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.”