God shows us his face in our neighbors – Isa 63:16-17, 19b; 64:2-7; Adv 1 Collect

First Sunday of Advent (B); Holy Cross Parish.

Frederick has been very important in my life, but I never met him.  You see, he was born in France in 1813, in the aftermath of the French Revolution.  He had a happy enough childhood it seems, in a very devout Catholic household.  But, as he entered adolescence, he came to encounter the world as much more complex and shady place than his childhood had prepared him for.  He struggled to find his place in a world of disagreement, conflict, question and doubt.  He was an exile from the child’s garden.  Everything that had seemed so secure seemed ruinously fragile.  What could he trust in to show him God?  He would later write of the “horror of doubts that eat into the heart and leave the pillow drenched with tears.”  One night he got up from that tear-drenched pillow and ran.  He ran into St. Bonaventure’s church, vaulted the altar rail and crashed to his knees in front of the tabernacle.  The pitiful child cried: “Why do you hide your face, God?”

Christ hungers and thirsts for us – Matt 25:31-46, Ezek 34:11-17

Christ the King; Holy Cross 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 what we need to prepare for joy – Matt 25:14-30, 1 Th 5:1-6

Week 33 of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

How would you like to be given $226,200?  Or, more precisely, to be trusted with $226,200 of someone else’s money?  That’s fifteen years worth of full-time minimum wage employment.  And that’s what a talent was.  When the master we hear about in the gospel is doling out these sums of money, it’s not always clear to us what meaning they actually carry.  And that going back and doing a little economic history wasn’t just me indulging my geeky side this week, but a step in appreciating the power of the gospel.  A ‘talent’ was a unit of currency worth 15 years worth of day laborer pay.  That’s what the least trusted servant is entrusted with: $226,200, one talent.

God zealously purifies us and sends us forth – Ezek 47:1-12, Jn 2:13-22 (Lat. Bas.)

Feast of the Lateran Basilica; Holy Cross Parish.

Today we, the Church, celebrate a church, and not just any church: we celebrate the cathedral church of Rome, the church on whose façade is inscribed omnium ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis mater et caput – the mother and head of all churches of the City (that is, Rome) and the world.  By celebrating this one church, we’re really celebrating every church, from our marble marvel here, to the grandeur of the Basilica, to the tin roof structure with only three walls I worshipped in when I worked in Mexico.  And we celebrate these works of human hands, because God made us with hands, and with feet, and with behinds, and hearts and lungs… with bodies.  We don’t worship God neatly in our minds, but bodily, and bodies need buildings.

Jesus prepares a place for us – John 14:1-6, Rom 6:3-9, Ps 23 (All Souls)

All Souls, with alternative gospel; Holy Cross parish.

Daniel Pobolski, Patricia Kowalski, Antonia Ransberg, Hilda Gzregorek, Geraldine Tajkowski, James Plencner, Patricia Carter, Larraine Cress, Joseph Hartz, Ed Lind, Loretta Zygulski, Eugene Lizzi, Josephine Sopzcynski, Esther Gromski.  Since my ordination, these are the fourteen men and women that I’ve buried (one, but a boy); confining that list to just those whose funeral I’ve presided and preached at, just those for whom I’ve been the one the Church has charged with standing by a casket or an urn and proclaiming hope.

God loves us into loveliness – Matt 22:34-40, 1 Thes 1:5c-10, Exod 22:20-26

30th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stanislaus.

My father was a wandering Aramean.  Well, he wasn’t; my father was from Cumbria and the only wandering I remember him doing was purposeful moderate hiking.  But, if we were celebrating Passover, it wouldn’t matter if your father was from LaPorte or La Paz; we would each make that claim, that “my father was a wandering Aramean,” and we’d make it because Deuteronomy tells us to.  As the Jewish people recall each year the saving wonders God worked for His people in freeing them from slavery in Egypt, they don’t let that event stay soberly and tamely in the past, they claim for themselves, “my father was a wandering Aramean.”  In much the same way, today in this Church we’re invited to hear the Word of God say to us, personally “you were aliens in Egypt.  Remember.”  That’s not a word that we can let sit in the past, not a word we can hear directed solely to that one generation millennia ago, wandering in the desert, freed from slavery, approaching the promised land, receiving the Law as they went; that’s a word for us.  That’s the Word of the Lord for us.  That’s a word that takes on life in this assembly.  That’s a word in which we encounter Christ.  We were aliens in Egypt.  We were slaves.  Remember.

God makes us gift – Matt 22:15-21, 1 Thes 1:3-5

29th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross 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 produced from their own purse at Jesus’ request.