 Thess 2:16-3:5

32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been to the Broadhead Center at Duke. Formerly known as West Union, it’s the central campus dining location, and it’s a really beautiful building (as well as having reasonably priced good food!). One face of the building is glass, or at least some other transparent material, and because of a kind of cut away in the first floor, from the garden level up, you have two stories of continuous glass-like wall, letting in natural light and opening the space up. One day, I was sitting in that lower, garden, level, facing towards that wall that is a window, but reasonably far back from it, and I saw a student, one of the brightest and best that we pride ourselves on attracting at Duke, walk towards the glass wall, and walk straight into it and get knocked back. Once a few people had verified that this student was entirely uninjured, apart from with respect to his pride, someone shouted out, “That is the best compliment you could pay to the cleaning staff.” The student had failed to notice the window was a window, and thought it was just the outside.

God sees past our sin – Luke 19:1-10, Wis 11:22-12:2

31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

More than one astronaut has talked about their surprise at going up into space, all excited about going to space, to explore radically new things, dreaming of investigating moons, planets, stars, and then being suddenly taken aback by their view of something that they thought was familiar: earth. NASA astronaut Ron Garan calls this the “orbital perspective.” He described his sudden awareness that “we’re all travelling together on this planet and, if we looked at it from this perspective, we’d see that nothing is impossible.”

God urges us on in struggle – Luke 18:1-8, Exod 18:8-13

Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I wonder what you might come up with if you were asked to tell a story that encapsulates your image of prayer. I think that could actually be a really interesting spiritual exercise, especially for people who naturally like to make up and tell stories, to think through what story you would tell if wanted to talk about prayer through a narrative. It could be something from your life, a story from the life of a saint, or a completely made up story that nonetheless is deeply true. To maybe spark your imagination, and I hope not to shut it down, Exodus and Jesus’ parable in Luke give us two such stories, or maybe, actually, three, and I’ll get to why I think there are three stories there later

God heals the fear that makes us shun – Luke 17:11-19, 2 Tim 2:8-13

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I think the worst thing we could ever teach someone is that they should keep their distance from Jesus.  Yet, this is what these ten lepers were taught.  Not specifically from Jesus, of course, they’d been taught to keep their distance from everyone who didn’t share their disease.  When the first signs of leprosy were noticed on someone’s skin, there would be a funeral style liturgy in which the victim would be mourned as if dead when cast out of the community, shunned, told to remain perpetually separate, to cry out to warn people not to come near them.  They were taught that their skin was so dreadful, literally, something that people dreaded so, that they must keep away, because they were dangerous, because they were to be feared.  They were taught to hate their own skin, taught that the only useful thing they could do with their lives was to help others avoid them.

God looks upon our faith – Luke 16:1-13, Amos 8:4-7

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

In general, the beginning is a very good place to start, but there are some stories with which it’s best to start at the end. I think this parable, which is confusing and strange in a lot of ways, is one of those.

God seeks out the lost – Luke 15:1-10

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant.

Have you seen the AT&T ads about times when just OK is not OK? There’s one about a carnival worker who claims he did an “OK job” assembling a thrill ride, and so the fair goers swiftly walk away. There’s another about a tattoo artist who says, “Don’t worry, your tattoo is going look OK.” And when the tattoo-recipient asks him if he’s meant to sketch it first, the artist replies, “Stay in your lane, bro.” Well, I’ll admit that sheep care is not exactly my lane, but I think I’d do a pretty OK job at it. I mean, if I managed to keep 99% of my sheep, I’d view that as a pretty good batting average, actually. I’d probably do a pretty OK job at looking after the 99, and sell some wool to make reasonably OK sweaters now and again. If one wandered off, I’d probably say to myself something like, “Oh, don’t sweat the small stuff.”

God, and God alone, is enough for us – Luke 14:25-3

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

When most of us hear this gospel reading, I think we’re more shocked by Jesus’ command to hate their family than to take up their cross. And I think that’s because we’ve domesticated the cross. And I’ll get back to what Jesus says about family, but we need to start with the cross.

