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.