Christ has brought us to the holy mountain – Luke 14:1, 7-14; Heb 12:18-24

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

If you looked in last week’s bulletin or online at what the readings would be for this week, (and I definitely do recommend reading the readings before Mass if you can) you might have noticed that what we just heard from Luke’s gospel was chapter 14, verse one and verses seven through fourteen. If you’re anything like me, that immediately gets you fascinated to find out what goes in verses two through six. What are we skipping? What we’re skipping is Jesus healing a man with dropsy. The Greek term Luke wrote that we translate “dropsy” means basically “water-logged.” The understanding of this disease was that it was an insatiable thirst. Someone suffering from this disease would keep feeling thirsty even though they were perfectly well hydrated and would take on more and more fluid until they swelled up. And I know, we have lots of medical personnel here who could talk all about modern understandings of this, and how it relates to edema… what matters is how Luke understood the disease.

Christ leads us up the mountain – Luke 13:2-30; Isa 66:18-21

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have climbed a mountain. If you haven’t, spoiler alert, it’s quite difficult. And I’ve never done any of what they call “technical climbing,” where you actually need ropes and harnesses and things, but I have made it to the top of Pike’s Peak, one of the many 14,000-foot-high mountains in Colorado. If you want to walk it, as I did, you start at an altitude of around 7,000 feet, and over the course of walking 14 miles, you ascend the other 7,000 to make it up to 14. Between 11,000 and 12,000 feet is what they call the tree line. That’s the altitude above which no trees grow. One of the many realizations I had on that walk was that the trees are probably a good deal smarter than we are. Air that low in oxygen is really hard to walk through. The whole climb took me about seven hours, but the last mile, over which we climbed almost 1,000 feet, took me an hour. Now, Pike’s Peak also has a Cog railway that you can take to the summit, as well as a road. You can drive up. And at the top, is a little café and gift shop. All I remember about the café is that they served chili, and, at that moment, the chili was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

Christ leads us through conflict to ultimate peace – Luke 12:49-53; Heb 12:1-4

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I think it would have been understandable for the people listening to Jesus to have said yes. “Yes, I did think you were here to bring peace.” I thought that, because, isn’t that what the angels sang when you were born? Well, the angels wished peace on earth, but they didn’t say it would be the first thing Jesus would bring. And Simeon, who prophesied in the Temple when Jesus was just a few days old, prophesied that he would be a “sign of contradiction,” and told Mary “a sword will pierce your heart too.”

God raises us with Christ – Luke 12:13-21; Col 3:1-11

18th Sunday in OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

There’s a scholar called Sakari Häkkinen who studies Jesus’ parables by traveling to subsistence rural villages, in East Africa and the Middle East. He goes to those villages, and tells the stories Jesus told, and asks them what they think. Part of the reason he does this is that when we read these stories with Western eyes, we miss things. When we read these stories with several layers of remove between the work we do and food on our plates, we miss things. If we don’t know food insecurity, if we don’t look at the sky and feel in anticipation either fullness or emptiness in our stomachs, we miss things. That’s not to say that the cultures in the villages that Häkkinen visits are identical to the villages in which Jesus would have preached. But they might have some insight that we don’t.

God hears us – Luke 11:1-13; Col 2:12-14

Seventeenth Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy infant parish.

There’s a story I once heard from Amy-Jill Levine, who’s probably the foremost Jewish scholar of the gospels around. It’s about how she first learnt what we call the Lord’s Prayer. It was in her public elementary school in the fifties, when they would start every day with the Our Father, followed by the pledge of allegiance, followed by the Star-Spangled Banner. As a child, she didn’t think there was anything odd about that prayer, although it wasn’t one she could ever remember hearing in the synagogue, because it seemed so like the ones her family prayed there and at home. Calling God Father, talking about the holiness of God’s name, talking about food, and forgiveness; this was exactly how they prayed. And it wasn’t just Amy-Jill as a child unable to pick up on some subtlety; this is a very Jewish prayer.

Jesus hungers to speak with us – Luke 10:38-42; Gen 18:1-10a

Sixteenth Sunday in OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

One parish I used to be a part of would serve a meal one Saturday each month for those who were homeless or who otherwise knew food insecurity. It was normally kind of an assembly line type set up, which is a very efficient way of feeding a lot of hungry people in a reasonably short period of time with limited volunteer resources. But, for the meal that fell during the Christmas season, they got a lot more people involved, and did two sittings of a family-style table service meal. Each table would be hosted by parishioner. That host would bring trays of food from the kitchen, would make sure each bowl or plate or jug of goodies circulated around the table. They’d also be responsible for making conversation, for welcoming the people they were dining with, and listening to them. They would also explain why Christmas means so much to us, why when the stores are packing their supplies away, we keep on celebrating, and why we want to celebrate with them. More than one type of hunger was fed at those meals.

God’s love overflows for us –Prov 8:22-31, Rom 5:1-15 (Trinity)

Trinity Sunday, Year C; St. Adalbert's and St. Casimir's parishes.

Before I entered seminary, I was a math teacher, which some people might think would give me an advantage in preaching on Trinity Sunday.  But, no amount of mathematical trickery can magically make ‘sense’ of the 3-in-1, because the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved, but someone to adore.  We’re not here to ‘make sense’ of the Trinity, because sense is fundamentally the wrong thing to try to make out of Love.  Love is the thing to make out of Love: wonder, love, awe, praise and adoration.  Love is the heart of our belief in God as a Trinitarian God. Because if there wasn’t more than one person in the Godhead, God wouldn’t have been able to love before He created us. That would mean that God would have created us out of a neediness, a need to have someone to love. And it would mean that love is kind of an add-on to God, an optional extra He chose to take on at the dawn of time.

God pulls us up by the flame of the Spirit – Acts 2:1-11, Gen 11:1-9

Pentecost; St Adalbert's and Casimir's parishes.

[Acts 2 is read on Sunday and Gen 11 is an option for the Vigil. As I had a Vigil and Sunday morning Mass, I varied the below homily by giving reminders of the reading they hadn't heard proclaimed.]

Fire fascinates us.  I was just out at a retreat center this week with some of my brothers in Holy Cross, and for some of our small group sessions, my group happened to in a room with a gas fire-place. It wasn’t particularly cold, but I noticed that almost instinctively one of the members of my group turned the fire on whenever we went into the room. I guess it’s similar to how we light candles even though the electric lights here work perfectly well. Fire captures our gaze and delights us.  This is as true with how a fire place makes a space feel more humane, more conducive to reflection, to when we gaze up at those firey dots in the night’s sky, or think about some campfire conversations maybe you’ve had.  Fire not just warms us, it lights up our world, it cooks our food, it fascinates us and attracts our gaze.

God shows us what yet another facet of love looks like – Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:46-52

Ascension, Year C; St. Adalbert's and St. Stanislaus parish.

Some people say that Ascension is the hardest feast of the Church year to preach on.  Not Trinity Sunday, not Good Friday, not a funeral: the Ascension.  And I’m not making excuses here, but it’s the only feast on which the primary action of God, in Christ, that we celebrate seems to be him moving away from us.  We’re on earth, and he ascends: to heaven.  And that’s not the primary movement given to us to proclaim at any other time: the Christian story is consistently one of God reaching out to us, God coming to visit and redeem his people, of us turning away, but of God’s grace eventually conquering our stubbornness and repentance moving us to accept the glorious eternal embrace offered.  Except today: when the movement is of Christ ascending.

Jesus and the Father unite in care for us – John 10:27-30, Rev 7:9-17, Acts 13:43-51

4th Sunday of Easter, Year C; Holy Infant parish

“The Father and I are one,” Jesus tells the crowd. And that statement has led to all kinds of theologizing to try and make sense of what it can mean for Jesus, who certainly looked pretty human, to be able to say that. And the crystallization of a few hundred years of puzzling over that is what we say in our creed, what we mean when we confess Jesus is fully divine and fully human. It’s an amazing confession, when you think about it, that there’s nothing that authentic to being human that’s incompatible with divinity. That’s an amazingly daring statement about our created dignity, to which God longs to restore us, and to which God has acted in Christ to begin to restore us. It’s also an amazingly daring statement about God, the limitless God, who can hold creation in his fingertips, but consented to know limit, to know impairment, to know hunger and thirst and death all for love of us. That God, in His totally radically free will, wills to love us so much even when we turn away that He consents to know a thirst for us that He doesn’t have to.

God always gives us a second chance – John 21:1-14, Rev 5:11-14

Third Sunday of Easter, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Our God is a God of second chances. And not just second: third, fourth… there isn’t an ordinal so high that it could limit God’s love, stop God from continue to reach out to us, from bidding us cast our nets, and inviting us to breakfast; just as Jesus does with Peter, even after Peter denied him. The image of the net, full to bursting with fish, but not bursting, is an image of how plentiful and limitless God’s ongoing will to reach out to us is. A lot of commentators over the centuries have spilled a lot of ink (or, I guess, now, worn out a lot of keys on a lot of keyboards) trying to figure out quite why there were 153 fish. Some of these explanations are kind of fun. St. Jerome claimed that there were 153 species of fish, so 153 fish was a symbol for the church containing the full diversity of humanity. Unfortunately, there aren’t just 153 species of fish, and no one at that time seemed to think that either, except people that wanted to get this meaning out of John.  Other people have tried gematria, which is an ancient technique whereby you assign a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet and add up all the letters in a word or phrase. If you do that to the phrase “church of love,” you get 153, which is really cute. The problem is that neither John no anywhere else in the New Testament is the phrase “church of love” used, and there are all kinds of different phrases that would give you that number. My personal favorite explanation is that 153 is the sum of all the whole numbers from 1 to 17, and 17 is the sum of 10 and 7, two important numbers that represented fullness (think 10 commandments, 7 days of the week).

Jesus takes away our grave clothes, too – Luke 24:1-12

Easter Sunday, Year C [Mass during the day, but I used the Vigil Gospel]; Holy Infant parish.

Our gospel ends with Peter amazed. Actually, in Greek, it says that he went away “marveling to himself.” I love that. Just imagining him walking and marveling. Like, his legs are keeping moving, but in his mind, and in his heart, all that he can think, all that he can feel, is “Wow.” Our gospel ends with Peter amazed, but I’d like to encourage us to read the whole thing amazed.

Jesus labors to bring the Church to birth – John 18:1-19:42

Good Friday; Holy Infant.

When the fire broke out at Notre Dame earlier this week, I was actually rather surprised by how many people seemed to be touched, moved, grieved by it. My facebook feed was full of people who felt a need to share something about it; Catholics, but also non-Catholic Christians, people of other faiths, and people with no religious commitments at all. I think there’s just something basically human about grieving the loss or potential loss of beauty like that. I’m reminded of the rallying cry of the early 20^th Century American Labor movement: “give us bread, but give us roses too.” Stomachs can hunger, but so can hearts. Beautiful places of worship can often be among the few places of beauty where people in poverty are actually welcomed.

Jesus brings us back to the Father – Luke 22:14-23:56, Phil 2:6-11

Palm Sunday, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Luke shows what Paul tells.

Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, tells them how much God in Christ desired to be close to humanity, tells that there was nothing Jesus wouldn’t do, that he would even empty his very self, so that could be with us, be human with us.

God sends us to the goal of glory – John 8:1-11, Isa 43:16-21, Phil 3:8-14

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

The saddest thing about this gospel is that they walked away, these people with stones in their hands.  And there’s pretty stiff competition for the saddest thing about this gospel.  There’s the fact that there were going to stone a woman to death.  There’s their desire to test Jesus.  There’s the possibility that an act of adultery had been occurring, and the (worse) possibility that their accusations were false.  There is a lot to lament in this Gospel, about this happening retold to us, and about people and events in our lives whose memories it evokes.  But, I still contend that the saddest thing about this gospel is that they walked away, these people with stones in their hands.

God feeds us for joy – Luke 15:1-3. 11-32

Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant Parish.

Did you know that baby flamingoes are born with grey feathers?  They only become pink because their diet is rich in a natural pink dye called canthaxanthin, which is found both in brine shrimp and, somewhat paradoxically in blue-green algae.  Zoo flamingoes used to lose their acquired pinkness until zookeepers realized that they had to provide them with artificial sources of canthaxanthin.  As with flamingoes, so with us: we are what we eat.

God gives us time – Luke 13:1-9, Exod 3:1-15

3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C; Holy Infant.

Today’s gospel forever takes away our right to victim blame. That goes for victim-blaming ourselves as much as it does for assuming that anyone else who suffers injury “had it coming.”

Jesus’ glorious word sustains us on our walk –Luke 9:28b-36

2nd Sunday of Lent, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I spoke to someone recently who has decided that for Lent he would look at some of his wedding photos every day. Not because this was an unpleasant penance… our Lenten observances aren’t meant to be as arduous as possible, they’re meant to be things that make us holier. In this case, the idea was that going back and looking at a beautiful beginning was meant to be inspire him to live his marriage vows more ardently.

God delights in our embrace – Deut 26:4-10; Psa 91; Luke 4:1-13

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

“Even the devil can quote scripture,” goes the saying. That line is actually not in the in the Bible (it’s from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), but the truth of it is confirmed by the gospel we’ve just read. Actually, in Shakespeare’s play, that line is used to ignore rather than engage what I find actually a very interesting argument about the relevance of the book of Genesis to debates about usury. The way the saying is used often seems to follow the Shakespearean model, ignoring someone’s attempt to bring scripture to bear on a situation rather than engaging it. So, I suggest, that even though it’s the devil citing it, we pay attention to what he says when he cites scripture, pay enough attention to see why that doesn’t lead Jesus to do what Satan wants.

God has won for us – 1 Cor 15:54-58, Luke 6:39-45

Sunday of the 8th Week of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know if you noticed, but two weeks in a row now, we’ve had readings in which Paul has used the image of clothing to talk about what God is doing for us in Christ. Last week, he said we will wear the image of Christ. This week, it’s this image of what is corruptible (by which Paul means perishable really) putting on what’s incorruptible; what’s mortal putting on immortality. Well, in my family, I’m not really the expert on clothing. That would be my youngest sister, who’s a professional fashion stylist. So, I thought I should get in contact with her and talk this over, talk over how clothing really changes people. And she shared with me a quote from that great mid-twentieth century sage, Marilyn Monroe. Ms Monroe, apparently, once said, “Give a woman the right pair of shoes, and she can conquer the world.”

Jesus dresses us – 1 Cor 15:45-49

Seventh Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish, Mass with baptism.

Tomorrow night, the winners of this year’s Academy Awards will be announced. But, before the ceremony officially begins, we’ll have the pre-ceremony, the red carpet walk. Person after person, especially the celebrities who are women, but increasingly the men too, will be asked: “Who are you wearing?” Not what, but who. The radio station I normally listen on my drive into work each morning was inspired by this, this past week, to ask the same question of people who workin their office, and received such answers as, “I’m wearing H and M” or, “tonight, I’m wearing Targé(t).” For the record, my alb’s by Patti Schlarb and stole and chasuble by Slabbink. But, the deeper answer, the answer that St. Paul told the Christians in Corinth, is that we are wearing Adam, and we will wear Christ.

God makes the hungry full –Luke 6:17-26, Jer 17:5-8

6th Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

The beatitudes are wonderful to hear, aren’t they? The woes… not so much. We like hearing about the last becoming first, but it’s not so nice to hear about the first becoming last, especially when we take honest stock of where we stand in the line. Blessed are the poor, great. Woe to the rich, a little more troubling, especially when we consider that thinking globally, if we can turn on our taps and have something drinkable come out, we’re rich. Now, it should be noted that Jesus doesn’t talk about any kind of punishment for being rich, but there’s still this idea that the rich have already got what they’re going to get. And we want more.

Jesus calls us – Luke 5:1-11

5th Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant Parish.

Do you wonder why, at the start of this reading, Peter isn’t listening to Jesus? There’s a whole crowd pressing in to listen to him speak, speak the word of God, but Peter is sitting a ways off, having gotten out of his fishing boat and he’s sitting there tending to his nets. It probably isn’t that Peter doesn’t know who Jesus is. The way Luke tells it, Jesus had healed Peter’s mother-in-law the day before, and when Jesus talks to him, Peter does seem to know him. It seems that Peter genuinely believes himself to be too busy to put down his nets and listen to Jesus.

Jesus frees us through and for joy – Luke 4:14-21

3rd Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

“Jesus taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.”  What a wonderful way to start our Ordinary Time walk through the Jesus’ earthly ministry, guided this year by Luke.  We start out hearing of Jesus teaching, to universal praise and acclaim, becoming a revered teacher given an overwhelmingly positive reception.  We know that that’s not going to last.  In fact, by the end of this very chapter, the people who hear him teach react so negatively that the try to push him off a cliff!  When I started praying with this lectionary selection and preparing myself to preach, it seemed a little odd to me that the lectionary kind of gives us two and a half bits of Luke here. We read from the dedication page, which tells us about Luke’s purpose in writing (to build up our faith), then we jump to this little summary ("Jesus taught in their synagogues and was praised by all”) that comes comes right after the Temptation in the Desert, and then we start a story that kind of ‘zooms’ in on one instance of Jesus teaching in a synagogue, but one that doesn’t end quite as well as all the other examples that got summed up in one sentence. It almost feels like we should have ended with a ‘to be continued’ sign, because (sorry for the spoilers), the gospel we’ll hear next week is the negative reaction that Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth gets.  But, as I sat more and more with the reading, and the lectionary’s choice of how to carve up this pie, I began to see the wisdom.

Jesus expands our joy – John 2:-12, 1 Cor 12:4-11, Isa 62:1-5

2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Once, at my last parish in Indiana, our sacristan had to take a couple of months off to recover from surgery, and I thought I’d figured out everything she did each week and either arranged cover or just decided to do it myself.  But, over those couple of months, I gradually starting noticing more and more things that just somehow got magically taken care of when she was around that I’d never really thought about.  During the first week she was gone, one of our parish school kids, a little second grader, came up to me with a panic struck expression: “There is no blessing in the church!”  I was pretty worried about this exile experience she seemed to be having, so I tried to figure out what was actually wrong, and eventually understood that all of the holy water stoups were dry.  I could fix that problem. Spiritual crises aren’t normally the kind of thing you can fix, so it was nice to get a win for once!

Jesus baptizes us – Luke 3:15-16, 21-22, Isa 40:1-11, Titus 2,3 extracts

Baptism of the Lord, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  In Luke’s gospels, it’s our introduction to the adult Jesus, all four of our gospels narrate it, (which means it beats out Jesus’ birth by a factor of 2:1 there). The first parish I served first as deacon and then as priest had a beautiful stained glass window of the scene, which was important enough to me that I picked an image of it to put on the holy card we gave out at my priestly ordination.  Yes, Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  But, Jesus getting baptized isn’t what struck me as the most important thing in this gospel.  Studying and praying with it over this week, one sentence stuck with me: “He will baptize you.”

Dios nos dirige para ofrecer nuestros dones – Mat 2:1-12

Epifanía; San Casimiro

Solo los encontramos en estos 12 versos del evangelio según San Mateo, estos magos. Los otros evangelistas no dicen nada sobre ellos. Pero nos fascinan, estos majos de oriente, tenemos esta fiesta dedicada a ellos. Creo que nos fascinan tanto porque su búsqueda es nuestra búsqueda: buscan donde pueden ofrecer sus dones.